Panelists in St. Petersburg for the Civil Rights Movement in Florida Conference say desegregation is an ongoing struggle that will continue for years to come.
By MONIQUE FIELDS
Published June 4, 2004
[Times photo (1968)]
About 20 members of Clearwater's NAACP chapter took to the street in 1968 to stop a school bus carrying children to John F. Kennedy Junior High School, a predominantly white school. The NAACP took the action to protest the fact that the all-black Pinellas High School was being closed and kids were being bused to JFK.
[Times photo (1967)]
Teacher Annie Mae McCray leads her first-grade class in a song in 1967, the first year of faculty desegregation in Citrus County schools.
[Times photo: Willie J. Allen Jr.]
Joel Buchanan explains what it was like to be one of the first black students to integrate Gainesville High in 1964 during a discussion Thursday at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.
Lawyer Enrique Escarraz III says Pinellas' new superintendent should be able to help narrow the achievement gap.
ST. PETERSBURG - Joel Buchanan has felt the sting of hate.
As one of the first black students to attend Gainesville High School in 1964, he remembered how segregationists spat in his face, kicked him down the stairs and gave him failing grades he didn't deserve.
"I had teachers who would not take a paper from me," he said.
Buchanan recalled one teacher who looked at him, then pointed to the table.
"Put it there," he was told.
Buchanan was one of six panelists Thursday at the the Civil Rights Movement in Florida Conference, held at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.
He and other panelists lamented that little has changed in Florida in the 50 years since the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional.
The landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case allowed children to attend schools once reserved for whites.
For Buchanan, that meant new books in the library and dozens of microscopes in the science lab.
But the pluses and minuses of desegregation proved far more difficult to evaluate.
Activists and attorneys later would learn that black children lost a sense of community as they boarded buses for schools outside of their neighborhoods. Many of them, such as Buchanan, were ostracized by blacks who resented change.
While schools are integrated today, black and white students are not achieving at the same pace.
Black children are less likely than their white peers to pass the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, enroll in advanced classes or graduate from high school.
They are far more likely to repeat a grade, face suspension from school and attend special classes for mentally disabled students.
The problem is so sweeping that large districts such as those in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties are struggling to narrow the achievement gap.
Pinellas has a chance to address the issue as it welcomes Clayton Wilcox as the district's new superintendent this fall, said Enrique Escarraz III, a St. Petersburg lawyer who helped craft the Pinellas school choice plan.
Wilcox, the first outsider hired to run the district in almost four decades, will bring a new perspective and an opportunity for "shaking up" the district," Escarraz said.
During the 1960s and 1970s, that work was left to activists, who brought inequities to the attention of leaders.
One of those activists was former state Sen. Jack Gordon, a panelist at the conference.
Gordon ticked off a number of ways that prejudice found its way into schools: promotion, inattention to students, the number of books in the library.
Gordon recalled that in the former Dade County, black students at one school couldn't take their books home because administrators feared the children would lose them.
At the time, Gordon spoke up, and the children were allowed to take the books home. But he suspects such practices continue today.
"This is a struggle that's going to continue past the lifetime of anyone in this room," Gordon told about 100 people Thursday.
Fifty years ago, blacks turned to attorneys to seek relief. Today, the community needs to do that work, said John Due, a longtime civil rights attorney.
"We need to get off our knees and help ourselves," Due said. "You don't need lawyers to be your leaders. Lawyers can't lead you to freedom. Parents can do that."
As for Buchanan, he later confronted the teacher who gave him the failing grade.
"Do you know who I am?" Buchanan asked, recalling the meeting years ago.
"You were my first Negro student," his former teacher replied.
"I have that paper," he said. "I want you to change this grade."
She reluctantly changed the grade and then stood up and hugged him, apologizing for her actions.
Lawyer Enrique Escarraz III says Pinellas' new superintendent should be able to help narrow the achievement gap.