Growing up my parents shared a 1985 Volvo 740 GLE. No matter how much they bickered about other things, one thing was always constant during my childhood — the orange and green license plate on the back of that maroon Volvo.
That simple plate celebrating the centennial of Florida A&M University was my introduction to a school and a history that is as much a part of me as my parents.
Florida A&M is not the best school, or the most perfect school, but it is my school. To this day there is a misnomer that the school only accepts blacks. Of course the truth is that only one of Florida’s three public universities founded in the 19th century has never excluded anyone because of race or gender — Florida A&M.
My dad went to the school so long ago it some people called it FAMCEE, because it was Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College. It didn’t become a university until 1953, the year my dad graduated.
Eventually, I found my way to the school which was once a slave plantation. Florida’s first territorial governor Robert DuVal owned the property. Until the 1940s there was a massive oak tree adjacent to where the current library sits that bore the blood of beaten slaves.
Traditions at so many colleges are being whitewashed by those who choose to only remember the good ol’ days when the sky was apparently bluer.
It would ruin a good story to know that Paul William Bryant and Wayne Woodrow Hayes frequently visited Tallahassee, Florida to get insight from a coaching wizard— Alonzo Smith Gaither.
Even when they were nothing but Jazzbirds playing on a combination of grass and dust, Saturday’s in the fall were always about an experience for Famuans. The smell of all sorts of unhealthy concoctions waft in the air prior to kickoff, some unfortunate opponent is pummeled for 30 minutes and then the world’s best marching band takes center stage.
The experience is what fathers tell sons and why mothers want their daughters to return to Tallahassee. It’s what has become a part of the lore of a school that is largely ignored or forgotten — even by its local newspaper.
Time may have grayed and thinned my dad’s hair, but the bushy mustache he had as a sophomore in 1950 remains. Pictures hidden away in archives only tell so much.
Older generations serve as modern-day griots, the ones who remind future Famuans that Foote-Hilyer was once the only hospital for black people in Tallahassee or how every building on campus tells the story of a person who was critical to the school’s mission of educating African-Americans.
Without those stories, we would not know the student union building, which was once a hotel, was named after an interim president, in H. Manning Efferson, who rarely gets credit for being the bridge between one of the university’s more unpopular presidents (William H. Gray Jr.) to one who became president emeritus upon retirement in George W. Gore.
It was a warm February afternoon, one where the sun prevented icy thoughts of the night to enter the consciousness. After hours canvassing North Florida talking to football players, I idled at a Kentucky Friend Chicken to write about what I witnessed that day.
While waiting to see just how bastardized Harland Sanders’ Southern delicacy had become, a group of people were talking about one of the boys I recently interviewed.
They started talking about his future and how his choice of college would be the perfect fit for him because of its proximity to home, the family atmosphere within the football program and the hospitality of the campus crowd.
They were talking about Florida A&M.
Laughs and liveliness,
-Wb
