2 Black Students’ Struggles for Justice at the University of Florida by David L. Horne

Abstract: In this chapter Dr. David L. Horne, a 1968 graduate and one of the founding members of the Black Student Union (BSU) at the University of Florida, reflects on his experiences in the development of the BSU and African American Studies Program. In addition to his personal experiences as an undergraduate and graduate student at UF, Professor Horne documents Black life at UF including race relations and UF’s response to several BSU demands for the establishment of an African American Studies academic department. Readers of this chapter are also encouraged to view the Samuel Proctor Oral History-produced documentary, The Making of the Institute of Black Culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXxJaiIPGgw&t=40s

 

Dr. Horne notes that his historical account is augmented by conversations with Gainesville residents Walter Barnes, Charles Gaston, Otis Stover, Sandra Williams, and Joyce Kirkland.

 

I was told that I was born in a thunderstorm. Well, I wasn’t really outside in it, I was in Brewster Hospital (for Colored People). But it was considered a good sign, as those things go. I came in as the elements were dark and raging, with the fight all around me. And though the household into which I was born was, as Poet Nikki Giovanni said, on poverty’s edge, I was loved, and I was happy.

My father, Amon Horne, fell victim to the general despair of the day for Black men in 1940s Jacksonville, Florida. He was a big man with solid builder and chef skills, but he was disrespected and could not find steady work in the area. So, he, like many other Black men of that time, simply left, and my mother, Dora, had to handle all the family’s heavy lifting.

She somehow kept us—my older brother Junior (Amon), my older sister Cookie (Edith), and me—decently clothed and fed. She also kept us in a Baptist church and gave us a solid, long-lasting respect for education and due regard for adults. I played a lot and read a lot. Comic books helped propel my reading skills; I was reading Ivanhoe and other such works early in life. After finding out I could do almost all the schoolwork I was assigned fairly easily, I excelled in school and got used to being rewarded and praised for it.

I went to Susie E. Tolbert Elementary School, James Weldon Johnson Junior High, and New Stanton High School. At James Weldon, I played clarinet in the marching and concert band, and practiced being a debater. They taught all of us the “Negro National Anthem” (“Lift Every Voice and Sing”), which we sang in school every morning after reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

In church and school, my community regularly taught that we were all either part of the “Talented Tenth” or we should want to be and should strive to be. Our teachers and church elders seemed to expect us all to do something worthwhile with our lives because none of us were born by accident. We had a purpose and we had to find it and pursue it. We were supposed to live a life of meaning, however long that was, and wherever we found ourselves living.

When I was in junior high school, my mother became a classroom teacher and joined the teachers’ union. She started taking me with her to union meetings and strikes, and I remembered the fervor and intensity of the activists. I also remembered her telling me that many of the teachers refused to strike and protest. Then when there was a decent settlement—increased wages, better benefits, etc.—those who did not participate in the activism reaped all the benefits while the strikers got all the punishment. I never forgot that lesson.

My older brother, Junior, had a hard time in Jacksonville, so my mother sent him to live with my aunt and uncle in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After adjusting to the frigid temperatures there and the newness of Massachusetts, he eventually won a scholarship to Harvard University. I remember attending his graduation when I was a senior at James Weldon, but it was cold there (even in the spring) and I wasn’t impressed. Later, when he had gone on to Cambridge University in England and tried to convince me to leave Jacksonville and finish my high school years in Massachusetts (Phillips Andover Academy) or New Hampshire (Phillips Exeter Academy), I remembered Harvard and how cold it felt there. I was, and am, a warm body soul.

I did well academically all the way through school, and virtually lived on the honor roll. During my senior year in high school, three things galvanized me: the assassination of John Kennedy, the Civil Rights struggle going on in Jacksonville and other parts of the South, and a feeling that my time to choose my purpose was upon me.

