Editor’s Note: This story is the result of a partnership between the Zimmerman School’s advanced reporting classes and WUSF 89.7 FM news called Telling Tampa Bay Stories. The Fall 2019 recordings focused on Newtown, one of the first Black communities in Sarasota. Listen to a recording of our interview with Commissioner Shaw here.
SARASOTA — Willie Charles Shaw, a pillar of the African-American community of Sarasota, continues to fight for Newtown and Sarasota as its city commissioner for the 1st District.
His family came to Sarasota nearly 120 years ago, to build the Seaboard railroad that linked Sarasota to the state’s growing network. They laid foundations and cut railroad trusses. The Seaboard railroad was built mostly by black laborers such as Shaw’s ancestors.
Shaw was raised in a rural region of Newtown known as “Black Bottom.” His father was a WWII veteran who served in the infamous Red Ball Express of Patton’s Third Army, a majority-black supply unit during the war. Those trucks proved vital in carrying supplies, troops and ammunition to the Battle of the Bulge. His father would later present in the radiation treatment camps at the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombing sights during the occupation of Japan. He later went on to support his family as a lumber truck driver.
Shaws’ father instilled military discipline in him, he wears a crease in his pant every day even if they’re jeans. As an inquisitive child, he always loved to listen to his uncles, father and relatives speak on their wartime experiences on Sundays.
He started a paper-route for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and the now-defunct Sarasota Journal in the fourth grade. He would unload lumber car boxes with his father.
He recalls a time in which he was younger, eight or nine, some white women were sitting on the fender of the car. They passed by on Fruitville Road they spat racial remarks at him and his brother. His father went after them, chased them down and reprimanded them in front of Shaw.
“That was important.” Shaw said, “to see a black man standing up. Its been instilled in us. To speak up and speak out.”
Unlike his younger mechanically minded brothers, he worked in a hospital later in adolescence. It was there, at around 16 or 17 years old, that he experienced racial bigotry. Shaw recalled vividly a moment in which a white patient in a full-body cast in the orthopedic wing asked him to sing and dance “Old Black Joe” for him. He refused, because of his instilled respect and pride influenced by his father.
He followed in his father’s footsteps by serving in the U.S. Air Force as a security officer with stints in Korea and Texas, working on deciphering the Ho Chi Minh manifesto and researching Battle of Dien Bien Phu amongst other duties.
The racial prejudice he faced later in life didn’t faze him due to his experiences in the military. His experience as a Vietnam-era veteran gave him an edge, having commingled with people of different backgrounds.
“I was able to reach out to people and make myself available not looking for the negative but looking for the positive,” said Shaw.
Returning home, he eventually joined the Postal Service and served for 33 years, nine months and two weeks.
Shaw marched into the political area as early as 2011, being elected to vice mayor, mayor, and remains as the City Commissioner for the 1st District of Sarasota. During that time, he raised his interracial and international family in Sarasota. Shaw devotedly serves as a minister at the Mount Tabor Missionary Baptist Church.
He has represented Sarasota during different roles numerous times at the national and state level in the League of Cities. As a moderator, speaker, committee chair, legislative committees, etc.
His family is perhaps his greatest motivator and the rest of the families of Sarasota that he wants a future for.
“My roots are so deep here,” said Shaw.
