For seven decades, Robles Park Village has covered up Tampa’s first burial ground for black people. Concrete slabs became the barrier between the living and the dead there. But in 2019, Zion Cemetery was rediscovered.
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UF Alumni Reflect On Black Thursday And The Black Student Experience
By Audrey Mostek
April 14, 2021
Betty Stewart-Fullwood was among the 100-plus Black students who left the University of Florida after the administration’s response to their demands for better treatment in 1971.
“It was the principle of the matter,” Stewart-Fullwood recalled Tuesday during a virtual panel discussion commemorating the 50th anniversary of the campus protests commonly known as Black Thursday. “I needed to walk out, even though I came back.”
Three times on Thursday, April 15, 1971, groups of Black Student Union members entered Tigert Hall in an attempt to speak with then-UF President Stephen C. O’Connell. The BSU wanted, among other things, UF to enroll and hire Black students and faculty, create a minority affairs department, and “the fair and equal treatment of our Black brothers and sisters” on staff at the university.
In 1962, the tumultuous sands of time cascaded onto the 2,000-acre Gainesville campus of the University of Florida, a racially segregated state school.
In the shadow of the Confederate flag and the sound of Dixie, Black OR white education systems transitioned to black AND white single-source schools.
By 1962 and 1963, we were well into the second half of the 20th century. Fourteen academically elite Black teenagers bravely breached the virtual fortress that was protecting exclusively white undergraduate education. I was among them.
The students, from all-Black public schools, qualified by passing the formerly whites-only Florida 12th grade placement test.
Like college students throughout the Southeast, Stephan P. Mickle and 13 others answered the clarion call to integrate Florida s undergraduate classes: Johncyna Williams, Alice Marie Davis, Rose Elizabeth Green, Jessie Dean, John Reddick, Carol Hudson, Charles Speights, James Gloster, Susan Lockhart, Oliver Gordon, Jimmy Dukes,