Washington Park High and the Education They Built Themselves
Near Lakeland, Florida
In nineteen twenty-eight, Washington Park High School opened as the sixth Black high school in the state of Florida. That ranking tells you something about how slowly the state built educational infrastructure for its African American citizens, and about what it meant when a community finally got it.
The school served Lakeland's Black students through the era of legal segregation, which in Polk County carried particular burdens. In the early twentieth century, Black students attended school for only four months out of the year, compared to the ten-month calendar their white counterparts had. Schooling was not free. And there was no high school at all for Black students until the building on North Dakota Avenue opened in nineteen twenty-six as a two-story brick structure, with Washington Park High School formally following in nineteen twenty-eight.
The school's first principal was William A. Rochelle, who led the institution for twenty-two years and became one of the most important figures in the desegregation movement in Polk County. He was so central to the school's identity that in nineteen forty-nine the institution was renamed Rochelle High School in his honor. On June eighth, nineteen thirty, ten students received the first high school diplomas awarded to Black graduates in Lakeland. Their names are documented: Elnora Bryant, Velma Dickerson, Peaches Felder, Celeste Green, Inez Harris, Lucy Lloyd, Maxwell Saxon, Inez Shipp, Vera Lucas, and Maggie Jordan. Those names survived.
The building operated until Polk County schools desegregated in nineteen sixty-nine, and it was demolished in nineteen seventy. The institution it represented produced generations of Black professionals, educators, and civic leaders who went on to reshape Lakeland long after the segregated school system that had tried to limit them was gone.
