College Education
The School
For many, the final step in the emergence into adult life is college. In West Augustine, African American students had access to a local college by the name of Florida Normal and Industrial School (known now as Florida Memorial University and located in Miami Gardens). The school came to St. Augustine in 1918 and was modeled on Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. According to University historian Tameka Bradley, students at Florida Normal were "encouraged to be industrious and self-sufficient, constructing many of the campus buildings themselves, as well as growing and preparing their own food."
Faculty as well as students from the college were active in the Civil Rights Movement locally throughout the 1960s. While events in St. Augustine would help spur the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it also, as Bradley states, "threatened to upset the delicate relationship between the City of St. Augustine and Florida Memorial, as well as provoking the resentment and animosity of whites in the area." Due to growing white resentment, as well as financial difficulties, the college relocated in 1965 to its current home in Miami Gardens.
Student Experience
Many students from the West Augustine area went to school at Florida Normal. Gerald Eubanks, for instance, returned to St. Augustine to attend Florida Normal after spending some time at Morehouse College. Though she did not attend herself, Betty Stirrup noted that "a lot of residents...a lot of kids that grew up with" her went.
Civil Rights Activism
Central to the experience of the college student in West Augustine, as the Civil Rights Movement was underway, was increased opportunities to engage in activism across the city. Betty Stirrup recalled, as a child, "standin' out in my front yard, and I saw the whole college marchin' to town, and they were singin'." That is a highly powerful image, and Bernice Harper expands upon the significance of their involvement by stating that "they were the first to start. The students from Florida Memorial...the students are the ones that started marchin', protestin' along with [Reverend Wright], followin' him."
Many in the St. Augustine community were not happy with the engagement of Florida Normal's students in the Civil Rights demonstrations, and as a result drove the school out of the city in 1968. After their official exit, residents of West Augustine remembered the aftermath. Betty Stirrup said she "witnessed the burning. They burned the college down, some of the buildings over there. They just burned 'em down to the ground." Though no students were present or harmed, it was clearly still an event that permanently marked the memories of residents.
Legacy in West Augustine
Residents of West Augustine had mixed feelings about Florida Normal's role in West Augustine, as well as in the greater St. Augustine area as a whole. Irvine Morrison, for instance, was not a student there, but as a resident he recognized that the school "did a lot of good for a lot of people" because they taught them trades. He noted, too, that "there was some fairly nice, decent homes, and the thing about it - they weren't what we were used to, but they belonged to them. It was their own...That was their castle. That was the big thing about it. It gave 'em a little bit of pride there." Nevertheless, Morrison also did not seem to think that the school's departure in 1965 made much of an impact on the city.
Other members of the community, particularly those who attended the school, greatly lamented the loss of the school to the city. Louis Nestor, for instance, said "[a]bsolutely, St. Augustine felt it" when they left. Gerald Eubanks attended the school and considered it a "gem" in the city. When the school was burned, he lived across the street and "would wake up in the morning when they were torching it." Betty Stirrup, who grew up near the school and whose parents worked there, believed it "made a great impact, because it motivated people to want to go to college when they finished school." Bernice Harper noted that the college "generated a lot of business for the community," and that its loss was certainly an economic loss for the city - "that was like a downfall for the community."