FORMER LIBRARY BECOMES CHILD CARE CENTER

For nearly 50 years, a building on North A Street sat empty — once Pensacola's first library for the Black community, shut down back in 1976. Now it's open again, this time as a childcare center. The city celebrated the official opening of the Alice S. Williams Center this week. It's named for Alice Strudivant Williams, who founded the first night school for African Americans in Pensacola. The center will serve infants up to two years old. Mayor D-C Reeves says preserving the building had been talked about for years. The project got 500-thousand dollars from a state African American cultural and historical grant, plus 300-thousand dollars from the Community Redevelopment Agency.

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