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chapter three Brotherhood of Defiance The State-Local Relationship in the Desegregation of Lee County Public Schools, 1954Ð1969 Irvin D. S. Winsboro At the start of the 1970–71 academic year, schools in Lee County, Florida, underwent a historic transformation. Sixteen years after the U.S. Supreme Court had declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, the Lee County School Board finally instituted countywide school desegregation. How Lee County had managed to delay this for so long is a story of local actions with state implications as well. As the convergence of state and local defiance swept the Lee County School Board away from allegiance to Brown, it eventually took federal actions to ensure compliance with the Court’s mandate. In the end, the desegregation of Lee County Public Schools reflected an interconnected triumph of black agency and federal intervention over a state/local resistance of school desegregation. This is a story that played out in many of the communities of the Deep South following Brown, but seldom as long as it did in Lee County.1 Even though the literature on the subject has reflected a long-fashionable focus on the “moderation” of Florida’s officials in the aftermath of Brown, in reality state leaders intuitively resisted desegregation in ways similar to that of other southern states, most notably in adopting or proposing racially based pupil assignment measures, granting extraordinary powers to the governor, probing and red-baiting desegregation groups, suggesting interposition and nullification acts, and using sovereign powers and legal counsel to prevent or delay desegregation—defined in this work as the “Down South” strategy. brotherhood of defiance 69 Florida officials seldom, however, resorted to the sensational resistance of Virginia or the demagogic rhetoric of political leaders in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama.2 While Orval Faubus, Ross Barnett, and George Wallace led their states into a bold defiance of Brown, more realistic segregationists positioned Florida to project a progressive “New South” image. Even so, leaders in Tallahassee stubbornly, and sometimes not so subtly, eschewed any meaningful measures to enact school desegregation in the Sunshine State. Some localities, Dade County (Miami), for example, initiated their own desegregation plans independent of state leadership and sanctions. Other school districts, following the lead of Tallahassee, steadfastly maintained their color lines. Representative of the latter, Lee County arose as one of the most defiant scofflaws of Brown; the county’s actions are as much a story of state-orchestrated resistance to Brown as they are of sustained local defiance. Given the nature of that defiance, Lee County reflected but one extreme manifestation of state-promulgated policies and unofficial guidelines for orchestrating the rejection, crippling—or, most commonly, the Down South-style delay and stonewalling—Brown’s sweeping mandate. That account suggests important lessons for understanding the interplay of everyday politics and everyday protesters in the wake of Brown in the South. Blacks in southwest Florida had viewed education as paramount to their improvement since they first settled there. Local lore has it that the Tillis family became the first black settlers in this region (then part of Monroe County) in 1867. After homesteading a small plot along the Caloosahatchee River, Nelson Tillis created a makeshift schoolhouse for the oldest of his eleven children. Tillis soon enticed J. Wesley Roberts away from Key West to preside over his small black academy. As other black families moved to the area, they continued the Tillis tradition of emphasizing education for their youth.3 Despite blacks initiating educational measures in the area, “separate but unequal” became the founding doctrine of the Lee County School District. In one of the first meetings of the Lee County Board of Public Instruction (LBPI), created in 1887 when Florida named the new county after Confederate icon Robert E. Lee, the Board moved that “colored people shall be encouraged to organize a [separate] school district . . . to the districts that served white students.”4 How that parallel district, subsequently known as “Sub-District No. 1,” would be financed and staffed was left to the black community, since the governmental bodies of the new county provided no funding for minority schools. Within two years of the creation of a public-funded white school district, black residents had opened their own (non-public funded) lower-level school in a church shared by Methodist and Baptist congregations. During the week, the church served as an academy for black children, with J. Wesley Roberts as its headmaster. Eventually, the LBPI...

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