Civil Rights Era in Florida

The civil rights era in Florida ran from voter registration drives in the 1940s through the Tallahassee and St. Augustine campaigns of 1956 to 1964, and the State Archives of Florida says school desegregation continued into the early 1970s (Florida Memory).

The State Archives describes how the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling declared school segregation unconstitutional, yet school desegregation in Florida continued into the early 1970s while protests slowly integrated buses, stores, theaters, beaches and other public places in Florida towns and cities (Florida Memory learning unit). Its photo exhibit states that the Brown decision, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 together ended the 89-year reign of Jim Crow (Florida Memory exhibit).

The timeline above lists the dated events this guide covers, each from the State Archives of Florida, the Library of Congress or the National Park Service. Digital Towns covers Tallahassee's 1956 bus boycott and Jacksonville's 1960 events in separate city guides; this statewide page connects them.

Harry Moore was a Brevard County teacher who led the NAACP's statewide branches in Florida and formed the Florida Progressive Voters League in 1945, which registered more than 100,000 Black voters (Library of Congress).

The Library of Congress says Moore began teaching in the Brevard County public schools, first in an elementary school and later as principal of Mims Elementary School. He and his wife, Harriette, who also taught, joined the NAACP in 1933, organized a local chapter in Brevard, and in 1937 filed a lawsuit over the unequal salaries of Black and white teachers, the first of its kind in the South (Library of Congress, Civil Rights Act exhibit).

Moore became president of the NAACP's statewide branches in 1941. When his organizing cost him his teaching job in 1946, the NAACP hired him as its Florida executive director (Library of Congress, NAACP exhibit). The Library of Congress calls him one of the earliest leaders to be assassinated during the modern phase of the movement (Library of Congress, Civil Rights Act exhibit); on Christmas night 1951 he and Harriette Moore were killed by a bomb placed under their house (Library of Congress, NAACP exhibit). The Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Cultural Center lent artifacts to the 2014 Civil Rights in the Sunshine State exhibit at the Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee (Florida Department of State).

Tallahassee residents boycotted the city buses for nearly seven months in 1956, and in 1960 FAMU students staged the capital's first lunch counter sit-ins (Florida Memory).

The Reverend C.K. Steele, pastor at Bethel Baptist Church, led the boycott, which began after police detained two Florida A&M University students for sitting beside a white woman on a city bus and ran mainly from May to December 1956. Riders organized a car pool, and 21 members of the Inter-Civic Council were convicted of operating an illegal transportation system because the car pool had no franchise (Florida Memory). On December 24, 1956, Steele, the Reverend Dan Speed and the Reverend A.C. Redd sat in the middle of a Tallahassee city bus instead of the back, an action the State Archives says ended the boycott (Florida Memory exhibit). As a result of activists' demands during the 1956 to 1957 boycott, Seth Gaines, an independent taxi driver, became the first African American to drive buses on a regular Tallahassee route (Florida Memory).

Using tactics learned at a Congress of Racial Equality workshop in Miami, Patricia Stephens and her sister Priscilla held the first Tallahassee sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter on February 13, 1960. After a February 20 sit-in at the same downtown store, eight students chose jail over paying fines, which the State Archives calls the first jail-in of the civil rights movement (Florida Memory). In May 1963, 220 FAMU students filled a Tallahassee circuit courtroom to answer contempt charges for demonstrating against segregated theaters (Florida Memory exhibit). The Executive Office of the Governor notes that FAMU sociologist Charles U. Smith took part in both the 1956 boycott and the 1960 sit-ins, and that the boycott's 60th anniversary in 2016 was named in his honor (Executive Office of the Governor).

St. Augustine became a major civil rights battleground in the summer of 1964 (Florida Memory) after local dentist and NAACP representative Robert Hayling appealed to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Martin Luther King Jr. came to the city in early June (National Park Service).

The National Park Service says St. Augustine was, until 1964, one of the most segregated cities in the country. Hayling, from the Lincolnville neighborhood, organized campaigns in 1963 against segregated public facilities that served tourists and urged the White House not to support the city's 400th anniversary in September 1965. When both efforts failed, the SCLC asked New England universities to send volunteers for March 1964 demonstrations and asked Lincolnville residents to house and feed them (National Park Service).

In early June 1964 King joined a sit-in at Monson's Motor Lodge, and the same month the SCLC brought Jackie Robinson to address a rally in Lincolnville; the Park Service credits the publicity from both with hastening passage of the Civil Rights Act (National Park Service). The State Archives records nonviolent wade-ins at segregated hotel pools and St. Augustine area beaches that summer, a grand jury summons for King, and the gradual integration of the city's public recreational facilities (Florida Memory).

In 1956 the Florida Legislature created the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, known as the Johns Committee, which in 1957 held public hearings that tried to prove the NAACP and its Florida counsel were breaking the law (Florida Memory guide).

The State Archives describes the committee's mandate as investigating allegedly subversive activities at educational institutions, suspected communist groups and civil rights organizations, including the NAACP; the State Archives of Florida holds transcripts of its hearings from February 4 to March 13, 1957 (Florida Memory guide). Higher education was another front. Virgil Hawkins, a Bethune-Cookman College graduate, applied to the University of Florida College of Law in 1946 and was refused on the basis of race; he was never admitted, but his long case eventually opened Florida's graduate and professional schools (Florida Memory).

Public schools moved through the courts. On March 2, 1962, C.K. Steele, by then president of the Inter-Civic Council, and four other parents filed a class-action suit in federal court charging the Leon County School Board with running an illegally segregated system (Florida Memory guide). Today the Florida Commission on Human Relations posts the law creating the Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame, its nomination rules and its nomination form; the commission is at 4075 Esplanade Way, Unit 110, Tallahassee, phone (850) 488-7082 (Florida Commission on Human Relations). In 2019 the governor selected Henry "Hank" James Thomas of Jacksonville, one of the original thirteen Freedom Riders, as an inductee (Executive Office of the Governor).

Florida civil rights history can be seen in the Lincolnville Historic District in St. Augustine, at Jackie Robinson Ballpark in Daytona Beach and in State Archives of Florida photographs online (National Park Service; Florida Memory exhibit).

The Lincolnville Historic District, on the National Register of Historic Places, is bounded by DeSoto Place and Cedar, Riberia, Cerro and Washington streets, and Lincolnville dates to 1866 (National Park Service). The ballpark in Daytona Beach, built in 1946 as City Island Ball Park, honors Jackie Robinson because Daytona Beach was the first Florida city to let him play that spring, after Jacksonville and Sanford refused; it joined the National Register on October 22, 1998 (Florida Memory exhibit).

Lenders to the 2014 Civil Rights in the Sunshine State exhibit included the Ritz Theatre and Museum in Jacksonville, HistoryMiami, the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Cultural Center, the ACCORD Civil Rights Museum and the Meeks-Eaton Black Archives and Museum at Florida A&M University; the show also displayed a stool from the Jacksonville Woolworth store, site of a 1960 sit-in (Florida Department of State). The Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee, which produced that exhibit, was closed for repairs to the plaza level of the R.A. Gray Building when checked on October 15, 2026 (Museum of Florida History), while the State Archives' Florida Memory photographs cited on this page remain online. Last verified: October 15, 2026, on the State Archives of Florida, Library of Congress, National Park Service and Florida Department of State websites.