John F. Kennedy Assassinated

The 35^th President of the U.S. was tremendously popular with young people in the U.S. at the time, including Black students. Mr. Kennedy and his brother, Robert, were seen as youthful harbingers of a better American future. With the Kennedys in charge we all felt a little safer, and we felt the glow of a very possible and better tomorrow. His sudden death felt like a good friend of ours had died. Many of us discussed it in classes and on our walks home. It put a gloom on the rest of the school year, and this was only around Thanksgiving, in the fall (November 22, 1963). A malaise set in, even though no one at New Stanton High School actually knew or had talked to a Kennedy family member.

Taking the College Entrance Exam

The senior class had just finished taking the Florida State 12^th Grade Exam, and some of us, including me, felt pretty confident we had done okay on it. I was especially buoyant because I thought mine would be a pretty high score. After all, a few months earlier, I had taken a tough standardized exam with a group of white students from across Duval County and had not felt crushed by the experience. It was for earning a scholarship to either Phillips Andover Academy or Phillips Exeter Academy, and had been arranged for me by my older brother as part of his plan to get me out of Jacksonville and the South. Besides the cultural difficulty of some of the questions, what I most vividly remember about that testing experience was the rather awkward exchange between a small group of the white students and me when we were on a lunch break. I heard them chatting about various test preparation classes and devices they had used to get ready for the exam. One member of the group decided to be polite and asked me what test preparation process I’d used. A bit taken aback in the moment by the question, I remember saying, “None.” I hadn’t taken any test prep. The incredulous look they all gave me stayed seared in my brain.

What I most remember about that episode was the realization that white students were actually taking test prep classes to get ready to pass hard exams. It was like learning that white girls pressed and hot combed their hair. It was a bit of a shock. We were led to believe that white students got the best part of regular schooling, so they were always smarter. Even though I felt I missed something by not having taken test prep classes, I also felt stimulated knowing that I was performing on just my raw ability; I actually knew many of the answers.

Suffice it to say that, though I did hear that I hadn’t embarrassed myself or my big brother by my exam scores, I did not receive any scholarship offers from either of the prep schools. Since I was not crazy about the idea of moving to chilly New England and becoming the token Black student in a sea of whiteness, I did not feel much rejection because of that result.

But the experience made me feel ready for the fabled Florida State Exam, in which I would have to compete with the smartest New Stanton High senior, a youth named Michael Wilson. He and I often had friendly competitions for the highest exam scores and end-of-semester grades. We also were perpetual locks for the honor roll each semester and were both in the Honor Society. Anyway, Michael did exceedingly well on that year’s Florida State Exam, making the highest score among all students in the Negro high schools of Duval County (Douglas Edwards High, Mathew W. Gilbert High, and New Stanton). I made the second highest score in the county and at New Stanton, and was satisfied with that—although Michael did get special recognition and an award of distinction that I wished I had gotten.

Civil Rights in Jacksonville

In 1963-1964 (my senior year), the NAACP Youth Brigade started training some of us to participate in desegregation activities in downtown Jacksonville, particularly the integration of lunch counters and public service desks downtown. As I remember, it was J.C. Penney’s and Woolworth stores that they were particularly interested in challenging. Some of New Stanton’s more adventurous students participated in both the training and the demonstrations. My older sister, Cookie, did. I did not. I could not ever reconcile sitting still on a lunch counter stool while white citizens called me names, spat on me, punched me, and/or poured hot coffee on me. I was convinced I would ruin the sit-in experience for the NAACP. If, as my sister reported happened to her, someone spat on me and slapped me, I did not think I was capable of not jumping up and throwing punches back. Though I was no gang member, I did participate by standing on bridges and viaducts and throwing stones and bricks on white passengers in cars below. That kind of stuff I could do. The special kind of courage it took to do the sit-ins, I just did not have, and I did not beat myself up about it.

