← back to the registry
AB-032 Public junior college · Pensacola, FL 1965

Booker T. Washington Junior College — The Nation’s First Black Junior College, Closed by Integration in 1965

mergerabsorbed1960s
Lifespan
1949–1965 · 16 yrs
Peak Enrollment
~361
Killed By
desegregation (absorbed into Pensacola JC)
Fate
Absorbed
LocationPensacola, FL
AffiliationPublic junior college (Black-serving)
Campus todaySite shared with Booker T. Washington High School, still an active Escambia County school

Summary

Booker T. Washington Junior College opened in Pensacola, Florida, on September 6, 1949, and was dissolved in 1965, when desegregation ended Florida's separate Black colleges. It holds a distinction that makes its erasure especially bitter: it was the first public junior college for Black students in the nation, the seedbed of what would become Florida's twelve Black junior colleges — the "Magnificent Twelve" — and the longest-lived of them all. Established by the Escambia County school board and sharing a campus, an administration, and a leader with Booker T. Washington High School, it gave the Black families of Florida's western Panhandle a college of their own at a moment when the state offered them almost nothing else.

Its founding president and dean, Dr. Garrett T. Wiggins, was the only educator in northwest Florida with an earned doctorate — by local reckoning "the smartest man in Escambia County" — and under him the college became a genuine launch point. Its first class graduated in 1951 with 23 students; at its peak it enrolled roughly 361. For Black students barred from Pensacola Junior College, which had opened for white students a year earlier in 1948, Booker T. Washington was the two-year college that fed Florida A&M, Bethune-Cookman, Edward Waters, and the professions beyond.

It is often said that the college "merged" with Pensacola Junior College in 1965. The people who lived through it insist that is the wrong word. As one account puts it, like Roosevelt Junior College and the other Black junior colleges of Florida, it is "more accurate to say it was closed." When integration came, none of its faculty secured comparably paid positions at Pensacola Junior College, and its Black students did not transfer en masse; those who did found, at best, an indifferent reception. President Wiggins, in a partial exception, moved on to a research post at the white college. The institution he built did not survive in any form.

What Booker T. Washington Junior College represents is the founding case of a statewide erasure. It was first to open and among the first to be dissolved, and the gap between those two facts measures the cost of how Florida chose to integrate. A pioneering Black institution — the first of its kind in the nation — was not enlarged or honored or merged as an equal. It was closed, its faculty dispersed, its students scattered, and its name retired, while the white college a few miles away absorbed the legal credit for desegregation and continued under its own banner.

Timeline

1948
A white college first
Pensacola Junior College opens for white students in Escambia County.
September 6, 1949
The nation's first
The Escambia County school board opens Booker T. Washington Junior College for Black students — the first public Black junior college in the United States — on the campus of Booker T. Washington High School, with Dr. Garrett T. Wiggins as president and dean.
1951
First graduates
The college's inaugural class graduates with 23 students.
1954
A new address
The high school and junior college move together to Tunis Street (now Texar Drive) in Pensacola.
Late 1950s
A model for the state
Florida, encouraged under Governor LeRoy Collins, uses Pensacola's college as the template for a system that grows to twelve Black junior colleges statewide.
Early 1960s
Peak
Enrollment reaches roughly 361 students.
July 1964
The law turns
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids segregated, federally funded systems, putting Florida's dual colleges on the clock.
1965
Absorbed
Under integration pressure, Booker T. Washington Junior College is closed and its operation absorbed into Pensacola Junior College; faculty do not secure comparable jobs, and Black students do not transfer en masse.
1965 onward
One man crosses over
Dr. Wiggins becomes director of research at Pensacola Junior College until his retirement — the rare member of the college to land at the receiving institution.
1969
The high school integrates
Booker T. Washington High School, the college's longtime campus partner, is integrated under federal court order, ending the segregated era that had defined the site.

