The last unlikely hero: Gerald Bard Tjoflat and the Jacksonville desegregation crisis - 35 years later.

• Author: Jung, William F.
• Position: Florida

Resistance to public school desegregation in this country was often contentious, and sometimes violent. Little is more precious to parents than the education of their children, and few things evoke more loyalty than the local school. Yet separate black/white school systems had existed in many parts of the country since the Civil War, and their necessary replacement invoked intense passion among many, and physical resistance among a few. This resistance was not limited to the South, as the violence and tumult in places like Boston (1) gave witness.

The 35th anniversary of the final injunctive order in the Jacksonville desegregation case, Mims v. Duval County School Board, 329 F. Supp. 123 (M.D. Fla. 1971), is a fitting time to review a positive page in this difficult chapter of our national history. The desegregation of the Jacksonville school system 35 years ago involved a 100-year-old segregated black/white school system in a city that was very much a part of the old South. It came at a time of intense crisis in our nation, both in terms of race relations and the general social upheaval now called "the 60s." The resolution of the Jacksonville school crisis was generally peaceful and successful. The credit for this success belongs to the good citizens of Jacksonville and to the federal district judge who led them, Gerald Bard Tjoflat.

Florida's Reaction to Brown v. Board of Education

In Florida, prior to 1954, it was illegal under both the Florida Constitution and under Florida statutes to educate children in an integrated classroom. This prohibition applied even to parochial schools. Florida statutes not only required that the children be kept separate by race, but even their books could not be stored together. (2) This system of educational apartheid was obliterated, in theory at least, in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (U.S. 1954).

The Supreme Court's holding in Brown, of course, was that "separate but equal" education of white and black children was neither equal nor constitutional. Florida school boards and state judges generally disagreed with this logic at the time, and some outright resisted it. Florida joined the rest of the South in collectively rejecting Brown.

Historically, the graduate schools integrated first. Virgil Hawkins sought admission as the first African American at the University of Florida School of Law in 1949. He required 10 years and 11 court decisions before breaking the color barrier, with the aid of the federal courts. (3) His success came four years after Brown.

Hawkins was three times denied relief by the Supreme Court of Florida. In one of Hawkins' failed appeals, one year after Brown, Justice Glenn Terrell of the Florida Supreme Court wrote in a concurrence:

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 te 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.... (4)

Justice Terrell's words, which seem such a relic now, were within mainstream Florida judicial thought at the time.

The response of Florida's...