Enough New Stanton students participated in the activities and got chased from downtown to give New Stanton High a different kind of reputation than it generally had before in the Jacksonville community. New Stanton was the bourgeoisie school for wannabes. Except for our always formidable football program and our nationally famous marching band, New Stanton was not known for any kind of rock-‘em-sock-‘em. That reputation belonged to Matthew Gilbert.

Anyway, it was New Stanton students who mainly braved the ire of whites and policemen in downtown Jacksonville, and we all basked in that little light.

In fact, that new rep contributed to New Stanton’s sudden national infamy in March of 1964. As described in The New York Times March 14^th edition, with racial friction already roiling the city during that time, an incident started when a white milkman bringing supplies to the school cafeteria was razed by a group of students. The incident climaxed with a major clash between students, teachers, police, firemen, and journalists at the school. A journalist’s car had been overturned and torched, and the police and firemen were pelted with bricks and bottles, forcing them to withdraw before they started beating and shooting the students. Eventually, teachers regained control of the situation and dismissed the riled-up students for the day. I watched most of the action from a big picture window in a school hallway as several students we called “hoodlums” on most days surrounded two white reporters and pummeled them as the burning car seemed on the brink of explosion. I gathered my girlfriend and everybody sensible quickly left the school for home, or headed to someone’s house for a party.

That night in the neighborhood surrounding the school and in every other Black neighborhood nearby, we waited in the shadows for the usual autos full of young whites coming to punish us and remind us of our place in society. That night we were ready to turn the tables. Some young toughs had already stopped the city buses from driving through the neighborhoods bringing our parents’ home. All the white drivers were chased off their routes and out of their vehicles. Confused or not, we all sought solace and satisfaction in “protecting” our own neighborhoods that one night. A change was in the wind.

Time to Choose: The Parting of the Waves

At the beginning of April, I was already late in applying for college entrance for September. We were to have over 300 graduates that year, and most of them would be going off to some college or university. That was New Stanton.

The vast majority were headed for Florida A&M, Bethune-Cookman, Florida Memorial, or the local Edward Waters College. I was not attracted to any of them because I knew that being close to too many high school friends meant too much partying and not enough real schoolwork. I opted for a scary try at the University of Florida, which only recently had been forced to integrate.

As a member of a “sophisticated gents” type of on-campus club called the Ambassadors, I had a lot of comradeship company once my choice was made public. Four other members of the Ambassadors applied to UF too, and all five of us were admitted. We became known as the New Stanton Five, and we carried the hopes and pride of a lot of people on our shoulders. We had to succeed.

School counselors set up a summer preparatory course just for us, our favorite math/science/English teachers kept patting us on our backs, our church pastors/deacons had several serious talks with us about how to conduct ourselves like we had had some decent home training, and the NAACP Youth Council kept trying to encourage us not to be intimidated.

So, in September, off we went.

Toes in the Water: UF

All our parents, some relatives, and a few well-wishers drove us to UF campus on the Saturday and Sunday before classes started. They were as antsy as we were to see the campus and feel the atmosphere. This was like a space adventure.

The freshmen dormitories were all in a block of congested buildings, and the Stanton Five were scattered in different directions. The dormitory assigner-in-chief apparently had social engineering on his or her mind, because we were all matched up with white roommates. My social experiment lasted all of five minutes. The student assigned to my room merely looked at me come in with my luggage and books, watched me dump everything on the lone empty bed in the room, and—without saying a word or offering a greeting—simply got up and walked out.

About a half-hour later someone else came into the room, gathered up all my would-be roommate’s belongings, and left. I never saw the first roommate again, or if I did, I could not recognize him. On Sunday of that weekend, another young man came to the room, knocked, saw me, and walked away, dragging his belongings with him. Just before our first class started on Monday morning, Michael Sherfield, one of my New Stanton classmates, moved into the room. Apparently, the polka-dot part of the social engineering experiment was over. As I found out later, all the rest of the Stanton Five also got Black roommates, except Bernard Mackey, who gladly accepted his new white roommate and was accepted by him. Being very “high yella” (fair-skin), Bernard had already told us he intended to join a white fraternity on campus, maybe even get into the Blue Key Society, or whatever. He was open to change.

