By SAM GAUNTT
PHOTO CREDIT Sam Gauntt
Dozens of current and former residents of College Park’s Lakeland community reunited on Aug. 24 for the neighborhood’s annual Lakeland Day celebration.
Some hadn’t seen each other in decades.
“It keeps the connection there, and allows us to come together one more time,” Fannie Buchanan-Featherstone, a commissioner on the College Park Restorative Justice Commission, said.
The event, which featured speeches by city and community leaders, live music, games and barbecue, celebrated the history of Lakeland, a historically African American community.
The event also prompted a discussion of the damage done to the neighborhood when approximately two-thirds of it was destroyed in an urban renewal project.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, according to the Lakeland Community Heritage Project’s website, urban renewal efforts displaced 104 of the 150 households in Lakeland, and replaced many of the single family homes with higher-density housing complexes. Many of the residents who were forced out of their houses weren’t able to return to the neighborhood, so they left.
Much of the land that was once part of the neighborhood’s east side is now part of the Lake Artemesia Natural Area.
“Right now is your opportunity to make something that was wrong, right,” Maxine Gross, founding chairwoman of the Lakeland Community Heritage Project, told a crowd at the Lakeland Day celebration. “This is your opportunity to have your voice listened to. This is not a time for you to look the other way.”
Gross added: “Lakeland will not be the same as it was for me, but it can be a place where your children, your grandchildren and their children can make a good home for themselves. That is what we owe our ancestors.”
Efforts to preserve Lakeland’s history include the creation of the Lakeland Legacy Scholarship Fund as well as the Lakeland Legacy Center, a planned community space on the bottom floor of a housing complex that will be built at the site of the former Campus Village Shoppes on Baltimore Avenue.
Several attendees, including College Park Mayor Fazlul Kabir and Lakeland Civic Association President Robert Thurston, delivered speeches at the event.
In an interview with College Park Here & Now, Thurston, a member of the city’s Restorative Justice Commission, said one of his biggest goals is for College Park residents and leaders to be able to recognize Lakeland as a community within the city.
“Even though we’ve lost a great amount [of Lakeland], we do have a remnant of that left that I’d like to make sure that remains,” he said.
During the celebration, live music filled Lakeland Park while family, friends and neighbors reconnected, fried fish and barbecued.
Many longtime Lakeland residents attended the celebration. Some former Lakelanders traveled across the country, from as far away as New York and Fort Worth, to attend the event, Keith Webster, a member of the Restorative Justice Commission, said.
“Everybody comes back here to remember what Lakeland used to be, a community that goes back to 1890,” Webster, who grew up in Lakeland, said. “This was one of about the safest communities that you can live in.”
Webster said before the urban renewal projects, Lakeland had everything a community needed, including a town hall, stores and a tavern.
He emphasized the tight-knit environment of the neighborhood.
“When people built homes, everybody helped,” he said. “You put on a fish fry, and the whole community came in to buy your fish. The next day, Mr. Johnson put on a chicken dinner, everybody in the community came to buy the chicken dinner. That’s how we did it.”
Buchanan-Featherstone has been a part of the Lakeland community since she was 6 years old. After leaving Lakeland for some time she returned to raise her children in the neighborhood.
She said Lakeland Day is “very valuable” for the community.
She said one of the best steps the commission has taken so far is creating the Lakeland scholarship.
It “encourages the children and lets them know that they can do it,” she said.
Buchanan-Featherstone added that Lakeland is a community of faith – regardless of peoples’ religion.
“We don’t go low, we go high,” she said. “We try and show love the best we can to everybody. I don’t think you could knock on one door and ask for a drink of water and somebody wouldn’t give it to you. You know, that’s just the way we are.”
