Why?
Retaliation for African-American FMC students' highly successful Civil Rights demonstrations, 1963-1964, which helped LBJ end a Senate filibuster and enact 1964 Civil Rights Act.
An Establishment house organ, The St. Augustine Record prints any putrid propaganda emitted by Flagler College, developers and local governments. Pitiful.
President Harry S Truman said, "The only thing new under the sun is the history you don't know.:"
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called St. Augustine "the most lawless city in America."
St. Augustine was a "college town," 1918-1968. Florida Memorial College was home to African-American college students, who studied, learned and shopped here. Then came the 1963-64 Civil Rights demonstrations, which helped bring about the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Reactionary, barbative, reptilian, redneck retromingent racists ran off FMC, which moved in the middle of the night to Miami Lakes. (See excerpts and full text of Florida Memorial University history, down below).
The Publisher of the St. Augustine Record during this time was A.H. "Hoppy" Tebeault, a racist and supporter of racist terrorist segregationists, who published in his newspaper:
- advance stories listing KKK rally locations,
- the names and addresses of students desegregating local elementary schools, Result: arsons, car bombings, firings and evictions of their parents and families,
- a front-page fatwa by Mayor Shelley threatening African-American students with arrest and lifetime blacklisting from employment if they demonstrated
Tebeault sold the Record.
Then Tebeault was hired as Vice President of Flagler College, where he presided as Republican Lord of All He Surveys, as liaison to local racist businessmen, while censoring the student newspaper, The Gargoyle, as documented by the Record's current Opinion Editor, Jim Sutton.
Odd that the Record would entirely eliminate this story from its May 5, 2019 article (below):
The Record at 125: With Flagler’s founding, St. Augustine becomes a ‘college town ’
By Sheldon Gardner
Posted May 4, 2019 at 4:56 PM
Updated May 5, 2019 at 9:48 AM
St. Augustine Record
It was an event that had St. Johns County abuzz “with an air of excitement and anticipation” in 1968.
An editorial on the front page of The St. Augustine Record about Flagler College’s opening weekend that year said the institution would bring renewal for “an entire block” of St. Augustine’s core.
Since its first days as a women’s college, the now co-ed institution has expanded both its footprint and enrollment. Along with its growth has come criticism and praise from people in the community.
The development of Flagler College is one of the major events in St. Johns County that The St. Augustine Record has covered since the paper got its start as the The Daily Herald on Oct. 21, 1894.
“I think the impact has been tremendous,” former college president Bill Abare said. “To be known as a college town, I think, is a great thing.”
The college’s campus includes the former Ponce de Leon Hotel, one of St. Augustine’s most prominent buildings.
Henry Flagler opened the hotel in the late 1800s, and it was a spot for wealthy winter visitors. Except during World War II, when the Coast Guard used the building, it was open to the public through the late 1960s.
LOOKING BACK ON 125 YEARS
Oct. 21 marks the 125th anniversary of the beginning of the paper that would become The St. Augustine Record.
The paper began as The Daily Herald and became The St. Augustine Record in 1936, and it has changed ownership several times in its history — including ownership by the Flagler System.
The paper has covered major events in its history, and we’ll look at some of those events and how the paper covered them over the next several weeks.
What events in St. Johns County do you think have been the most significant in the past 125 years? Send your thoughts to news@staugustine.com.
The Record described the Ponce as the city’s “undisputed center of cultural and social activity” that was used for dinners, conventions and special events.
F. Roy Carlson, at the time the president of Mount Ida Junior College in Massachusetts, gave a speech from the Ponce in the ’60s outlining his plans for Flagler College.
Carlson, who would lead the college initially, said he and his family had been interested in starting a school in Florida and began looking at options.
Conversation began about turning Flagler’s Whitehall in Palm Beach into a college, he said.
While that didn’t pan out, the conversation eventually led to negotiations between the Carlsons and the Flagler System that sparked the establishment of Flagler College.
Carlson also described his vision for the college in the speech, which The Record covered.
“I personally am a firm believer in the advantages of a small college, especially for women,” he said. “I do not foresee the college expanding very far beyond the confines of the present hotel for some years to come.”
Eventually, though, expansion became one of the main sources of tension between the college and the community. The college campus has expanded to around 30 properties downtown, including a complex with a parking garage and student housing on Malaga Street.
“I think that was the main thing people got upset about was them taking up more and more land space, taking more and more things off the tax rolls,” said Ramelle Petroglou, a St. Augustine resident and former mayor.
Former college president Bill Proctor said while there’s been some pushback, it’s not uncommon for colleges.
“It was kind of a mixed bag,” he said. “I think that’s true in any college town, doesn’t matter who you are and how good you are and what you do,” he said.
The expansion has largely been for necessities such as dorms, Abare said. The college’s facilities have also benefited the community, such as lectures and other events at Lewis Auditorium.
The college has also put money into preservation.
The college owns 15 historic properties and has spent more than $61.5 million on “restoration, rehabilitation and renovation projects” since 2001, according to Tonya Creamer, the college’s assistant director of news and information.
Aside from expansion, the college has encountered other controversy along the way.
In 2014, the college’s vice president for enrollment management resigned after an investigation found he exaggerated test scores, GPAs and class rankings of incoming freshmen for some years. The college launched an independent investigation and changed its protocols.
While the college has grown a lot since the beginning, survival was the focus in the early years, Abare said.