After Freshmen Orientation and getting our class assignments given to us (at this stage, choosing our own classes was not an option), we meandered around trying to get a feel for UF. I went to a presentation about future engineers and there found out that the average score on the Florida State Exam for students who entered the engineering program at UF was a good 80 points above my score. I was crushed. I had wanted to be a civil engineer since I was in junior high school and had done very well on the exam within the Black community, but was not even a blip on radar in the program being described. My first dream died the first day of orientation. Later, I found out that expertise in using slide rules was a standard qualification too, but though I had excelled in high school chemistry and physics, I had never been taught how to use a slide rule. And New Stanton, I always thought, was a modern, well-equipped school.

My roommate met and was befriended by a white student (I think Michael called him “Sarge”) who had been a military brat, and thus had a broader travel and personnel experience than most of the rest of our freshmen class. Sarge sought Michael out to introduce himself and start a conversation. He seemed to be a good dude and later proved himself to be just that.

After the orientation, four of the Stanton Five got back together to explore the campus and the surrounding neighborhood. The dormitory complex was pretty boring, so—after finding out where the dining hall was—we went exploring off-campus.

Allies in the Gainesville Black Neighborhood

We accidently stumbled onto 5^th Avenue and Mom’s Kitchen. The regular denizens on the block teased us about being uppity Negroes and they knew we wouldn’t be coming back down their way too often. Little did they (or we) know that this neighborhood would become our refuge and safety zone, even though it was pretty raunchy itself. I can safely say that the 5^th Avenue neighborhood is what helped us keep our sanity at UF. And the down-home fried chicken, hamburgers-n-fries, and other soul food saved our palates.

That first evening on 5^th Avenue, Michael also wandered off by himself, looking for the liquor store he knew had to be nearby. He introduced himself to the local winos and took a pint back to our room on campus, making me livid.

The First Classes

The protocol then was that most entering freshmen, unless they were in some special major or program, did not choose their class schedule for the first semester. My schedule, as I remember it, included Freshman English and Lab, Physical Sciences, Humanities, and Freshman Math (College Algebra). The classes that stood out were English, Physical Sciences, and Humanities.

For English, I had an excellent instructor (whose name I cannot recall) who actually treated me as if he fully expected me to perform well in his class and was not looking for me to flail or fail. He was a serious editor and whipped my writing into college-level phraseology. He even read my early attempts at writing short stories. In that class, I got a chance to feel as if I belonged.

As for the Physical Sciences class, the instructor approached where I sat during his opening address to the auditorium of students, and, looking directly in my face, announced that he fully expected over half of the class to flunk his course. Then, lowering his voice, he asked me why I was in his class. Though frightened at first, I got angry and decided I was not going to flunk this instructor’s class. That chip on my shoulder got me through the class, too. I remember making a C for the semester, not a D or an F.

The Humanities class I remember was fun, with all kinds of films on Greek and Roman statuary, old buildings, English history, etc.—all European stuff. This was heady propaganda without a hint of modesty. The world was what Europeans had made it—other peoples and cultures did not count. But I was not intimidated.

By the Christmas Party at the end of the semester back in Jacksonville, when we all compared our progress, we had all gotten through that first semester above water. I had all C’s, including one C+, Michael Sherfield had all B’s, Walter had one B and the rest C’s, Larry had all C’s, and Bernard just said he passed everything. All our high school pals patted us on the back and shook our hands. So far, so good. We had at least shown we were capable and could do the work. I just breathed deeply, thankful that I had survived that first gauntlet. The Stanton Five had not embarrassed themselves, their high school, or their race.

