07/28/2026
Someone once asked the man who handled the snakes at Paradise Park whether he was afraid of them, and he said he had dealt with worse in human beings. That one line holds the whole reason the place existed, a safe park Black families built on a Florida river in 1949 because the world outside the gates was the real danger.
For twenty years it gave a hundred thousand people a year somewhere to breathe, and then a corporation erased it without a word. Let that snake handler's answer sit with you a while.
There was a man who drove all over the South with a big sign bolted to the roof of his car, and the sign said Paradise Park.
He mailed letters to Black churches and schools across three states, telling them about a place on a river in Florida where their families would be welcome.
His name was Eddie Leroy Vereen, and he had a reason to work that hard.
For years, Vereen had been a boat captain at Silver Springs, one of the most famous attractions in the country.
Every day he steered a glass-bottom boat out over water so clear you could count the fish, and pointed white tourists down at the underwater world sliding past beneath the glass.
Black men had piloted that river since the 1870s. They knew every bend and every spring in it.
And when the boat came back to the dock, Vereen was not allowed to bring his own wife onto it. He was not allowed to bring his own children.
The boats were for white tourists. The Black men who ran them could steer, and nothing more.
So when the owners of Silver Springs finally set aside a strip of riverbank downstream for Black families in 1949 and asked Vereen to build a park there, he did not build a consolation prize.
He built a paradise, and he poured himself into it like a man who had been waiting his whole life for the chance.
He and his wife planted the place by hand. Hundreds of palm trees and azaleas, whatever would make it beautiful, set into the ground with their own fingers.
He laid a hundred feet of white sand for a beach and put lifeguards on it. He raised a dance pavilion with a jukebox, a soda fountain, a café, and a gift shop.
There was a jungle cruise and a petting zoo, a softball field and horseshoe pits, a reptile show, swim lessons in the shallows. Whatever Silver Springs had upriver, Vereen found a way to give his people a version of it downstream.
And he brought in glass-bottom boats of their own, so that now a Black child could lean over the rail and see the springs the way only white children had before.
He put his own wife and children in the postcards and the posters, the family smiling on the beach, an invitation that said this place is safe, come as you are.
They called it Paradise Park. It opened on the twentieth of May, 1949.
Then Vereen went to work filling it, and the way he did it tells you everything about the man.
Ocala had exactly one hotel that would rent a room to a Black family. One.
So when the buses rolled in from other states, hundreds of people at a time, Vereen personally found them beds, placing strangers in the homes of neighbors and the back rooms of churches all over Black Ocala.
That is the kind of place it was. You arrived a stranger from three states away, and someone's grandmother made up a bed for you.
He ran the park like it was his own front yard, and in a way it was.
One of his grandson Reginald's jobs as a boy was to keep white people out. It almost never came up, but now and then one wandered in by mistake and had to be gently turned around, which was its own quiet joke, a Black family's paradise with the fence pointing the other way.
Every year, the Monday after Easter, Vereen and Reginald hid hundreds of eggs across the grounds for the children to find.
If he caught teenagers dancing too close in the pavilion, he would walk over and pull the plug on the jukebox himself.
Reginald Lewis grew up inside that world, and he said you became lost in the beauty and the camaraderie of it. Earl Glover, whose family also worked at the park, said that when people came through those gates, they became family, no matter where they had driven in from.
And they came. From all over Florida, all over the South, all over the country.
By the early 1950s, as many as a hundred and fifty thousand people were coming in a single year.
Together with Silver Springs, it made up one of the largest recreation grounds in the country, in the years before Disney World was even an idea.
Civic and church leaders across the nation called it the finest park ever built for Black Americans. The blues great B.B. King came through once.
There was a day set aside each year for Bethune-Cookman College, and the money taken at the gate went straight to the school. Vereen's park did not just give Black Florida a place to swim, it helped pay for a Black college.
It ran on Black labor and booked Black performers, and it put real money into Black Ocala, helping hold together one of the most prosperous Black communities in the South.
For a lot of the people who came, it was one of the only places in the entire state where a Black family could get in the water at all.
Picture what a full day there looked like.
Cars and church buses rolling in from Gainesville and Jacksonville and towns you had to drive all day to leave, the children asking the whole way if they were almost there.
