Gifford High School in Vero Beach, Florida

Gifford High School was the segregation-era high school for Black students in Indian River County, located in Gifford, which the state marker program lists under Vero Beach.

It grew out of a small school for Black children on land donated in 1901, added high school grades in 1938, moved into a county-built campus in 1952, and graduated its last class in 1969 when Indian River County schools were integrated. The Gifford High School Sundial Landmark marker records that the school then became a middle school and that the original facade is now part of the Gifford Middle School campus.

The Gifford School began on land donated by William Edward Geoffrey, an African American railroad worker from Darlington, South Carolina.

According to state Marker 1009, Geoffrey came to Gifford in 1892 to work on the Florida East Coast Railroad. The town's first school, built in 1898, served only white children. In 1901 Geoffrey bought eighty acres in Gifford and donated part of it for a park and a school for Black children, a small building on 38th Lane east of what is now US Highway 1. It taught grades one through six, and older students had to travel to Fort Pierce for high school.

The Gifford School and Hosie Schumann Park marker, dedicated in 2020, adds that the Gifford School was built with help from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation, which supported hundreds of Black schools across Florida and the Southeast. Its textbooks, furniture and equipment were donated secondhand. In the early years parents and the local church ran the school, and classes for Black children ran three months a year, when there were no beans to pick. The county's History of Gifford adds that Black children in the Wabasso area attended school in an old Masonic Hall.

Before 1938, Gifford students who wanted to finish high school had to travel to Fort Pierce, according to state Marker 1009.

The History of Gifford by Milt Thomas, edited by county historian Ruth Stanbridge and printed as Appendix E of the county's 2014 Gifford Neighborhood Plan, says the Gifford School went only through the sixth grade in the early 20th century, its students could not attend school in Vero or Fellsmere, and families lacked the resources to send children as far as Fort Pierce or Melbourne.

The same history credits John Broxton, a Wabasso-area settler who had sent his own children to Bethune Cookman School in Daytona to finish high school. Broxton saved for a used car and began carrying Black students to Fort Pierce for high school. In 1931 the Indian River County School Board agreed to pay him $10 a month for the trips, and he later bought an old school bus to carry students from Wabasso, Gifford, Oslo and St. Lucie to Fort Pierce.

Gifford became a high school in 1938, and its first senior class that year had three graduates, according to state Marker 1112.

Marker 1009 and the county history both date the Gifford expansion to 1938, while Marker 1112 describes the change more loosely as a transition in the late 1930s. Marker 1112 adds that approximately 68 students graduated between 1938 and 1951 and lists the principals of the period by name and years.

Conditions reflected the gap in county spending. The county history says textbooks reached the school only when they were too outdated and worn out by white students, the same was true of furniture and equipment, and the school had no heating, so on cold days students huddled around a fire on the outdoor basketball court. In 1952 the Indian River County School Board funded a new high school building at 45th Street and 28th Court, but the history says students and teachers still dealt with a shortage of equipment, and teachers spent hours raising money in the Black community for materials and supplies.

Gifford High stopped operating as a high school because Indian River County integrated its schools in 1969, as Marker 1009 records.

The county history credits Joe Idlette Jr. with a key role in that change. In his account, he asked in 1962 for his children to attend Vero Beach Elementary School, was turned down, and went to the NAACP, which sent a lawyer from Jacksonville and started a process that took seven more years. The history says the schools were integrated without serious incidents in 1969, and that Idlette was elected to the school board in 1974 and served four consecutive terms.

The History of Gifford calls integration a double-edged sword: Black students would receive the same education as white students, but it meant decommissioning Gifford High School, and for a community where family, church and school formed a single bond, the loss of its school affected the social fabric. Public office had begun to change a few years earlier: the history records that in 1964 Walter Jackson, whose family homesteaded in Gifford and who eventually owned 300 acres of citrus land, became the first Black man in Indian River County to hold elected office, on the school board.

The facade of the 1952 building and a sundial from the Class of 1964 remain on the Gifford Middle School campus, where Marker 1009 stands at 4530 28th Court.

Marker 1009, placed in 2017, says the sundial was a gift from the Class of 1964 at graduation and calls the facade and sundial the last material remnants of the original Gifford High School. The site of the first Gifford School has its own marker: Marker 1112, at 1760 39th Street, says the property owners donated the land to Indian River County in 1971 as a community park, and Gulf and Western Sugar dedicated it to Hosie Shumann, an employee from 1942 until his death in 1971.

Nearby, the county plan describes Martin Luther King, Jr. Park, two acres at the northwest corner of 45th Street and 28th Court, as home to the historic Macedonia Baptist Church and Museum. The county history says the church was built in 1908 on land in Sebastian, largely by Black workers who had labored on the railroad, and in 1994 it was moved to Gifford and completely restored.

State arts funding has also reached the community. The Florida Department of State's African-American Cultural and Historical Grants program took applications from October 11 through November 30, 2021, and its ranked list shows $493,000 for the Cultural Council of Indian River County's Gifford Community Cultural & Resource Center project, an amount that also appears on the department's list of funded applications. Last verified: October 15, 2026, against state markers 1009 and 1112, the county's History of Gifford and the Department of State grant lists for this Gifford school history.