The Social Milieu

We met two other new Black students also assigned to the freshmen dorms. One was from Lawtey, Florida, and he had decided to drive in on the days he had classes, but otherwise not stay on campus much. We called him “Big O” (I think his name was Arthur), not because of any resemblance to basketball legend Oscar Robertson, but because he asked us to do so. The other brother we called “Sig” because of his penchant for offering psychological comments on everything (I really do not remember Sig’s given name). Every afternoon that it wasn’t raining, we would play football catch in the field formed between the dorms. A week or two later, some of the white students joined us. After watching us from the dorm windows for a while, apparently they determined we were not a threat. We ended up playing flag football regularly in the afternoons and learned to ignore the occasional verbiage that slipped out (several whites scratching like monkeys when we made a good catch or trying to mouth off comments they half-remembered from Amos ‘n’ Andy).

There was an upper-division Black student who did not live in the dorms, but who regularly came to visit us. (Again, I do not remember his name.) He had a white girlfriend and one day decided to bring the young lady into the freshman dining hall for dinner. After we’d played football and were back in our dorm rooms that night, Michael’s friend Sarge came banging on our door. He said there was a serious situation going on downstairs and we better get ready for trouble. A Black student had brought a white girl into the dining hall and a gang of rednecks were now searching for them to chastise her and punish him. There was a large crowd of white male students collected in one of the dorm rooms pumping themselves up to go after any Black male students they could find. Sarge asked whether there was any place we could go off campus until tempers had calmed. There wasn’t. We then decided to go to the mob room and confront the students, with Sarge leading the way. The crowd was a lot larger than any of us expected, and we were soon sucked into it with no visible way of exiting. I thought of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, No Exit. Sarge went to find the ringleader to try and reason with him. Left floating in the middle of the gathering sea storm, we stood back-to-back, but nobody said anything to us, although several beer-drinkers in the crowd kept looking menacingly at Michael and me. I surveyed the dorm room windows for escape routes. After what seemed like a very long time, Sarge came back and told us it was time to go, and he literally pushed us outside the packed room. Away from the crowd, he said he’d yelled the ringleader into some common sense, threatening to have him expelled from school, and that we should be okay now. There’d be no lynching this night.

Towards the second half of the first semester, Michael had gone on a drinking binge. By this time, he was well known among the winos on the 5^th Avenue block. Since he would often buy a round of drinks for most of them, he was now a “regular home boy.” And when he had no money, they’d spot him some drinks. He would sometimes be gone for days somewhere drinking (God knows where he’d be sleeping), and I’d have to go find him. So, the winos pretty much recognized me too. One particular Friday evening, he’d disappeared again, and I got a call in the dormitory that he’d been rushed to the hospital. It seems he was walking groggily down 5^th Avenue and got into a little yelling conversation with another denizen of the streets. The fellow broke an empty wine bottle on the sidewalk, grabbed a sharp piece of the glass, and cut Michael’s forearm down to the base of his hand, barely missing the main artery. Michael was too drunk, apparently, to notice or care that he was bleeding profusely and started walking on his way again. Then he collapsed. Phileron Wright, a college student at FAMU home for the weekend and one of the allies we’d made in the neighborhood, just happened to be driving down 5^th Avenue and saw Michael in grave trouble. He jumped out of his Volkswagen Bug, piled Michael into it and headed for the hospital, about 20 minutes away. When I got the phone call in the dorm, the staff was pumping Michael’s stomach and trying to keep him from leaving the hospital. He was out of commission for two weeks, got himself back together, and passed all his class quizzes and exams; he ended up doing quite well academically.

Got to Get Out of This Dormitory

By the beginning of the second semester, psychologically, I was having real difficulty. Walking onto campus going to classes, I would have this tremendous urge to physically attack the first white male I saw along the path—the bigger, the better. That went on for several weeks. Then I called together a meeting of the Stanton Five minus Bernard Mackey and told them it was time to move out of the dorms. I was going to go shopping for an off-campus apartment or house and wanted to know who was with me. I was going regardless.