Abare came to the college in 1971 as admissions director and had to try to convince students to come to a college with a couple of buildings and many key facilities missing.
“I wasn’t smart enough to understand what the challenges were going to be and how difficult it was going to be to recruit students to come to Flagler College,” Abare said.
He arrived when 223 students were at the college. Undergraduate enrollment is now about 2,500, according to Creamer.
Petroglou said the college’s impacts have been more positive than negative — including the students who have stayed in St. Augustine after graduation.
More than 18,000 people have graduated from Flagler College, not including Saturday’s graduating class, according to Director of Alumni Relations Margo Thomas. About 3,100 graduates live in St. Johns County, and some run local businesses.
“I think (the college is) the best thing that happened to St. Augustine, really,” Petroglou said.
Edward Adelbert SlavinErroneous premise and headline. St. Augustine was already a "college town," 1918-1968, with Florida Memorial College located here. Racists ran FMC out of town in retaliation for civil rights activism that helped lead to adoption of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As Florida Memorial University's history states in pertinent part: "The advent of civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s brought about a whirlwind of challenges and change to St. Augustine. When local African Americans decided to protest and resist segregation in the city, students from Florida Memorial joined the effort, participating in sit-ins, wade-ins, and swim-ins, orchestrated by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The events in St. Augustine significantly influenced federal legislation resulting in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson." "Activism by FMC students, however, 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. Given this vulnerable financial and social situation, Dr. Royal W. Puryear oversaw the relocation of the school when, in 1965, the trustees purchased a 48-acre former air strip near Opa-locka in Dade County."
"On November 11, 1968, the new campus opened as Florida Memorial College. In December 2004, the institution’s charter was amended, and the name Florida Memorial University was adopted." https://www.fmuniv.edu/about/our-history/ «
"On November 11, 1968, the new campus opened as Florida Memorial College. In December 2004, the institution’s charter was amended, and the name Florida Memorial University was adopted." https://www.fmuniv.edu/about/our-history/ «
From Florida Memorial University's history:
Our History
Florida Memorial University is a private, coeducational, and Baptist-affiliated institution that has the distinction of being one of the oldest academic centers in the state, and the only Historically Black University in South Florida.
In 1879, members of the Bethlehem Baptist Association founded the school, then called Florida Baptist Institute, in Live Oak to create “a College of instruction for our ministers and children.” The Reverend J. L. A. Fish was its first president. Despite a promising start, racial tensions soon cast a shadow over the Institute. In April 1892, after unknown persons fired shots into one of the school’s buildings, then-President Rev. Matthew Gilbert and other staff members fled Live Oak for Jacksonville, where he founded the Florida Baptist Academy in the basement of Bethel Baptist Church. They began holding classes in May 1892, with Sarah Ann Blocker as the main instructor. The school in Live Oak, however, continued to operate even after this splintering.
In 1896, Nathan White Collier was appointed president of the Academy, a post he held for 45 years. President Collier recruited renowned composer and Jacksonville native, J. Rosamond Johnson, to teach music at the school. While in the employ of the Florida Baptist Academy, Rosamond composed music for “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” a poem written by his brother, James Weldon Johnson, creating the song that has since been enshrined as the “Negro National Anthem.” It was first performed by a choir that included students from Florida Baptist Academy at a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday in 1900.
The institution numerous graduates who would go on to acclaim within the state and nation, such as Earth M. M. White, the legendary business woman and community servant in Jacksonville; the Rev. Howard Thurman, a renowned figure in American theology, who was recognized in 1952 by Life Magazine as one of the twelve most influential religious leaders in the country; and Harry T. Moore, civil rights advocate and head of the Florida conference of the NAACP.
Because of the dual pressures of a growing student body and not enough space to expand, the Academy took advantage of an offer from the City of St. Augustine to relocate the institution to the 400-acre “Old Hansen Plantation.” The school began its third incarnation at its new home in St. Augustine on September 24, 1918, as the Florida Normal and Industrial Institute. Influenced by the educational model popularized by Booker T. Washington at his Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, students were encouraged to be industrious and self-sufficient, constructing many of the campus buildings themselves, as well as growing and preparing their own food. The students received hands-on training in the practical fields which would allow them to support themselves and their families.
In 1942, the Baptist General State Convention voted to merge its two schools, closing down the Florida Institute at Live Oak and combining it with what would become Florida Normal Industrial and Memorial College in St. Augustine. Florida native and writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston, served as an instructor for the school during this time.
The advent of civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s brought about a whirlwind of challenges and change to St. Augustine. When local African Americans decided to protest and resist segregation in the city, students from Florida Memorial joined the effort, participating in sit-ins, wade-ins, and swim-ins, orchestrated by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The events in St. Augustine significantly influenced federal legislation resulting in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson.
Activism by FMC students, however, 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. Given this vulnerable financial and social situation, Dr. Royal W. Puryear oversaw the relocation of the school when, in 1965, the trustees purchased a 48-acre former air strip near Opa-locka in Dade County.
On November 11, 1968, the new campus opened as Florida Memorial College. In December 2004, the institution’s charter was amended, and the name Florida Memorial University was adopted.
The FMU legacy is firmly rooted in steadfast dedication and commitment to pursue its mission “to instill in our students the values of leadership, character, and service to enhance their lives and the lives of others.”
Prepared by Dr. Tameka Bradley Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History and University Historian.
https://www.fmuniv.edu/about/our-history/
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