Abstract
African-Americans were the leading figures in the fight to end segregation in southwest Florida. Following the protest strategies of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), blacks in Fort Myers challenged the historic racial hierarchy. While not unusual in its pattern of opposition, the African-American community in Lee County, Florida has not been given the scholarly attention it deserves. Blacks have been treated as passive victims of historical events, and it is therefore, necessary to change this view and provide a more accurate history. A large amount of scholarship has been undertaken on the civil rights movement in the U.S. as a whole, and a substantial body of work is emerging on civil rights in the Sunshine State, but few works cover African-Americans specifically in southwest Florida. The aim of this study is to provide a better understanding of historical black agency in southwest Florida and identify how local African-Americans changed a community. It will explore these issues through a focus on desegregation in the local school system. Professor Irvin D. S. Winsboro, a historian who focuses on African-American history in Lee County, stated that the integration of the schools, "reflected an interconnected triumph of black agency and federal intervention over a state/local resistance of school desegregation."1 Winsboro has examined the desegregation of schools in southwest Florida and assessed how the refusal of local authorities to integrate public schools fit into the framework of resistance orchestrated by the state. This research project builds on Winsboro's work by exploring the role played by African-Americans themselves in the struggle to integrate schools in Lee County. This project is based on detailed analysis of the Fort Myers News-Press, as well as oral history interviews with members of the black activist community in southwest Florida. It is my hope that this study expands scholarship on civil rights and black agency, with regard to Lee County, Florida, and beyond.