Writing a concurring opinion in the Virgil Hawkins case, Florida Supreme Court Justice Glenn Terrell wrote “I might venture to point out …that segregation is not a new philosophy generated by the states that practice it. It is and always has been the unvarying law of the animal kingdom, the dove and the quail, the turkey and the turkey buzzard, it matters not where they are found, are segregated: place the horse, the cow, the sheep, the goat and the pig in the same pasture and they instinctively segregate…and when God created man, he allotted each race to his own continent according to color, Europe to the white man, and Asia to the yellow man, Africa to the black man, and America to the red man, but we are now advised that God’s plan was in error and must be reversed.”
Justice Terrell’s morally vapid words, while not holding greater sway than the Brown mandate, certainly provided insight into how Florida would remain defiant as far as integration through the 1960’s. UF did not graduate its first black student until nearly a decade after the Brown decision; Florida State University (FSU), originally a college for women that became a co-ed school following World War II to accommodate the large numbers of white males returning from war who wished to obtain college degrees per the GI Bill, was similarly racially segregated and graduated its first black students in the late 60’s as well.
Still, once integration became the “law” in America, such did not mandate the closure of any of the state funded Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) including FAMU. By the 1970’s, students of all races were eligible to enroll at FAMU the same as at UF and FSU, but the issue during this period for many of the public HBCU’s, including FAMU, was whether the individual states should eliminate them all together as a purge of the state’s recent segregationist past. In 1968, Florida’s Board of Control, which provided oversight for the state universities, closed the FAMU Law School and opened a new one at FSU. The law school closing was only the beginning, as it was during the 70’s that FAMU faced relentless calls for its complete merging with FSU. It was only through the indefatigable efforts of former FAMU Presidents Benjamin L. Perry and Dr. Walter Smith, Sr. that the same was averted. Still, during the middle of President Smith’s tenure, the disparate funding aspect of FAMU as opposed to FSU was manifest in a major way during the 1979-80 football seasons when FAMU’s Bragg Stadium was in need of repairs. FAMU was allowed to use FSU’s Doak Campbell Stadium—built and maintained at the time in large measure by public funds—but the football team was not allowed to use FSU’s locker room and was forced to get dressed on the bus and conduct halftime on the side of the field. These and other slights only raised the stakes during the early 1980’s when FAMU President Smith sought to obtain a full engineering school, one that would further its mission as a Land-Grant college under the Morill Act, a designation that it only shared in Florida with UF.
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