I found a house large enough for all of us close to campus, used all my monthly allowance to secure it, and simply moved out of the dorm. Gradually, they all moved too, though Walter—as we found out later—was already planning on transferring to Tennessee State University to be with his girlfriend.

Another Black student (I think his name was Ronnie) with a large pet Afghan hound, moved in with us to handle Walter’s portion of the rent. He was a bit of a bohemian and attracted a lot of white friends of his to the house. He liked throwing parties. I remember staying permanently irked at him because of that dog, which he liked to keep in the house, and his habit of inviting white students who liked to “go ghetto” at our house. They would get sauced on beer, then go up on the roof and pee down into the yard. Several of them considered themselves Civil Rights radicals and tried to chastise us for being at UF and instead of in Mississippi, where the real action was taking place. One of those conversations ended the frequent parties, as I yelled at one very boozy radical that he didn’t have the credentials to criticize us for not being Black enough to go join the Freedom Riders and bridge marchers. We had valid reasons for staying the course we had chosen. If any of them felt that strongly about the Civil Rights struggle, then they should be in an auto caravan going farther South instead of at a party guzzling beer. Speaking for all the Black folk in the room, I strongly invited any of them who were willing to go in our stead to get going. “Go and stand for the cause or shut the hell up!” Feeling insulted, they thankfully stopped coming over.

Landlord: Can’t Have Negroes on His Property

By the end of that second semester, the property owner came by one afternoon inebriated and told us we all had to vacate his place—that he couldn’t have Negroes on his property. That was when we moved farther into the East Side, in the 600 block of 7^th Avenue, Mrs. Stafford’s. There, some of us hit our stride. But Larry Mathews suffered a bad motorcycle accident and eventually had to drop out of school, while Michael Sherfield dropped “out of phase” by scratching one semester, thereby getting behind his entering class. Uncle Sam came looking for him. He fought it off for as long as he could, then capitulated and made a deal to accept induction if he were allowed to graduate college and enter officer candidate’s school.

Formation of the Afro American Students Association and BSU

During the first semester of my junior year (1966), we formed the first Afro American Students Association and registered as a campus organization. We had about 10 members, including Ms. Thomasina Harris. Within the first month, we changed the name to the Black Student Union (Figure 2.1) in league with what other students were doing on other campuses across the country. I was elected the Minister of Information in charge of news and correspondence, a position I kept for over five years. Larry Jordan was also a founding member, but except for me, none of the Stanton Five joined. Kitty Oliver and Emerson Thompson, both from Jacksonville, also joined later.

The Basic Agenda of the BSU at UF (accessed from notes)

• Establish and maintain informational relationships with Black student groups in other cities and states.
• Invite quality Black speakers to the UF campus.
• Advocate for the hiring of Black faculty at UF.
• Advocate and petition for a Black Cultural Center on campus.
• Advocate for more inclusion of Black students in campus life.

Note: The BSU at UF was not, nor was it ever intended to be, a mass-population group. It was intended from the outset—and always remained—an organizing entity. We decided on projects and things to accomplish, identified what had to be done to accomplish those goals, then identified who and what we needed to accomplish the task at hand, and assigned roles to everybody. The 1971 student sit-in in (UF President) O’Connell’s office is a case in point. (Kip Smith was president of the BSU then.) Some students were to rally outside and others were to pressure O’Connell in his office. If the police showed up, BSU members and affiliates were supposed to leave O’Connell’s office immediately. However, the police or someone locked the office doors in order for the arrests to be made. Similarly, if trouble started outside, we were to disband and not get suckered into someone else’s fight. So, when someone unknown to us threw a brick at one of the Tigert Hall office windows, those of us outside disbanded and left the plaza. I was arrested the next day after giving a speech on the Tigert Hall steps as part of the continuing student demonstrations, not as part of the O’Connell office sit-in.

