Thousands pass by an east Gainesville plaza on Williston Road each day, unaware it once housed a Black-owned shopping center envisioned by a trailblazing Baptist preacher.
Now known as the Shalom Center, the plaza at 908 SE Williston Road in southeast Gainesville was once called the Alavec Shopping Center. The shopping center grew out of a vision of the late Rev. Dr. Thomas A. Wright, a longtime civil rights leader who served for 44 years as pastor of the historic Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist Church in northwest Gainesville.
The shopping center opened in 1971 during “a period of time when there was no economic development in the Black community,” said Philoron Wright, a retired local educator whose father, the late Rev. Dr. Thomas A. Wright, spearheaded the effort to raise capital to build the center…