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AB-033 Public junior college · West Palm Beach, FL 1965

Roosevelt Junior College — Palm Beach County’s First Black College, Abruptly Closed in 1965

mergerabsorbed1960s
Lifespan
1958–1965 · 7 yrs
Peak Enrollment
~225
Killed By
desegregation (absorbed into Palm Beach JC)
Fate
Absorbed
LocationWest Palm Beach, FL
AffiliationPublic junior college (Black-serving)
Campus todayOriginal building demolished; site is now Roosevelt Middle School's athletic field

Summary

Roosevelt Junior College opened in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1958 and was closed in 1965, after just seven years — Palm Beach County's first institution of higher education for African Americans, and one of the twelve Black public junior colleges Florida built under segregation. It shared its first year, its campus on Fifteenth Street, and its president with Roosevelt High School, the all-Black secondary school next door, and in short order it became something the county had never offered its Black residents before: an accredited, degree-granting college they could attend at home. Within its seven years it won accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and membership in the American Association of Junior Colleges, and it enrolled roughly 225 students taught by a faculty and staff of eighteen.

Its founding and only president, Britton G. Sayles, doubled as the principal of Roosevelt High School, and the college he led offered tracks in general education, business, pre-teaching, pre-law, and secretarial studies — a serious curriculum aimed at students bound for Florida A&M, Bethune-Cookman, and the professions. For the Black community of Palm Beach County, Roosevelt was both a practical opportunity and a point of pride: a college of their own, accredited and respected, in a county whose white junior college had been built to exclude them.

The end was abrupt and externally imposed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade segregated systems, and a federal mandate threatened to strip Palm Beach County of more than half a million dollars in funding unless it integrated. The county's response was to close Roosevelt in 1965 and send what it could to the formerly all-white Palm Beach Junior College. Despite the common claim of a "merger," President Sayles was emphatic that there was none: fewer than half of Roosevelt's 225 students and only six of its eighteen faculty crossed over — three classroom teachers, the dean as a guidance counselor, and two librarians. The rest lost their jobs.

What Roosevelt represents is the abruptness of the desegregation-erasure at close range. The transfer of six faculty did make Palm Beach Junior College the county's first school with an integrated staff — a real milestone. But it was achieved by closing the Black college, not by joining the two as equals, and it left a bitterness among Roosevelt's surviving staff and alumni that endures to this day. A pioneering institution was dissolved, most of its people were cut loose, its building was eventually demolished, and the integration it enabled was credited to the college that absorbed it.

Timeline

1958
A college for Palm Beach County's Black students
The county school board opens Roosevelt Junior College in West Palm Beach — the county's first higher education for African Americans — sharing facilities for its first year with the all-Black Roosevelt High School at 1235 Fifteenth Street.
1958
One leader, two schools
Britton G. Sayles becomes the college's first and only president while continuing as principal of Roosevelt High School.
Late 1950s–1960s
An accredited college
Roosevelt earns accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and joins the American Association of Junior Colleges, offering general education, business, pre-teaching, pre-law, and secretarial programs.
Early 1960s
Peak
Enrollment reaches roughly 225 students, taught by 18 faculty and staff.
July 1964
The law turns
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars segregated, federally funded systems.
1965
The funding ultimatum
A federal integration mandate threatens Palm Beach County with the loss of more than half a million dollars in funding unless it desegregates.
1965
Absorbed
The Board of Public Instruction closes Roosevelt Junior College and routes its operation to Palm Beach Junior College; fewer than half of 225 students and six of 18 faculty transfer.
1965
An integrated faculty — at the other campus
The six who transfer — teachers Ruby Bullock, Daniel Hendrix, and Carrie Bridwell, dean Paul Butler as a guidance counselor, and librarians Margaret Brown Richardson and Idella Wade — make Palm Beach Junior College the county's first school with an integrated faculty.
1970
One door opens later
Daniel W. Hendrix, a transferred Roosevelt instructor, becomes the first African American elected to the Palm Beach County School Board.
2006
A building named
Palm Beach Community College dedicates the Britton G. Sayles Social Science Building, honoring Roosevelt's only president decades after his college was closed.

