FAMU: The Black University That Outlasted Legislative Contempt

Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University was founded in eighteen eighty-seven as the State Normal College for Colored Students. The Florida legislature had established what would become Florida State University for white students some years earlier; the institution for Black students came later, received less funding, and was expected to train teachers and domestic workers rather than doctors and lawyers.

That is not what it became.

Over the following century, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University produced the physicians, lawyers, educators, and activists who drove Florida's civil rights movement. Its graduates were in the courtrooms arguing desegregation cases, in the streets leading marches, and in the state legislature eventually writing the laws that replaced the ones the legislature had written to exclude them.

The university's funding was deliberately suppressed by the Florida legislature for decades while Florida State University and the University of Florida received preferential budget allocations. The law school that Florida Agricultural and Mechanical opened in nineteen forty-nine was closed under pressure during the desegregation battles; the argument at the time was that if Black students could attend white law schools, there was no need for a Black one. Florida Agricultural and Mechanical reopened its law school in two thousand two.

The university's marching band, the Marching One Hundred, is considered by many musicians and educators the finest historically Black college and university band in the country. It was not founded to be a symbol. It was founded because these students were as serious about music as they were about everything else the institution gave them permission to be serious about.

The university is still in Tallahassee. It is still fully operational. It outlasted every legislative attempt to diminish it.