Volusia County Junior College — Built for Black Daytona in 1958, Erased by Integration in 1965
Summary
Volusia County Junior College, a public two-year college at 875 Second Avenue in Daytona Beach, Florida, opened on September 2, 1958 to serve the county's Black students and was closed seven years later, in 1965, when Florida dissolved it and folded its students into the previously all-white Daytona Beach Junior College. It was one of the twelve Black public junior colleges Florida built across the late 1950s and early 1960s — institutions created not as an act of inclusion but as the state's "separate but equal" answer to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, a system designed to demonstrate that Florida could expand higher education for African Americans without integrating it. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made that arrangement untenable, the state did not integrate these colleges so much as eliminate them, and Volusia County Junior College was among the first to go.
The college was led for its entire existence by a single president, J. Griffen Greene, a one-armed educator from Georgia who built the institution from nothing and, by the reckoning of those who later honored him, extended its reach to thousands of Black residents through college courses, adult education, and vocational and GED programs. The degree-granting college proper was small — its college program enrolled on the order of 494 students at its height — but counted together with the adult and vocational students it served, the institution touched roughly 5,600 people by 1964. For a Black community in segregated Volusia County, it was the first local door to college that had ever existed.
That door was closed on short notice. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the state moved to consolidate the county's two junior colleges, and in 1965 Volusia County Junior College ceased to exist as an institution. A transitional "Volusia Center" operated for the 1965–66 year offering sophomore courses, but the college's identity, governance, and name were gone. Roughly 450 of its students made the move to Daytona Beach Junior College; within a year, fewer than 100 of them remained. Of sixteen full-time Black faculty, ten were transferred; President Greene was given a position with, by the accounts of the period, little to do.
What Volusia County Junior College represents is the central, bitter paradox of the twelve Black colleges and of the desegregation era itself: that the law which finally ended legalized segregation also erased the Black-led institutions segregation had forced into being. The campus survived in a sense — the receiving college endures today as Daytona State College, which has named a building for Greene — but the Black college as an institution did not. Integration counted as progress in the aggregate, and as loss in the particular: a community's own college, its Black faculty's careers, and a fragile new ladder into higher education, all dissolved into a larger institution that kept few of the people it absorbed.
Timeline
A College Born of a Constitution's Refusal
To understand what Volusia County Junior College meant to Black Daytona Beach, one has to understand why Florida built it at all — and the answer is not a generous one. The Brown decision of 1954 had declared segregated public education unconstitutional, but Florida's Constitution of 1885 still commanded the opposite, and the state's strategy through the late 1950s was to prove that "separate but equal" could be made real enough to survive. When the Community College Council mapped out an ambitious expansion of public junior colleges beginning in 1957, the state paired the plan with a parallel network of Black colleges, built county by county, so that the new access to higher education could be extended to African Americans without seating them beside white students. Twelve such colleges eventually opened; Volusia County's, in Daytona Beach, was among the early ones, opening its doors on September 2, 1958.
The cynicism of the policy did not diminish what the college became to the people it served. For Black families in Volusia County, there had simply been no local college before — no two-year ladder toward a degree, no adult-education or vocational program a working person could reach without leaving the county. Volusia County Junior College was that ladder, and its founding president, J. Griffen Greene, made it more than a token. Greene, a Georgia-born educator who had lost an arm in his youth and spent his life in Black education, built the institution out from its small academic core into something that, by 1964, touched roughly 5,600 people across its college, adult, GED, and vocational programs. The degree-credit college itself was modest — its high-water enrollment on the order of 494 — but the institution as a whole had become a genuine community anchor in a segregated city.
That is the weight Act One must carry, and it is a weight shared by all twelve of Florida's Black junior colleges: each was, simultaneously, a monument to the state's refusal to integrate and a real, beloved, hard-won institution for the community it served. The founders and faculty did not build these colleges as instruments of segregation; they built them, within a segregated system, as the only colleges their children could attend. Volusia County Junior College stood for seven years as proof that a Black community, handed a separate and unequal arrangement, would nonetheless make something durable and dignified of it. The tragedy is that the durability was not allowed to last.
The Law That Closed the Door It Opened
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 changed the legal ground beneath all twelve colleges at once. By barring segregation in publicly funded institutions, it made Florida's parallel Black junior colleges both unlawful and redundant: a county could no longer justify operating two segregated colleges, and the cheaper, politically simpler course was not to integrate the two into a genuinely shared institution but to keep the established white college and dissolve the Black one. The state's own guidance, as the era's records put it, recommended that each county operating two junior colleges "immediately take some steps toward consolidation" — language that sounded neutral and, in practice, meant the elimination of the Black colleges.