A College of Their Own on Fifteenth Street

For the Black families of Palm Beach County, the opening of Roosevelt Junior College in 1958 marked the first time higher education had ever been offered to them within the county's own borders. Until then the path to college ran out of the county entirely — to Florida A&M in Tallahassee, to Bethune-Cookman in Daytona — a journey of means and distance that closed the door for many. The county's white junior college was no option; it did not admit them. Roosevelt changed that. Set on Fifteenth Street in West Palm Beach, sharing its first year and its campus with the all-Black Roosevelt High School, the college brought a degree-granting institution into the heart of the Black community, where students could reach it.

And it was a real college, not a token. Within its short life Roosevelt earned accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and joined the American Association of Junior Colleges — credentials that placed it in the mainstream of American higher education and meant its work counted. It offered tracks in general education, business, pre-teaching, pre-law, and secretarial studies, the curriculum of a community college preparing students for both transfer and the workforce. At its head stood Britton G. Sayles, who carried the dual burden of college president and high-school principal, embodying the way Black education in the county was knit together by a handful of devoted leaders wearing several hats at once. Roughly 225 students enrolled under a faculty and staff of eighteen — modest in scale, but for a Black county college only a few years old, an achievement that the community regarded with pride. It was, in the plainest terms, theirs.

The Magnificent Twelve and a County's Choice

Roosevelt was never an isolated venture; it was Palm Beach County's contribution to a statewide system born of segregation. Across Florida in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the state — having moved to expand public two-year education while refusing to integrate it — encouraged county school boards to open separate junior colleges for their Black residents, and twelve such institutions resulted, the cohort later honored as the "Magnificent Twelve." They were real and valuable: in many counties, including Palm Beach, they were the first colleges of any kind open to Black students. But they were also lawful only under "separate but equal," and that doctrine was living on borrowed time.

When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregated, federally funded systems, Florida's counties faced the question of how to comply, and the answer they reached — county by county, from 1963 to 1967 — was to close the Black colleges and absorb their remnants into the white ones rather than to merge the pairs as equals. The historian and former Florida A&M president Walter L. Smith, whose The Magnificent Twelve is the definitive account, distilled the pattern without flinching: the colleges were "absorbed, not merged," and across all twelve, "not one of the twelve Black presidents even became a vice president" of the receiving institution. Roosevelt would prove the pattern exactly. Its president was not elevated, its faculty was mostly not retained, and its students mostly did not follow — and the integration of Palm Beach County's higher education would be recorded as a step forward even as a Black-built college was being dismantled to achieve it.

Closed Under an Ultimatum, and the Bitterness That Stayed

The end did not come from within. In 1965, with the Civil Rights Act in force, the U.S. government pressed Palm Beach County to integrate or forfeit its federal money — more than half a million dollars — and the county's Board of Public Instruction chose compliance through closure. Roosevelt Junior College was shut, and its operation routed to the formerly all-white Palm Beach Junior College. The maneuver is routinely described as a merger of the two colleges, and President Sayles spent years rejecting the word. There was no merger. Palm Beach Junior College continued under its own name and charter; Roosevelt was closed.

The numbers behind the closure are the heart of the grievance. Of Roosevelt's roughly 225 students, fewer than half transferred to Palm Beach Junior College. Of its eighteen faculty and staff, only six made the move: three classroom teachers — Ruby Bullock, Daniel Hendrix, and Carrie Bridwell — along with Dean Paul Butler, reassigned as a guidance counselor, and two librarians, Margaret Brown Richardson and Idella Wade. The rest lost their jobs. Those six transfers carried a genuine distinction: they made Palm Beach Junior College the first school in the county with an integrated faculty, and one of them, Daniel Hendrix, would in 1970 become the first African American elected to the county school board. But the milestone was reached by closing the Black college and keeping a fraction of its people, not by uniting two institutions, and the cost fell hardest on those left behind. Among Roosevelt's surviving staff and alumni, the abruptness of the closure left a bitterness that has endured — the sense, well documented in the county's own histories, that a respected institution had been extinguished overnight and most of its faculty discarded so that the books could be balanced and the federal money kept.

