Blanche Armwood worked to improve education and opportunities for blacks and women.
By MICHELLE JONES
Published April 4, 2003
Armwood High School in Seffner was named after Blanche Armwood, a Tampa native and the first African-American woman from Florida to graduate from an accredited law school, Howard University.
She was born in 1890 and at 16 began teaching, after attending Georgia's Spelman College, where she graduated in 1906.
In 1922 she began supervising schools for black children in Tampa and Hillsborough County. At the time, the children could only attend six months a year.
Faced with inferior schools and scant supplies, Armwood established the first accredited school for African-Americans in Hillsborough County.
Eight years later, she took a job helping unemployed black women. She helped organize a day nursery and kindergarten for children of working mothers. She also served as executive secretary of Tampa's Urban League and was involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Association of Colored Women.
She was considered aggressive and rebellious by some as she fought for political, economic, social and educational equality, wrote Maxine Jones in The African American Heritage of Florida.
Education wasn't her only interest; she also spent years on the campaign trail supporting candidates who stood for a better way of life for blacks and women.
Armwood died at the age of 49 in 1939, and the school, named after this significant Tampa resident, opened in 1984.
[Last modified April 3, 2003, 17:30:40]
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