After years of racial tension, Sanford plans project to promote inclusivity, respect, acceptance

In Sanford, more than a decade after Black teenager Trayvon Martin died and the man who killed him was acquitted as the world looked on, racial tensions simmer below the surface.

A city-run racial equity committee is now working on a project that officials hope will help to mend race relations between Black and white residents and visitors.

Over the next year, members of the city of Sanford’s Race, Equality, Equity and Inclusion (REEI) Advisory Committee will be making plans for how the city can help to share its history and, through storytelling, promote acceptance and respect.

But residents who have long taken on the fight of protecting Black communities and preserving their neighborhoods say the path to racial equity starts with acknowledging more than a century of wrongs against Sanford’s Black residents. Then the city can look not just to sharing history but also to making tangible policy changes that could lead to progress.

The preliminary plans for the project, named Pathways to Reconciliation, were shared with city commissioners in a work session on Monday, launching what is expected to be a nearly two-year effort of researching; collecting firsthand oral histories, writings and art from longtime residents; partnering with museums and educational institutions and mapping a walking tour for locals and visitors alike.

The REEI committee and the proposed project were launched in an effort to address both the nationwide outcry that followed the death of George Floyd, who was killed by a Minneapolis officer on video in 2020, and the 10-year anniversary of the killing of Trayvon, whose death in a Sanford neighborhood in 2012 launched the Black Lives Matter movement. After requests were made to the city to paint a Black Lives Matter street mural in front of the Sanford Police Department, officials set out instead to come up with a more permanent way to focus on race relations, the proposal said.

“It’s the early stages of developing an idea that came to us about a year or so ago,” said REEI Chair Barbara Coleman-Foster. “The idea was to have something that lasted beyond a day, a week, a month. Something that was long term and essentially highlighted the contributions of particularly, at this point, the African American community.”

Pasha Baker, director and CEO of the Goldsboro West Side Community Historical Association, said she hopes the REEI committee will look even further into the past than Floyd’s and Trayvon’s deaths.

“You know about Goldsboro,” Baker said, pointing to how Sanford forcefully annexed Goldsboro despite the protests of its residents in the early 1900s. “The city of Goldsboro, an all Black incorporated city that had its own government, taxation system and everything else around it was stolen. But I didn’t read that in the (proposal) document. … You have me in the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin, but 100 years before that, Sanford stole a complete city and left it neglected. And you want to talk about race relations? You want to talk about furthering the community and you never said sorry.”

Baker said that should be the starting point of any project meant to materially improve race relations in Sanford.

A timeline included in the proposal said from now though summer 2025, the REEI committee will spend time on research, budget planning and fundraising and project design to ready for implementation in fall 2025. After that, in fall 2026, it will launch an assessment and plans for an expansion.

According to Coleman-Foster, REEI’s goal is to share stories of people who have lived in Sanford of generations and have witnessed firsthand some of the best and worst moments in the city’s history.

That will include triumphs like the creation of the Crooms Academy of Information Technology and the impact of Black business owners while also addressing the discrimination Black residents faced before and during the civil rights movement.

Coleman-Foster emphasized that with the project still in the very early stages, there is still time for residents and stakeholders to influence the final result.

The project will likely be mostly digital, creating an online space to house the oral history, writings and photograph and the guide for an independent walking tour of historic sites. Coleman-Foster said it will also allow for partnerships with the Goldsboro Museum and the Sanford Museum and other intuitions already working on collecting this history and can serve to point visitors and residents to where they can view artifacts already on display.

“I see it as an opportunity to highlight all the rich history of Sanford,” Coleman-Foster said. “We have a tendency to focus on the positive but we have to understand how all of it has brought us to where we are today. I’m excited about the project. … I think it will serve the city well.”

Still Baker is calling on the city and the REEI committee to do more if they want to improve race relations.

“There should be a plan of action,” Baker said. “That’s where my hope and that is where my optimism lies — that this group will have a plan of action and start from the root cause 100+ years ago.”