The Five Factors

01
A federal ultimatum, answered by closing the Black college
Roosevelt died because Palm Beach County faced losing more than half a million dollars in federal funds unless it integrated — and chose to comply by shutting the Black institution rather than truly merging it with the white one. The generalizable mechanism is the perverse incentive of compliance-by-closure: faced with a desegregation mandate, a district can satisfy the law most cheaply by eliminating the minority institution, achieving "integration" through subtraction.
02
"There was no merger."
President Sayles's flat insistence names the defining pattern of the Florida cluster. The white college kept its name, charter, and identity; the Black college's ended. Calling that a merger obscures the asymmetry — only one institution survived — and the honest term is absorption, the dissolution of the weaker partner into the stronger.
03
Most of the faculty were not retained
Of eighteen Roosevelt faculty and staff, only six transferred; the rest lost their jobs, and the president was not given a position commensurate with leading a college. This mirrors the statewide record, in which Black professors and administrators were rarely kept and never elevated. The deepest, most lasting injury of a desegregation-by-closure is the displacement of a Black institution's professional corps.
04
Integration credited to the college that did the absorbing
The six transfers made Palm Beach Junior College the county's first school with an integrated faculty — a real milestone, but one achieved by closing Roosevelt and reassigning a fraction of its staff. The receiving institution reaped the historic credit for integration while the institution that supplied the integrators ceased to exist. Progress was recorded at the surviving college's address, not the one that closed.
05
Abruptness leaves a bitterness that outlives the buildings
Roosevelt was closed quickly, under external pressure, with most of its people cut loose, and the resentment among its surviving staff and alumni has endured for decades. An orderly transition might have eased the loss; an abrupt closure compounds the material harm with a lasting sense of injustice. How an institution is ended, not only that it ends, shapes the memory the community carries.

Aftermath

The people of Roosevelt Junior College were divided by the closure into a fortunate few and a displaced many. Six of eighteen faculty and staff moved to Palm Beach Junior College — teachers Ruby Bullock, Daniel Hendrix, and Carrie Bridwell, dean Paul Butler as a guidance counselor, and librarians Margaret Brown Richardson and Idella Wade — and in doing so integrated the county's college faculty for the first time. Daniel Hendrix would go on, in 1970, to become the first Black member of the Palm Beach County School Board, a genuine legacy traceable to that transfer. But fewer than half of the college's 225 students followed, and the majority of its staff lost their jobs outright. President Britton G. Sayles was not given the leadership of the surviving institution; his college was simply closed beneath him.

The campus itself did not survive. Roosevelt's original building on Fifteenth Street was demolished, and the site became the athletic field of Roosevelt Middle School — the college's footprint paved over into recreation ground, its name surviving on neighboring schools rather than on any college. The recognition that did come, came late: in 2006, Palm Beach Community College dedicated the Britton G. Sayles Social Science Building, honoring the man who had led the institution it absorbed, four decades after the closure. Palm Beach County's own historians have since documented the episode candidly, including the enduring bitterness of those who lived it. The integration Roosevelt's closure enabled was real, and so was the milestone of the county's first integrated faculty. But both were purchased by erasing a Black college and discarding most of its faculty, and the people who carried that loss have never been persuaded to call it anything gentler than what it was.

Lessons

  1. Beware compliance-by-closure: when a desegregation mandate can be satisfied most cheaply by eliminating the minority institution, expect districts to do exactly that, and structure mandates so that integration cannot be achieved by subtraction.
  2. Reject "merger" when only one institution survives; honor the displaced college by naming its end accurately, as its own president did, rather than absorbing it twice — once in fact and again in language.
  3. Count the faculty left behind: a transition that retains a fraction of an institution's staff and dismisses the rest has dismantled, not merged, that institution, and the dismissed deserve to be part of the record.
  4. Do not let the receiving institution claim the whole credit for integration; the milestone of an integrated faculty belonged equally to the Black college whose closure supplied it, and memory should be allotted accordingly.
  5. End institutions with as much care as you can muster, because abruptness breeds a bitterness that outlasts the buildings; an orderly, respectful transition is owed to a community losing a college it built and loved.

References