Buckman Act

In 1905 the state of Florida passed the Buckman Act, which reorganized the State University System of Florida and empowered the Florida Board of Control to govern the system. The act, named for legislator Henry Holland Buckman, mandated the consolidation of the state's six institutions of higher education into three: one for white men, one for white women, and one for blacks, e.g., African Americans. Four of the institutions – the University of Florida at Lake City (formerly Florida Agricultural College) in Lake City, the East Florida Seminary in Gainesville, the St. Petersburg Normal and Industrial School in St. Petersburg, and the South Florida Military College in Bartow – were merged into the new University of the State of Florida.

The University of the State of Florida served as the institution for white men; the State Normal School for Colored Students (the future Florida A&M University) served African Americans, and the Florida Female College, later named the Florida State College for Women (the future Florida State University) served white women.^[1] A fourth school provided specialized training and education for the deaf and blind (the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind).

The Buckman Act was effectively discontinued as being impractical following World War II, when the establishment of the GI Bill provided a financial vehicle for returning U.S. military veterans, the overwhelming majority of them male, to pursue a college education that they could not have otherwise afforded. Single gender provisions at the University of Florida (UF) and the Florida State College for Women (FSCW) were officially eliminated in 1947 and both schools became coeducational, with the latter being renamed Florida State University (FSU). In 1953, the former State Normal School for Colored Students, by then known as the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes, was renamed to its current title of Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University (FAMU). Civil rights efforts in the 1960s also led all three institutions becoming racially integrated during the early years of that decade, although FAMU remains a historically black university, with over 87% of its student body African-American as of 2014.

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