GUEST COLUMN | Fish Island victory reflects interest convergence. (SAR, by Imani J. Jackson)

The plantation and remains of Florida's first crooked Realtor, slave owner Jesse Fish, his slaves, and their mansion and slave cabins are here. 

 Time to preserve it all with inclusion in a St. Augustine National Hiastoridal Park and National Seashore. 

 First proposed by Mayor Walter Frayser and our Senators and Congressmen in 1939, there is no a substitute. 

Enough of Amateur Hour and mendacious mediocrities mucking up historic preservation and environmental protection here in St. Johns County, a/k/a "God's country." 

Good column by UF graduate fellow Ms. Imani J. Jackson:

GUEST COLUMN | Fish Island victory reflects interest convergence


By Imani J. Jackson / Gainesville
Posted Aug 3, 2019 at 5:54 PM
Updated Aug 3, 2019 at 5:54 PM
St. Augustine Record

July 25, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his Cabinet approved Florida Forever preservation funding for Fish Island. Fish Island is the undeveloped waterfront property where El Vergel plantation operated — at Jesse Fish’s behest and via many enslaved African people’s labor. Thursday’s victory reflected sensitivity to cultural heritage and the power of environmental preservation organizing in one of America’s most historic cities.

The state’s stake in Fish Island will likely spur the sort of local, U.S. and global recognition recently afforded its neighbor Fort Mose. Fish Island funding and preservation will likely facilitate the teaching of pluralistic histories, compel deeper dives into the site’s citrus traditions (particularly given Florida’s estimated $8.6 value in the industry) and inspire experts to help reconnect African American people with obscured — though never erased — ancestors who may have worked the citrus plantation.

Fish Island is representative of broader environmentalist struggles. Sure, the environmental movement should advance battle cries for flora and fauna, protection of vulnerable species and waterway pollution prevention. The movement should also develop room for diverse communities to connect ecological preservation of significant sites with different groups that have relied on these spaces.

Fish Island’s strength is its dynamism and capacity for connections.

In legal scholarship, commingled social interests can be called “interest convergence.” Law professor Derrick Bell created the theory, which essentially holds that minority progress occurs after the majority appreciates that their own interests connect with those of the less powerful.

Fish Island, as St. Augustine community members and allies beautifully demonstrate, is chock full of converging interests.

Connections exist between Spanish land grants, censuses, thousands of reported citrus trees, surviving species and St. Augustine locals’ political savviness, collaboration and resistance to the build-first-reflect-later residential development fate many coastal communities experience.

The Fish Island victory should spark more interest in the site and happened in a time when most Americans support stricter environmental regulations, even at some financial cost, according to the Pew Research Center. Reasonable Floridians likely won’t take issue with the $6.5 million funding promised for Fish Island, particularly if deeper site knowledge links to solutions for contemporary citrus issues.

Funding and centering Fish Island is also timely given the Southern Poverty Law Center’s determination the U.S. education ecosystem produces many students with inadequate knowledge of U.S. slavery.


Florida Forever status for Fish Island may also mean ancestral reconnections for people whose forebears labored on El Vergel. In Jacksonville’s Fort George Island on Kingsley Plantation, anthropologist and African art expert Johnnetta B. Cole was brought back in 2011 to where her ancestors lived after probable graves of the enslaved were uncovered there. Cole told the media, “I wept. This is not ordinary; this is not an everyday experience.”

At the national level, cultural geographer Carolyn Finney has called the park system a place “where cultural identity, environmental values and American history intersect and are actively transmitted to the public.”

I predict the Florida Forever funded Fish Island will do the same.

Jackson is a Law, Environment & Society Fellow at the University of Florida College of Journalism & Communications.