When Nick Akins Jr. looks around the soul food restaurant Nikki’s Place in Parramore he owns and runs with his daughter, he can remember how the restaurant was during the time of segregation.
“On the other side of that door (to the kitchen) was the place that you could buy ice cream, milkshakes and stuff,” Akins said. “Back in the day you couldn’t go nowhere else to buy milkshake and ice cream. You had to go to a Black place to buy it.”
All this month, Central Florida Public Media is bringing you conversations around Black history. Akins sat down for a conversation with his daughter Shannea “Nikki” Akins - the Nikki in Nikki’s Place.
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Both Nick and his daughter attended Jones High School in Parramore on the west side of Orlando, before the school was moved and became what’s now known as the Callahan Neighborhood Center.
Nikki remembers the tall awnings of the band room, where her Dad also played.
“It was a surreal experience, and I was thankful that I was able to get the last bit of how everything was for so many years, and so many generations have been in this one room, including my Dad,” Nikki said. “So it's something that's special.”
Meet Nick Akins Jr.
Nick Akins Jr. was born in Hardeeville, South Carolina, and raised in Orlando’s Parramore neighborhood.
Nick is 81 years old, and has been married for 45 years. He has two biological kids, three adopted children, five grandchildren and two great grandkids.
Akins is perhaps best-known as the owner and head chef at Nikki’s Place. He got his start in food service working in the cafeteria at Jones High School when he was growing up because he couldn’t afford lunches.
“I had to work for my food, had to work for my lunches,” Akins said. “I was there every day on time, because I get my lunch for nothing.”
He later took a job running the cafeteria at Jones High School, and while there, the lunch featured items like pork chops, collard greens and cabbage.
“And we had teachers coming from other schools to get their lunch from Jones High School, because [we] had the real deal,” Nick said.
Meet Shannea “Nikki” Akins
For her father, going to a segregated school was just going to school. When Shannea “Nikki” Akins also attended Jones High School, while it was no longer segregated by law, the majority of the student body was Black — something she wasn’t used to.
Before going to Jones High School, most of her friends were white or Hispanic. She remembers loving Spice Girls - and she was Scary Spice because she was the Black girl.
“I was a little chocolate, and the only chocolate one,” Shannea said. “My mom would keep my hair pristine, and so my hair was nice and long, and you would see just white people playing in my hair.”
When she got to Jones, Shannea said it was a bit of “culture shock.”
“People thought that I was too white because I spoke well,” Shannea said. “I did enjoy it. I did enjoy getting assimilated to my Blackness and creating that space for myself to learn what I like, what I don't like.”
The takeaway
When Akins attended Jones High School, it was a school for Black students only. But for him, he said it just felt like school.
But he remembers asking his boss’s family why he had to catch a bus to go to Jones High School, instead of going to the closer Boone High School.
“He said, Nick, man, you know, you can't go to our school. They don't allow your people in our school,” Akins said. “That's when I started thinking about why I could not go to this school, because who I was.”
Shannea — now the CEO and general manager of Nikki's Place — not only followed in her father’s footsteps to Jones High School, she went to a historically black college afterwards: her mother’s alma mater.
“I appreciate all of everything that the experience of being in an integrated school has given me, you know, for all cultures,” Shannea said.
