One of Us: FSCJ professor Tim Gilmore has written a new biography of Eartha White
Times-Union
Tim Gilmore, an English professor at Florida State College at Jacksonville’s South Campus, says he has wanted to be a writer since the third grade.
Gilmore has achieved that goal at 40. He’s just published “In Search of Eartha White, Storehouse for the People,” a biography of the great African-American philanthropist, whose life spanned nearly a century, from the end of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights era.
That follows his first book, 2013’s “Stalking Ottis Toole: A Southern Gothic,” an account of the life of Ottis Toole, a drifter who grew up in Jacksonville and may or may not have been a serial killer.
Initially Gilmore planned to write a book about both of them, “a large non-fiction novel exploring opposite polarities of this city.”
But he quickly realized “both were too big” to share a story. He also worried that putting White in the same book as Toole was unfair to her.
So he wrote the Toole book first.
Toole confessed to dozens of murders, including the murder of Adam Walsh, the 6-year-old son of John Walsh, who went on to create and host the show “America’s Most Wanted.” But as Gilmore researched the book, he came to suspect that Toole was probably “just a local cross-dressing arsonist who never intentionally killed
anyone” but enjoyed the attention confessing to crimes brought him.
White was such a force in the Jacksonville community that Gilmore said he was a little surprised no one had ever written a full-length biography. Living through an era when a black woman would have typically have been powerless, White had so much influence in Jacksonville that rumors abounded about her, Gilmore said.
One was that she had a secret source of wealth. Another was that she was the child of Guy Stockton, a member of a prominent Jacksonville family, and a maid who worked in his home, and had been adopted by Clara White and her husband.
White, who briefly worked as a singer with the touring Oriental American Opera Company, returned home at the age of 20 when her fiancee, James Jordan, died. She never married.
“She married the community,” Gilmore said.
Over the next 78 years, she founded a nursing home, a tuberculosis hospital, an orphanage and a home for unwed mothers. She worked on anti-lynching campaigns and voter registration drives.
“I think of her as a pre-civil-rights-era civil rights leader,” Gilmore said. “She has not gained the status she deserves.”
Gilmore, who is married to fellow FSCJ English professor Jo Carlisle and has two daughters, Emily, 16, and Veda, 13, is already researching his next book. It’s about a Jacksonville woman, Virginia King, who self-published a series of books in the 1960s and 1970s in which she attempted to chronicle life in Jacksonville.
“In Search of Eartha White, Storehouse for the People” is available at Chamblin’s Uptown, Chamblin’s Bookmine, from Gilmore’s website, www.jaxpsychogeo.com and from The Clara White Mission’s website theclarawhitemission.org/.
charlie.patton@jacksonville.com; 904) 359-4413