Howard Academy: Education Under Jim Crow

In eighteen sixty-six, in the months after the Civil War ended, a Freedmen's Bureau agent opened a school for Black children in Ocala. It was called Howard Academy, named for the bureau's commissioner, General Oliver Otis Howard. Before its doors opened, there had been almost no legal education available to African Americans in Florida. Teaching enslaved people to read had been a crime.

James Howard, a white former slave owner, donated land for the school. Teachers came down from the North. Within a generation, the school was run entirely by African American educators, and Howard Academy had become one of the outstanding Black schools in Florida.

Then in eighteen eighty-seven, the school building burned. The community rebuilt it. By nineteen twenty-seven, Howard had become one of only two schools in all of Florida that awarded high school diplomas to African Americans. The other was Lincoln High School in Tallahassee. Think about what that means for the geography of opportunity in this state.

The records here go quiet about what daily life looked like for students navigating Jim Crow Marion County to reach that diploma. The documented history gives us institutions; the texture of daily resistance mostly lives in family memory.

What is documented: Howard Academy produced Effie Carrie Mitchell, the first African American woman to practice medicine in Florida. The school helped anchor a West Ocala community that would build its own bank, its own hospital, and its own newspaper in the early twentieth century. In nineteen fourteen, the Metropolitan Savings Bank became the first African American bank incorporated in Florida, right here in Ocala.

Howard's buildings served students until nineteen fifty-five, still more than a decade before Marion County schools were formally integrated. The original school building at three oh six Northwest Seventh Avenue is now the Howard Academy Community Center and houses the Black History Museum of Marion County.