For Volusia County Junior College, consolidation came in 1965, and it came fast. The college that had taken seven years to build was dissolved in a single administrative stroke, its students directed to enroll at the previously all-white Daytona Beach Junior College — itself founded in 1957 as the state's first comprehensive community college. A transitional "Volusia Center" operated on the old campus for the 1965–66 year, offering sophomore courses so that students partway through could finish a year, but it was a waystation, not an institution: the name, the governance, and the identity of Volusia County Junior College were already gone. There was no independent college left to defend, no board to vote, no alumni campaign to mount. The decision had been made at the level of state and county policy, and the college simply ended.
The human arithmetic of that ending is the part that should not be smoothed over. Roughly 450 students transferred to Daytona Beach Junior College. Within a year, fewer than 100 of them remained enrolled — a collapse that tells its own story about what it was like to be moved, without choice, from one's own community college into an institution built for and by another community. The receiving college had not been designed to welcome them, and the numbers suggest it did not. The ladder that Volusia County Junior College had built was not extended; it was kicked away, and most of the students who had been climbing it did not reach the top by another route.
What Integration Subtracted
The faculty's fate compounded the loss. Of the sixteen full-time Black faculty at Volusia County Junior College, ten were transferred to Daytona Beach Junior College — meaning six were not — and the institution's leadership was effectively dismantled. J. Griffen Greene, who had been the college's only president and had built it from the ground up, was given a position at the merged institution that the accounts of the period describe as having little real responsibility; he served as a dean for several years before leaving in 1973 to teach at Bethune-Cookman College, the historically Black institution across town. A man who had run a college was absorbed into a subordinate role at the college that had replaced his. His experience was not unusual among the twelve: across Florida, the Black presidents, deans, and faculty who had led these institutions were, with few exceptions, not given comparable authority in the white colleges that absorbed their students. Integration, in practice, meant the disappearance of a Black professional leadership class in Florida's two-year colleges.
This is the generalizable cruelty of the desegregation-erasure pattern, and Volusia County Junior College is a clean example of it. Closing the Black college and folding its students into the white one looked, on a state ledger, like progress toward a single integrated system. On the ground it meant a community lost its own college, its Black faculty lost their careers or their standing, and most of its displaced students washed out within a year. The aggregate gain — one system instead of two — was real. So was the particular loss, and the particular loss fell entirely on the people the policy was nominally meant to help.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
The students bore the heaviest cost. Of the roughly 450 who transferred to Daytona Beach Junior College in 1965, fewer than 100 remained enrolled a year later — a washout that no teach-out year could prevent, because the problem was not academic continuity but the absence of the community the old college had provided. Those who left did not, in most cases, simply re-enroll elsewhere; the ladder Volusia County Junior College had built into higher education was, for most of its students, removed rather than relocated. The faculty fared little better: six of sixteen were not retained, and the rest entered an institution where they held no leadership and had to rebuild their standing from below.
President J. Griffen Greene's later life is the story in miniature. Having built and led the college for seven years, he was absorbed into the merged institution in a diminished role, served several years as a dean, and left in 1973 to teach English and education at Bethune-Cookman College. He died in 1987, recognized late in life among Florida's notable citizens, and in 1999 Daytona State College — the descendant of the college that absorbed his — named Building 14 the J. Griffen Greene Center in his honor. In 2021 the center was rededicated with a timeline mural memorializing his work and the institution he built. That memorial is the form the college survives in today: not as a campus or an institution, but as a name on a building inside the larger college that replaced it, and as the record of the man who refused to let a separate-and-unequal arrangement be nothing at all. The site at 875 Second Avenue and the institution that stood there are gone; what endures is the receiving college, Daytona State, and a deliberate act of remembrance that the surviving institution chose to make.
Lessons
- Treat the closing of a minority-serving institution as a real loss even when it is folded into a larger, integrated one; the aggregate may improve while the specific community that built and depended on the college is left worse off.
- When two institutions are "consolidated," ask which one survives and which one disappears — neutral language about consolidation routinely conceals the elimination of the weaker, and historically the Black, institution.
- Measure desegregation by what happens to the displaced, not by the headline of integration; if absorbed students wash out and absorbed faculty are demoted, the policy has subtracted opportunity even as it claims to have expanded it.
- Protect the leadership and faculty of an absorbed institution explicitly, because the default outcome — as in Florida's twelve Black junior colleges — is that they are shelved or let go rather than carried forward at rank.
- Preserve the memory deliberately: a building named, a mural installed, an archive kept. Where institutions vanish into mergers, only a conscious act of remembrance keeps the erased college and its people from disappearing entirely.
References
- Volusia County Junior College Wikipedia
- J. Griffen Greene Wikipedia
- Our History Daytona State College
- A Tribute to Pioneer Educator (J. Griffen Greene) Daytona Times
- Magnificent Twelve: Florida's Black Junior Colleges (Walter L. Smith) Walter L. Smith / Four-G Publishers