The First of Its Kind, and What It Meant to Black Pensacola

Before 1949, a Black student in Pensacola who wanted college had to leave the western Panhandle entirely. Florida's higher education for Black residents amounted to a handful of distant institutions — Florida A&M, Bethune-Cookman, Edward Waters, Florida Memorial — and the white junior college that opened in Escambia County in 1948 was closed to them. Into that void the Escambia County school board opened Booker T. Washington Junior College in September 1949, and in doing so created the first public junior college for Black students anywhere in the United States. For the Black community of Pensacola, this was not a minor administrative addition. It was the arrival of higher education itself, within walking distance, in a city and a state that had taken pains to keep it out of reach.

The college's character was inseparable from the man who led it. Dr. Garrett T. Wiggins held an earned doctorate when almost no Black educator in the region did — the only one in northwest Florida — and he carried, in the community's memory, the title of "the smartest man in Escambia County." He was at once the junior college's president and dean and the principal of Booker T. Washington High School, the two institutions braided together on one campus, first beside the original high school and, after 1954, on Tunis Street. Under Wiggins the college did what a good two-year college is supposed to do: it took students who had nowhere else to begin and gave them a foundation strong enough to transfer onward — into Florida A&M and Bethune-Cookman, into teaching and medicine and law and the ministry. Its first class of 23 graduated in 1951; at its height it enrolled roughly 361. Small numbers, but each one a Black Pensacolian who now had a path. The college was, in the truest sense, the community's own.

The Magnificent Twelve, Pioneered Here

Pensacola's college did not stay a local experiment. Its success became the model for a statewide policy. Through the late 1950s, as Florida moved to expand public two-year education, the state — under Governor LeRoy Collins — encouraged county school boards to open junior colleges for their Black residents, and the network that resulted grew to twelve institutions, the cohort historian Walter L. Smith would christen the "Magnificent Twelve." Booker T. Washington was the first of them, the proof of concept, and the longest-lived. That primacy is the cruel irony at the center of its story: the institution that pioneered Black public junior-college education in America was built inside the architecture of segregation, and that architecture carried within it the seed of the college's destruction.

For the system was "separate but equal" in name and separate-and-unequal in fact, and it was lawful only so long as segregation was. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made federally funded segregated systems illegal, every one of the twelve was suddenly living on borrowed time. Florida's chosen remedy, applied county by county from 1963 to 1967, was not to merge each Black and white college as genuine equals but to close the Black colleges and absorb their students into the white ones. Smith's verdict on the whole enterprise is the necessary frame for Pensacola's: the colleges were "absorbed, not merged," and across all twelve, "not one of the twelve Black presidents even became a vice president" of the institution that took over. The first Black junior college in the nation would be unwound by the same logic that unwound the other eleven — and, having opened first, it would be among the first to close.

"More Accurate to Say It Was Closed"

The word that clings to Booker T. Washington Junior College's end is "merger," and the people who knew it have spent decades correcting it. In 1965, under the pressure of integration, the college's operation was absorbed into Pensacola Junior College — the white institution that had opened a year before it and had never admitted its students. The common telling calls this a merger of the two colleges. The truer telling, as one account states plainly, is that "like Roosevelt Junior College and other Florida black junior colleges, it is more accurate to say it was closed." A merger implies two institutions becoming one, each contributing its name, its people, its traditions. Nothing of the sort happened here. Pensacola Junior College continued, intact and under its own name. Booker T. Washington Junior College ended.

The human evidence is in what became of its people. None of the college's faculty secured positions of comparable pay at Pensacola Junior College; the Black professors who had built a pioneering institution were not absorbed into the white one as equals, and most simply lost their footing in higher education. Black students did not transfer en masse, and those who crossed to Pensacola Junior College encountered, by the kindest description, an indifferent reception on a campus that had been designed to exclude them. There was one notable exception at the top: Dr. Wiggins, the founding president, became director of research at Pensacola Junior College and served there until he retired — a single Black leader carried over, in a diminished role, from a college he had run. That exception only sharpens the rule. The pioneering institution he had led for sixteen years did not become part of Pensacola Junior College. It was closed so that integration could be recorded, and the most accomplished Black educator in the region finished his career as a researcher inside the college that had replaced his own.

