Florida A&M University

Overview

Florida A&M University is a public historically Black land-grant university in Tallahassee, Florida, founded in 1887, the third-largest HBCU in the country by enrollment and the only public HBCU in Florida. Black abolitionist and state legislator Jonathan C. Gibbs first introduced legislation to create the State Normal College for Colored Students in 1885, the same year Florida’s new constitution barred racial integration in schools. The college was sited in Tallahassee, then the center of Florida’s historical slave trade, on the 375-acre former plantation of Florida governor William Pope Duval. Classes began on October 3, 1887; four years later the school received $7,500 under the Second Morrill Act and became a land-grant college, taking the name State Normal College.

The 1923 Student Strike

The college became an official institution of higher learning only with the 1905 Buckman Act, which transferred its control from the Department of Education to a Board of Control — the same act that created the University of Florida and Florida State University. In 1923, students went on strike and destroyed several campus buildings in protest after Governor Cary A. Hardee moved to eliminate the school’s liberal arts program and convert it to a purely vocational one, believing a more educated Black population would leave the state; the conflict forced the resignation of university president Nathan B. Young.