Graduate School, Teaching at Santa Fe College

By my senior year I had married my Jacksonville sweetheart, and we moved into what used to be called the Flavet Village on the outskirts of the campus near the track and field facilities.

I graduated in 1968 with a major in psychology and attended the Black Power Conference in Gary, Indiana before entering graduate school in the new African Studies Center at UF the following fall.

By 1969, I was teaching two courses in African American History at Santa Fe Community College—then located not far from UF—and still working early mornings and late afternoons at the College Inn, right across the street from the main campus.

After several letters to the Dean’s Office and to the President requesting the hiring of Black faculty and the recruitment of more Black students as part of Florida’s obligation to its citizens, the BSU had a series of meetings with officials from the Dean’s Office. (The chair of the Social Sciences Division then was Dr. Manning Dauer, who seemed quite interested in our pursuits.) Eventually, a serious effort was undertaken to hire Black faculty and a public lecture, as part of such a process, was scheduled for Dr. Ronald Foreman. He was excellent, and the BSU sent its recommendation in to hire him before another institution did. Around 1969-1970, there was also a huge public protest against the College Inn on University Avenue for not serving Black students. Everything had to be take-out. They couldn’t sit in the eatery. All the kitchen help (including me) were Black. The main cook, James, said he would not get involved in all that and urged me to keep doing my work and stay out of it if I could. I needed the job, so I complied. Plus, James and his wife, Novella, were really nice people and had been at the Inn for a long time. By 1971, I was still slowly taking graduate courses and teaching at Santa Fe along with Gainesville natives Charles Gorton, Otis Stover, Joyce Kirkland, Sandra Hall Williams, and others; we formed a community-based Black organization called the Leagues of Blackness (LOB). We did guerilla theater pieces in community venues, started a free breakfast program on the Eastside, opened an office on 5^th Avenue, and tried to help the winos get some decent facilities at the ABC Lounge. That latter was very interesting. Our clients—the regular winos—did not want our help and told us to take our goody two-shoes ideas back to one of the campuses. They just wanted to drink in peace, not to have protest marches for new seating facilities in the Lounge. Trying to mimic the Black Panther Party, we also started having political education classes for Eastside youth from the neighborhood.

Arrested: A Career in Law? Not!

When I got arrested in 1971, there were large, loud protest demonstrations at Santa Fe College, at UF, and in the Eastside community. The UF students in particular, as seen in Figure 2.2 below, were incensed, believing this was just a continuation of the week’s attempt to muzzle student political activism. During the five days they had me in jail, members of the public—a sympathetic guard told me—overwhelmed the police switchboard with crank calls that blocked regular calls from coming through.

After the court dismissed the charges, I decided I’d be more effective in the community as an activist attorney, so I applied to law school at the University of Miami and, luckily, got accepted through the CLEO Program. I moved to Dade County and completed my first year, teaching at Miami-Dade College to finance myself. After successfully completing that first year, I did an internship with a Gainesville law firm. We had a case in the Ocala Public Schools that changed my life. The Ocala Superintendent summarily expelled virtually all Black student seniors in 1972 to punish them for a “racial riot” at Ocala High. None of the white student participants were punished at all. Black students, some of whom had not even been on campus that day, were arrested, charged with criminal trespassing, and all of them lost any scholarships—athletic or academic—they had earned; they were even barred from attending graduation. The superintendent said that all the Black students had to publicly apologize to the citizens of Ocala, promise not to be violent anymore, and attend night school to finish their graduation requirements. The situation was so ridiculous that I lost my temper and almost blew my internship. I decided after I calmed down that being an attorney may not be my best option after all. I changed course one last time. I came back to UF and finished my master’s thesis, applied to Boston University and UCLA, got accepted to both, and decided on the warm weather and larger graduate fellowship offer at UCLA. I left Florida and began matriculating at UCLA in the fall of 1973, and by 1984 had completed my dissertation and doctorate degree.