Twelve years after Brown v. Board of Education, Okaloosa County Schools passed a vote to integrate the school system – though not without kicking and screaming, on July 13, 1966.
In 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that segregation was illegal and that schools needed to integrate to provide all children equal access to education under the law. But the ruling didn’t mean the schools would integrate the next day – in fact, most school districts in Florida would wait more than a decade to integrate.
Though the rest saw Florida of the country as a ‘moderate’ state on segregation, it raised a chorus of protest against the Brown decision and made no move to integrate the schools after the Supreme Court’s ruling. Professor Lewis Killian of Florida State University surveyed the Florida public in 1954 during the Brown ruling’s aftermath and found that a majority of whites in the state wanted their government to preserve segregation by any means possible. Local newspapers across the state published opinions from individuals or their editorial boards that took a resigned stance on integration and urged local and state politicians to ‘get on with it’ rather than opposing the might of the Federal Government.
Although the Emerald Coast’s Congressman and Crestview’s own Bob Sikes told the local media that integration would inhibit the “orderly progress of southern education” and set back race relations “a generation,” small changes did go forward. Okaloosa County would have the first integrated school in Florida when Cherokee Elementary School admitted black and white children. The Federal Government, which hosted the school on Eglin Air Force Base, insisted on the school’s integration and got it in 1954 – to the chagrin of the school board.
By 1957, the Pork Chop Gang – the colloquialism for rural north Florida politicians in the state legislature – filed legislation to close all public schools rather than integrate. They’d passed 21 bills between 1954 and 1959 aimed at maintaining segregation in schools. In one instance, they planned to create a voucher program to subsidize private schools, which were still allowed to discriminate. Though the measure did not become law, it highlighted the sentiment of the political powers that be in the state. As the end of the decade neared the opposition to integration would soften, especially in the lager cities in the Sunshine State – as residents and politicians alike watched the economies of the segregationist-led states of Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Georgia collapse – as many of the businesses that could leave the state did to evade the harm to their reputation and bottom lines that came with being associated with segregation in the rest of the country and internationally.
Segregation wouldn’t go quietly in the Okaloosa County School System. The district would ultimately have to choose between continuing segregation and receiving federal funding – as the Federal Governemnt would give the Okaloosa School Board 15 days to implement integration of the schools – or lose the mountains of cash given to the district by the feds to educate Board Member Joe Etheridge would have to make four motions before M.A. Fortune seconded him on the condition the integration would only happen for a single year. The board passed the measure on July 13, 1966, 51 years after the School District’s creation.
