Why There Are No Guided Black-History Tours in Key West—and What's Blocking One Woman's Fix
Rolling Stone reports Arida Wright can't get a tourist-vehicle license for her Key West Black-history tours because Historic Tours of America reportedly
If you've searched for a guided Black-history tour in Key West and come up empty, that's not a fluke of tourism marketing. Rolling Stone reports that Arida Wright's Island Cultural Tours is described in the article as the only guided tour in the city focused on Black history—and that she has been running it "off the books" for roughly three years because she cannot obtain the tourist-vehicle license required to operate legally, according to the Rolling Stone report.
The Licensing Bottleneck, As Reported
According to the same Rolling Stone story, Key West operates under a city ordinance that caps non-franchise tourist-vehicle licenses at seven, and Historic Tours of America (HTA) is reported to hold all seven—while relying primarily on separate franchise licenses for its own operations. That structure, as described in the article, leaves independent operators like Wright without a legal path to a license even though the company holding them isn't necessarily using them. A former Key West city commissioner, Sam Kaufman, is quoted in the piece calling it unfair for one company to control all tours and to "hold hostage" seven unused licenses, using the word "monopoly" to describe the arrangement. This is reported as Kaufman's characterization within the article; no independent city or regulatory confirmation of the ordinance's current text or enforcement status appears in the available reporting, so the precise legal mechanics remain unconfirmed here.
Wright's Tours and Her Stated Mission
Rolling Stone describes Wright's tours as centered on Black history and framed as part of her broader work as a social activist, per the Rolling Stone report. The article does not specify the tour's exact stops, format, or pricing in the excerpted reporting, so those details remain unknown among the sources reviewed. What is reported is the core tension: a locally rooted tour telling a history largely absent from mainstream Key West tourism has operated without the license the city requires, because—according to the reporting—that license path is effectively closed to her.
A Separate, Related Backdrop: Higgs Beach
A companion Rolling Stone piece on the Higgs Beach African burial ground offers separate context on how Black history has been slow to gain public acknowledgment in Key West—though this is a distinct issue from the tour-licensing barrier described above, not a documented cause of it. That site is described as containing the remains of 295 Africans rescued from illegal slave ships who died shortly after arriving in 1860, per the Rolling Stone feature. The article quotes Veronica Stafford saying, "Since it is a Black cemetery and it has the stigma of slavery, nobody wants to touch it." That's her assessment of the stalled preservation situation at Higgs Beach specifically, as quoted—not a documented explanation for the separate tour-licensing barrier. The same article reports that preservation efforts were complicated by a 1983 federal grant condition requiring Interior Department approval for major park changes, that the site was named a National Historic Landmark in 2012, and that Monroe County confirmed a plan to relocate a small dog park within a week of a 2017 documentary's release—illustrating how institutional and bureaucratic constraints have repeatedly slowed acknowledgment of this particular history, separately from the tour-licensing question.
What Remains Unknown
Among the sources reviewed, there's no official statement from HTA or the City of Key West addressing Wright's licensing situation directly, no confirmation of whether the ordinance is currently being reconsidered, and no timeline for when—or whether—Wright might obtain a license. The exact current text of the tourist-vehicle ordinance and any recent amendments are not included in the available reporting. Separately, general travel coverage of Key West's Black history—including Bahama Village and Higgs Beach—appears in outlets like Afar and Visit Florida, though the available excerpts don't specify particular visit formats. A licensed guided option from Wright's Island Cultural Tours remains, per the reporting, unresolved.