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The Story of Pinellas County School Integration A nine-part series exclusive to the Gabber By James A. Schnur
John Donaldson, an Alabama native, came to the historic Gulfport area in 1868. He worked for a man named Louis Bell and married Anna Germain, a housekeeper for the Bell family. In the 1870s, the Donaldsons acquired a 40-acre tract in the present-day Childs Park area of St. Petersburg. They planted some of the earliest citrus groves in the area near St. Petersburg’s Tangerine Avenue, today called 18th Avenue South. As they harvested crops, the Donaldsons saw more free-roaming cattle than people on the open range between their property and Lake Maggiore. They started a family. Their children played with other youth in a nearby frontier settlement that became Disston City, a predecessor of Gulfport. Historians such as Raymond Arsenault, John Bethell, Walter Fuller and Karl Grismer describe how well this family got along with other settlers in the area. Englishman Arthur Norwood had noticed advertisements in a London paper touting the potential of a new development planned by Hamilton Disston. He came to Florida in the summer of 1886, built a simple school in a heavily wooded area near 49th Street and 26th Avenue South,
PINELLAS COUNTY SCHOOLS
Part 1: Brief Integration Disintegrates
Davis Elementary School and began teaching classes that fall. Some of the Donaldson children attended this school. Students called the one-room board-and-batten structure “Prop College” for the pine logs that propped up the exterior walls. Parents knew this tiny educational outpost as Disston City School, a predecessor to the original Gulfport Elementary (that opened at its present location in 1910.) The Donaldsons’ experience in the 19th century looked like that of other pioneer families in the area, with one significant difference: Unlike their
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neighbors, John and Anna Germain Donaldson were Black, and had lived as slaves until the Civil War ended. The first Black settlers in the St. Petersburg area, their children attended the first integrated school in present-day Pinellas County. The Duel over Dual Schools Technically, the Donaldson children who attended Prop College broke the law. Florida’s 1885 constitution included this mandate: “White and colored children shall not be taught in the same school, but impartial provision shall be made for both.” The Reconstruction era offered a brief glimmer of hope in the former Confederacy. Agents from the federal Freedmen’s Bureau assisted former slaves who wanted an education who had once faced brutal punishment if they engaged in an act of civil disobedience that threatened the slavocracy: any attempt to gain basic literacy. The state constitution passed in 1868 proclaimed that counties should offer education “without distinction or preference.” Blacks assumed a handful of lead-
theGabber.com | July 1, 2021 - July 7, 2021
