#gwen cherry

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Joe Lang Kershaw: A Florida Trailblazer

In 1968, Florida State Rep. Joe Lang Kershaw of Miami was the first Black person elected to the Florida Legislature in the 20th century.

Joe Lang Kershaw photographed addressing the Florida House in 1971, and in an undated official portrait. (State Library and Archives of Florida)

Kershaw was born in Live Oak in Suwannee County in 1911. He attended Florida A&M University (FAMU), where both his parents met and graduated in 1903, and where he graduated with a history degree in 1935. While studying in Tallahassee, he worked as a janitor in the Florida Legislature.

By the 1950s, Kershaw was a high school civics teacher and athletics coach at Miami’s segregated Black high schools, including Booker T. Washington in Colored Town, now Overtown, where he coached Miami Dolphins perfect-season football player Larry Little in the early 1960s.

Amid Miami Congressman Claude Pepper’s pioneering support for federal civil rights legislation, in 1968, Kershaw was elected to the Florida House of Representatives representing parts of Dade County. He was the first Black person elected to serve in the Florida Legislature since 1889.

Kershaw was joined in the state legislature in 1970 by Miami’s first Black woman lawyer Gwen Sawyer Cherry. The two worked to advance equity for Miami’s Black communities, particularly through Kershaw’s chairing of the Florida House elections committee, where he worked to enhance voting access for historically underserved inner-city neighborhoods like Overtown, Brownsville, and Liberty City.

Florida House of Representative 1968 and 1970 class photos, featuring Kershaw in 1968, and Cherry and Kershaw in 1970.

Kershaw and Cherry partnered in leadership through Cherry’s untimely death in 1979, and the end of his term in 1982. He mentored a new crop of Black lawmakers, including Gwen Cherry’s legislative successor Carrie Pittman Meek, who herself would be elected in 1992 among Florida’s first three Black congressmen in over a century.

Kershaw’s legislative achievements in his 14 years on the Florida Capitol include introducing legislation which led to the formation of the Florida Human Rights Commission, now the Florida Commission on Human Relations, the state agency tasked with enforcing federal and state civil rights laws. In 1971, he sponsored legislation which led to the 1976 creation of the FAMU Black Archives and Research Museum.

Democratic State Rep. Joe Lang Kershaw of Miami (right) pictured alongside Democratic State Rep. Lew Whitworth of Miami voting to repeal the cane pole tax during Florida’s 1971 legislative session.

Kershaw was called “Cane Pole” on the Florida Capitol for his advocacy to exclude cane pole fishing, popular in mainly poor and rural areas, from the state fishing license tax, a measure which became law in 1976.

Kershaw died in Miami in 1999. His namesake, Joe Lang Kershaw Jr., a lawyer, died in 2026 in Tallahassee. The annual Florida Legislative Black Caucus Kershaw-Cherry Luncheon honors the legacies of Miami’s trailblazing state lawmakers, and provides scholarships to support rising leaders.

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South Florida’s Segregated Black Hospitals

Physicians William B. Sawyer and James F. Sistrunk established the first dedicated hospitals to treat Black patients in segregated midcentury South Florida.

Drs. Sistrunk and Sawyer.

Dr. Sawyer (1886-1950) opened Christian Hospital in 1921 in Colored Town (now Overtown), the first hospital dedicated to serving Black people denied health care at segregated Miami City (now Jackson Memorial) Hospital. Christian Hospital was originally a 12-bed wooden facility erected with private funding from him, fellow Black physician Dr. Solomon M. Frazier, and cross-racial patronage. The facilities were replaced, expanded, and eventually moved to Miami’s Brownsville section in 1959, before closing in 1982.

Christian Hospital at its opening in 1921, and in Brownsville (undated).

In 1921, Sawyer built the upscale Mary Elizabeth Hotel in Colored Town, run by his wife Alberta. The first class, three-story, 91-room facility offered in-suite inter-com and plumbing to Black wealthy clientele barred from whites-only establishments. In 1927, Dr. Sawyer platted the Centerville housing development, and in 1949, began construction of the Alberta Heights apartment complex, both in Brownsville. In 1945, Sawyer and Frazier were among a coalition that prompted Miami city government to open Virginia Key Beach to Black residents, who were barred from swimming at Miami Beach until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Dr. Sawyer was father to Gwen Sawyer Cherry (1923-1979), Miami’s first Black woman lawyer (admitted to the Florida Bar in 1965) and the first Black woman elected to the Florida Legislature (1970-1979).

Provident Hospital in Fort Lauderdale.

In 1915-founded Broward County, Dr. James F. Sistrunk (1891-1966) established a medical facility for Black people denied entry at Broward General Hospital. Sistrunk, a World War I veteran, began his Ft. Lauderdale medical practice in 1922 and, with Dr. Von D. Mizell, started Provident Hospital in 1938. Sistrunk was credited with delivering over 5,000 babies in his 44-year practice. Sistrunk and Mizell backed NAACP protests that ended segregation at local beaches in 1962, until federal desegregation in 1964, when Provident Hospital closed.

Both doctors, who respectively graduated from Meharry Medical College, dedicated their lives to service. Gwen Cherry Park in Miami and Sistrunk Boulevard in Ft. Lauderdale each honor their legacies.

Footage of Miami’s Christian Hospital in 1954.

[thejfblog]

Data: 1992 Black Florida in the 103rd Congress

(Library of Congress)

Black Floridians were not represented either in the Florida Legislature or U.S. Congress between the end of Reconstruction and the 19th century and the passage of the federal civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Rising Miami attorney Gwendolyn “Gwen” Sawyer Cherry became the first contemporary African American politician to serve at Florida’s Capitol in Tallahassee upon her unopposed 1970 election.

Cherry served in the Florida House of Representatives uninterrupted until her death in 1979 at age 55 from injuries sustained in a car crash in Tallahassee. She was succeeded in the seat representing Miami’s contiguous Black and African American communities by local college administrator and community advocate Carrie Pittman Meek. Meek backed policies in support of working women during her tenure in the state house. She, too, was seated uninterrupted until successfully running for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1992, in a newly-authorized district drawn for the 1990 Census and with consideration for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Meek was joined in her successful Nov. 3, 1992 election to the 103rd Congress by fellow former Florida Rep. Corrine Brown of Jacksonville, and former Miami federal judge Alcee Hastings. Meek, Brown, and Hastings were among the first class of Black and African American politicians from Florida elected to the U.S. Congress in over a century.

Analyses of results for the 1992 primary, runoff, and general elections show Meek had the easiest path to victory of the three, elected to represent much of the same Miami constituency in Washington as she did in Tallahassee. Hastings bested attorney Lois Frankel, who would later become his colleague in the U.S. House, in an Oct. 1 runoff, as did Brown against radio broadcaster Andy Johnson.

View data visualization on Tableau Public.