No side gate, no back entrance, no white face at the front deciding whether they were allowed to stay.
A child leaning over the glass on a boat for the first time, watching the eelgrass sway and the long-nosed gar drift by, above the bright boil where the spring pushed up out of the ground.
A preacher waist-deep in the cold spring in his robes, the congregation lined along the bank in Sunday white, singing a believer up out of the water.
At Christmas, Santa Claus riding down the river on a glass-bottom boat, handing a paper package of trinkets and an orange to every child on the bank.
In the evening the jukebox lit the pavilion, and couples danced close on a wooden floor nobody was going to make them leave, at least until Vereen decided they were dancing a little too close.
Every Labor Day, a young woman was crowned Miss Paradise Park on a stage in front of her whole community.
The same photographer who had made Silver Springs famous, a white man named Bruce Mozert, came downstream and shot these families too, the women posing on the boardwalk, the children caught mid-splash. For decades those pictures sat forgotten in a rubber band on a shelf in his studio, nearly the last proof the place had ever existed.
This was joy, built on purpose, by the very people the rest of Florida was working so hard to shut out.
But nobody there could forget for long what was waiting outside the gates.
There was a man who handled the snakes at Paradise Park. Someone once asked him if he wasn't afraid of them.
He said he had dealt with worse in human beings.
That one sentence holds the whole era. Inside the fence was paradise, and the real danger was the world on the other side of it.
And it was still segregation, no matter how beautiful they made it.
Out on the river, boats of white passengers and boats of Black passengers slid past each other going opposite ways, and almost never crossed the line in the water between them.
The white man who signed the paychecks called the Black men building his second fortune by a slur, even as they built it.
Even Mary McLeod Bethune, the great educator, visited once and did not care much for the place, because a separate paradise was still a reminder of why it had to be separate.
The joy was real, and so was the fence around it.
Then the ground shifted, in the cruelest way it could.
In 1967, after years of struggle and law, Silver Springs finally began letting Black families in.
It was a victory, and it should have been. But it also meant there was no longer a reason to keep a separate park downriver.
The crowds began to thin. In its last season, Paradise Park was open only on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays, a shadow of the place that once drew a hundred thousand a year.
By then the parks had been sold to a broadcasting corporation, ABC-Paramount, run by men who read the river as a line on a spreadsheet.
And in 1969, they closed Paradise Park.
They did not call a meeting. They did not tell the workers, or the vendors who had sold there for twenty years, or the families who had been coming since they were children, or the people who had built the whole thing with their hands.
Think about the distance between how that place was made and how it was ended.
It was built by one man with a sign on his car, planting palms with his wife, finding beds for strangers in his neighbors' homes.
It was erased by a company far away that never learned his name, in a decision nobody bothered to announce.
Then the bulldozers came, and the pavilion and the beach and the boardwalk were pulled down and hauled off.
Silver Springs is still open today. The glass-bottom boats still run, and nobody leaning over the rail is told that a mile downstream, the people once kept out of that water built a paradise of their own.
The land where Paradise Park stood is covered in underbrush now. You could walk right past it and never know a whole world had once been there.
Today the only trace of it in Ocala is a mural on West Broadway, on the old Black business street, and a small marker near where the entrance used to be.
It was forgotten so completely that Cynthia Wilson-Graham, who grew up right there in Marion County, had never once heard of it, until she saw an old photograph at a meeting and it stopped her cold.
That is how thoroughly they erased it. A place that gave a hundred thousand Black families a year somewhere to be free, gone from memory in a single generation.
So here is the debt, and it is a small and payable one.
Remember the man who drove all over the South with a sign on his car because he was not allowed to bring his own children on a boat.
When they locked a door on him, he did not beg to be let in. He built something better than the room they kept him out of, and he filled it with more joy than that room ever held.
His name was Eddie Leroy Vereen, and the paradise he made deserved better than underbrush and silence.
So give him the one thing the world never did. Do not let him be forgotten.
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NOTE: These details come from Remembering Paradise Park by Lu Vickers and Cynthia Wilson-Graham, along with the Florida Department of State, the State Archives of Florida and Florida Memory, the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the recollections of Eddie Vereen's own family, including his grandson Reginald Lewis, recorded in those histories and in reporting by Slate and The Fine Print.
