FAMU: Built on a Former Plantation, Built for a Future
Near Tallahassee, Florida
Content note: this track discusses the legacy of plantation slavery in direct terms.
The campus of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University occupies land that carries a particular historical weight. The campus on which it sits was once the site of a plantation belonging to William Pope Duval, Florida's first territorial governor. The man who appointed the commissioners to find a capital city was himself an enslaver. The land he once worked with forced labor is now home to one of the largest historically Black universities in the United States.
The school was established by the Florida Legislature in eighteen eighty-seven, not from generosity but from political pressure. Black citizens and their allies in the legislature, led in part by the work of Jonathan Gibbs, pushed for an institution that would educate Black Floridians who were legally barred from the state's white universities. On October third, eighteen eighty-seven, the State Normal College for Colored Students opened with fifteen students and two instructors.
It grew steadily through the Jim Crow era, educating teachers, doctors, lawyers, and civic leaders for a community that was systematically denied access to power and professional life. The university was renamed Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College in nineteen oh nine and became a university in nineteen fifty-three. Its students and alumni provided the intellectual and organizational backbone of Florida's civil rights movement. The women who sparked the bus boycott in nineteen fifty-six, the students who sat in at Woolworth's in nineteen sixty, the attorneys who challenged segregation in court. A disproportionate number were FAMU students, graduates, or faculty.
When Florida established the University of Florida and Florida State University in nineteen oh five, both schools explicitly excluded Black students. That exclusion lasted until the nineteen sixties. During those decades, FAMU was not a fallback institution. It was the institution, the one place in Florida where a Black student could get a college education without leaving the state.
The university today enrolls over nine thousand students and maintains its land-grant research mission. Every time you drive past this hilltop campus, you are looking at an act of persistence that lasted a century against extraordinary pressure.
