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The Story of Pinellas County School Integration A nine-part series exclusive to the Gabber
Part 2: Separate and Increasingly Unequal Last week, we remembered a brief moment more than 130 years ago when the first and only integrated classroom on the Pinellas peninsula existed in what would become Gulfport. This week, we revisit the customs and traditions that reaffirmed racial segregation long before officials approved the creation of a place provisionally known as “58th Street High School” in early 1952. Dixie M. Hollins, the first superintendent of Pinellas public schools, made school facilities improvement a priority when he took office in 1912. Students attending the county’s four Black schools witnessed marginal improvements, but nowhere near those offered to their counterparts at other schools. White schools received more funding than Black schools; Black schools taught students for six months or less while white schools offered classes for eight months. Hollins embraced the views of Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Washington, whose father was a white man and mother was a slave, grew up as the Ku Klux Klan terrorized the South and white supremacy surged. In that environment, Washington believed that Black people should focus on industrial education and eschew activism, placing moderate economic gains above political engagement. Hollins corresponded with Washington, accepting his focus on domestic science and manual training. The superintendent hired graduates from Tuskegee to teach in Pinellas schools. In an expanding local economy with strong agricultural and hospitality-based roots, Hollins wanted Black students in Pinellas schools to become literate laborers
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HERITAGE VILLAGE ARCHIVES
By James A. Schnur
Gibbs High School, early 1930s rather than intellectuals. County leaders did require all Pinellas teachers to have some training or education, a standard higher than that demanded by the state’s superintendent of public instruction, William Sheats. However, segregated public schools in Pinellas offered Black students – who sat in secondhand desks and read used textbooks – no education beyond the ninth grade. Even if Hollins had wanted to improve Jim Crow schools, he would have faced stiff opposition. A January 1915 editorial from the now-defunct Largo Sentinel painted a sad-but-accurate image of the majority mindset at that time, stating that offering advanced educational opportunities to Black students denied them time “that could be used with far greater profit in teaching them to use tools and implements of the farm, the shop and the kitchen. . . . Not one in a hundred thousand of them is ever going to have any use for algebra, geometry, Latin, Greek and similarly advanced studies.” These harsh words defined segregated education in the Sunshine State. Hollins tried to take his relatively progressive platform statewide, resigning from his county position in a bid to unseat Sheats. The incumbent’s supporters circulated
handbills showing and telling rural Floridians about the improvements Hollins had made to Black schools in Pinellas. The race-baiting worked. On November 2, 1920 Sheats was re-elected, ending Hollins’s political aspirations. Riding ‘The Blue Goose’ to Gibbs Pinellas had no school buses in the 1910s. Children walked to school, rode horses or sometimes hitched a wagon ride. Private “jitney” services offered occasional, unreliable service, but never to Black pupils. The county purchased its first fleet of five buses for $11,240 in August 1923. None of them served Black schools. Black students attending Pinellas Junior-Senior High in Clearwater boarded their first bus in August 1946. Pupils riding that bus from their homes in the groves south of Largo or as far north as Tarpon Springs passed many neighborhood schools they couldn’t legally attend. No such vehicle existed for Gibbs Junior-Senior High School in St. Petersburg, opened in 1927 in a structure built as a white elementary school. These inequalities forced educators to find alternatives. Lack-
theGabber.com | July 8, 2021 - July 14, 2021
