A historic Black enclave on Florida’s Gulf Coast fought for flood controls. It may not survive.

RUBONIA, Fla. - Mary Brown recently opened the door of her home in this historically Black enclave and flicked the light switch on and off hopefully.

Nothing.

She was hit with the stench of black mold that in just a few days had crawled up the walls after her home was flooded with almost four feet of water during Hurricane Helene, then flooded again less than two weeks later during Hurricane Milton.

“Oh boy, it smells in here,” Brown, 85, said as she moved through her living room, where a tapestry sofa and love seat sat with cushions upended, soggy from the deluge.

Brown’s family have lived in Rubonia for generations, and she helped the neighborhood wage a successful years-long campaign to convince Manatee County to build a new drainage system to stem chronic flooding.

But after the back-to-back storms destroyed or damaged most of the 240 buildings in Rubonia, longtime residents like Brown say the new system isn’t working. They fear their community and its important history - as a refuge for the children of enslaved people - will be swept away.

Her younger brother, Morris Goff, 77, a retiree and veteran, followed her inside, leaning heavily on his cane.

“Mary, did the lights come on?” he called out.

“No,” she called back.

Goff sighed.

“Rubonia is always last,” Goff said. “I would have thought they would at least have the lights on by now.”

Florida is dotted with communities like Rubonia, a small coastal area between Tampa and Sarasota, that were founded as segregated neighborhoods in low-lying areas and are now being threatened by increasingly severe weather, experts say.

“All along the Gulf Coast, we have these predominantly African American communities that were built in undesirable areas because of basically redlining and segregation,” said Dannie Bolden, who has spent years trying to save North Port St. Joe, Fla. “Now with climate change, these communities are dealing with constant tidal surges that are causing more and more flooding in these places.”

Bolden has worked on environmental issues across the country, but he said the problems facing the Gulf Coast’s Black communities are particularly dire. Many local governments are not investing in remediation to help local residents build their homes on safer ground - and survive, he said.

“These once vibrant Black communities,” he said, “have a legacy and history that eventually will be totally gone.”

In Rubonia, only about 15 homes - newer structures built on stilts or mounds to withstand flooding - were unscathed by the double punch of the six-foot storm surge of Helene and the 120 mph winds of Milton, residents said. The devastation came little over a year after Hurricane Idalia sent more than three feet of storm surge into some homes in the community.

Rubonia was developed in 1912 to house Black migrant farmworkers who harvested tomatoes, strawberries and watermelons on nearby farms.

“It was a very close-knit community, where everyone knew everyone,” said Louis Goff, 55, president of the community association.

Rubonia was then a mostly Black town, the result of racist housing policies that kept Black residents out of most of the neighborhoods in Manatee County. Today, the neighborhood is more evenly split between mostly Black and Hispanic residents.

The town had no paved roads but everything they needed, Morris Goff and Brown said. There was a barbershop, service stations and grocery stores with rock candy and pig’s feet in jars. There were community picnics and fish fries, and everybody contributed $1 a month to keep the streetlights on.

But when a new route of Highway 41 was built farther away from Rubonia in the 1960s, businesses began to close, and flooding problems began to develop. Today, much of the surrounding area has been overtaken by suburban sprawl. Where once stood acres and acres of crops, there are now expensive neighborhoods, businesses and mobile home and RV parks.

“All of that development has made the flooding worse,” said Louis Goff, who worked in the department that handled drainage issues for the county. “The farmland used to absorb all that water, but that’s been covered over with cement and asphalt. The water still has to go somewhere, and where it goes is Rubonia.”

Every hurricane season, residents closely watch the weather forecasts, scared that even an ordinary summer storm would flood their community, he said. The neighborhood began fighting for a better drainage in the 1960s, he said.

Like many towns founded by or for Black families in the South during that period, Rubonia is an unincorporated community that exists outside city limits. Instead, residents depend on county officials for government services.

These types of unincorporated communities often have limited political power and struggle to secure basic services, experts say.

Rubonia leaders spent years asking Manatee County to address the neighborhood’s infrastructure and drainage problems before a plan was developed in 2011, residents say. It would be another decade before the $6.5 million project was funded and work began.

But Goff and other residents say the new system hasn’t helped their flooding problem.

“Long term, I don’t think there really is a solution,” Goff said. “The only thing you can do is build the house up really high or leave. … I don’t think the elderly people that built this community are going to be able to rebuild.”

The community remains susceptible to storm surges and is experiencing severe weather impacts on a more frequent basis, county officials acknowledge.

Manatee County Commissioner Kevin Van Ostenbridge, who represents the area, said the drainage project was designed only to keep rainwater from flooding the community. Rubonia will need different types of structures to deal with the storm surges from hurricanes, he said.

“What that looks like and what the county’s role will be in that remains up in the air,” Van Ostenbridge said.

“We’ve built strong relationships between the county and Rubonia over the last four or five years. We love them, and we will do what we can to save it because it really is a cool, unique little place.”

The environmental pressures have been devastating to the low-income community where more than two-thirds of the 500 or so residents own their homes and have lived there an average of 26 years, according to a 2016 county survey of Rubonia. The neighborhood remains close-knit, with generations of families living together and a popular annual Mardi Gras parade.

Kenyata Waiters, 29, a preschool teacher’s assistant and mother of two, said she was moving away from Rubonia, and her grandparents, longtime residents whose home was flooded during the recent hurricanes, were considering relocating, too.

“I don’t think I’m going to stay here much longer,” she said. “We’ve never seen anything like this flooding.”

When Helene slammed into the Florida Panhandle as a Category 4 hurricane late on the evening of Sept. 26, landfall was more than 200 miles away, and not many in Rubonia thought to evacuate. But the water rose so quickly that many were taken by surprise. Emergency responders did more than a dozen water rescues.

Another of Brown’s brothers, Ruben Goff, a retired tool and die operator and Baptist minister, nearly died in his car trying to escape from the family home he shares with her.

“My car just shut off, and the water started rising, up to my seat,” the 84-year-old recalled. “I asked God not to let me die in this car. I finally gave the door one giant push, and it gave way.”

The four-bedroom house flooded again during Hurricane Milton, Goff said.

This week, he and Brown worked together, trying to salvage what they can from the home their father, a farm laborer, had built in 1955. Ruben Goff lost most of his clothes - “39 suits! 23 pairs of shoes!” he lamented - as well as sermon notes he had kept for decades.

Brown tried to save a walnut sideboard that had been her mother’s, one of the few things she had left. When she pulled at one of the drawers, it came off in her hand.

Dizzy from the mold, the siblings took frequent breaks outside to recover. They sat down with their younger brother, Morris, on plastic lawn chairs under the shade of a stubby live oak tree that Morris had planted in 1965. They call it the “family reunion tree” because the family has taken photos underneath its branches for years.

“I told you not to cut this tree down, and now here it is, the only place to sit around here with shade,” Morris told his brother. “Now you need this tree.”

Brown was mentally counting all the senior citizens in the neighborhood to whom she takes Christmas dinner and calculating how many of them could stay. Only one or two could afford or want to leave, she told herself.

Her future was far more uncertain.

“I don’t know where I’m going to be,” she said. She co-owns the house with her eight siblings, and they may not want to rebuild.