The Five Factors

01
Founded inside segregation, doomed by its end
Booker T. Washington Junior College existed because Florida would not integrate higher education and built a separate Black college instead — the first in the nation. That origin was also a fatal dependency: when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregated systems, the college's separate existence lost its legal basis, and Florida's chosen remedy was to close it. Institutions created to satisfy "separate but equal" were structurally temporary, however valuable they proved to be.
02
"Merger" was the polite word; "closed" was the fact
Across the Florida cluster, the receiving white college kept its name, charter, and identity while the Black college's vanished. That is the defining mechanism of absorption: a transaction described as a merger in which only one party actually survives. Pensacola Junior College continued under its own banner; Booker T. Washington Junior College did not continue at all.
03
Black faculty bore the cost the institution's name concealed
When the college closed, none of its faculty secured comparably paid positions at the white college — a pattern repeated across all twelve colleges, where Black professors and administrators were rarely retained and never elevated. The most concrete loss in a desegregation-by-closure is the displacement of an institution's Black-led professional corps, even when buildings and students are nominally reassigned.
04
Students do not transfer en masse to a campus built to exclude them
Booker T. Washington's students did not move as a body to Pensacola Junior College, and those who did found an indifferent reception. Routing the students of a closed Black college to a formerly white one assumes a continuity that the history of exclusion makes unrealistic; the receiving institution's culture, not just its enrollment policy, determines whether students actually follow.
05
Being first offers no protection from erasure
Booker T. Washington Junior College was the first public Black junior college in the United States and the longest-lived of Florida's twelve, and it was still closed and its name retired. Historical primacy and a sixteen-year record did not spare it; only deliberate remembrance — Walter L. Smith's history, markers, the persistence of the high school's name — keeps the achievement legible. Significance does not preserve an institution; memory work does.

Aftermath

The college's people scattered along the predictable fault lines of a desegregation-by-closure. Its Black faculty did not find comparable employment at Pensacola Junior College, and most lost their place in higher education altogether; its students did not transfer in numbers, and those who did entered a campus that received them with indifference. Only Dr. Wiggins crossed over with his career intact, in the reduced role of research director — a melancholy emblem of a transition in which the institution's leader was kept and the institution itself discarded, sixteen years of a pioneering college distilled into a single administrator absorbed by the college that had replaced his.

The campus that the junior college had shared with Booker T. Washington High School outlived the college, and that survival is where the story's continuity now lives. The high school — segregated when the college opened — was integrated under federal court order in 1969 and remains an active Escambia County public school today, having moved in 1982 from the old Texar Drive site to a campus on College Parkway in Pensacola. The Booker T. Washington name thus endures in Pensacola, but on the high school, not the college; the junior college that bore it first, and that opened the door to public Black higher education for the nation, exists now in the historical record rather than on any building. Walter L. Smith's The Magnificent Twelve fixed it there, and Pensacola State College — the white college's present-day successor — has come to acknowledge the Black college that Pensacola in 1965 chose to close rather than embrace.

Lessons

  1. Call a closure a closure: when one institution keeps its name and charter and the other's disappears, "merger" is a euphemism that obscures who actually ended, and honest language is owed to the community that lost the college.
  2. Weigh the human cost in faculty, not just facilities: a desegregation plan that reassigns students but displaces an institution's Black-led professoriate has dismantled, not integrated, that institution.
  3. Do not assume students will follow when a Black college is dissolved into a formerly white one; the receiving campus's culture of welcome or indifference will decide, and indifference guarantees attrition.
  4. Recognize that being first or oldest confers no protection; pioneering institutions are erased as readily as obscure ones unless their history is deliberately preserved and taught.
  5. When integration is achieved by closing the minority institution, audit who actually benefited — and insist that the receiving institution memorialize, hire from, and reckon with the college it absorbed rather than simply claiming the credit.

References