Stone High School and Melbourne's Segregated Schools — Melbourne, Florida

Stone was the name attached to the school that educated Melbourne's Black high school students in the decades of segregation, the successor to Melbourne Vocational School in south Melbourne. The clearest published record is the African American Chronology in Brevard County compiled by Florida Tech historian Gordon Patterson, which traces the line from a one-room school of 1909 through Melbourne Vocational School, founded in 1930, to Melbourne Vocational High School, which opened in 1957 and graduated its last class before integration in 1967.

The Stone name and the vocational school belong to the same story. A 1976 Melbourne Times article by local historian Weona Cleveland, listed in the Florida Tech Read-In bibliography, is titled First Graduating Class Numbered 10 at Stone, and the chronology records that ten students made up the first graduating class of Melbourne Vocational School in 1933. The sources consulted do not state exactly when the campus took the Stone name or confirm the 1958 opening date sometimes cited, so this page follows the dates the chronology gives.

Segregated schooling in Melbourne began with the town's first classroom. In a 2020 Florida Tech News history of the Little Red Schoolhouse, Patterson writes that the one-room schoolhouse built in 1883 by Melbourne's pioneer families was segregated, with white students attending in the morning and African American students in the afternoon. That building now stands in the Florida Tech botanical garden.

A separate Melbourne school followed in 1909. The chronology records that the first school for African American children in Melbourne opened that year on the corner of Lipscomb and Line Streets, a one-room building with two rows of seats and two students per seat. About 16 students attended, and Mrs. May Piper was the first teacher. The chronology also records that Allen Chapel A.M.E., the first African American church in Melbourne, was organized in 1885 by families including Mary and Wright Brothers, and that Wright Brothers later ran a grocery store on Lipscomb Street.

Melbourne Vocational School came next. The chronology dates its founding to 1930 on the site of what is today Brothers Park in south Melbourne. The chronology lists Wright Brothers among the first Black settlers of Melbourne, who arrived sometime between 1867 and 1874. The same 1930 entry names John Stone, whom the chronology elsewhere describes as a Melbourne pioneer and a 1912 founder of Scott Chapel, in connection with the school.

The school grew from a first graduating class of ten students in 1933. The chronology records the inequity those graduates met when they became teachers: Brevard County School Board minutes from 1938 show white principals paid $200 to $235 a month, compared with $82 to $110 for Black principals. In 1937, Harry T. Moore and Thurgood Marshall filed the first lawsuit in the South demanding equal pay for African American and white teachers, an early equal pay challenge recorded in the Brevard County chronology.

Athletics gave the Melbourne Vocational campus an identity. In 1947, Azie B. Horne became the first African American football coach at the school, and the team, originally known as the Flying Eagles, later changed its name to the Gophers. The Gopher name survives today at Stone Magnet Middle School, whose principal's newsletter is the Gopher Gazette, according to the Brevard Public Schools Stone Middle site.

One of the school's substitute teachers was a nationally known author. The chronology records that Zora Neale Hurston, after returning in 1951 to her Eau Gallie cottage, served as a substitute teacher at Melbourne Vocational School before later working as a librarian on the missile test project. The Florida Historical Society exhibit on Hurston in Brevard County adds that during the same 1951 to 1956 period she staged a concert at Melbourne High School, its first integrated event.

The gap the school was working against shows in the census figures the chronology reproduces. Its entry for the 1950 U.S. Census lists Melbourne's population at 4,223 and gives the median years of schooling as 11.7 for white residents and 6.3 for nonwhite residents, a difference of more than five years at the moment Melbourne Vocational was preparing to become a full high school.

In December 1953 the Melbourne Vocational School building burned down, according to the chronology. The school continued, and in 1957 Melbourne Vocational High School opened, the institution Melbourne residents came to associate with the Stone name.

Integration in Brevard County came slowly and through the courts. The chronology records that the NAACP filed suit against the Brevard School Board in 1961 to desegregate the schools, and that the trial began in federal court in Orlando in 1964. Melbourne Vocational High School's class of 1967 was the last to graduate before the school was integrated; it was also the first class to have a yearbook and a senior trip.

The Stone campus then became the focus of the desegregation orders. In 1969, Federal District Court Judge George C. Young set a February 20 deadline for a plan to desegregate Poinsett and Stone Middle School. In June 1969, 600 white parents in Melbourne organized a boycott of planned busing of their children to the formerly all Black Stone Elementary School. A federal court approved the Brevard School Board's desegregation plan on May 11, 1973, and in February of that year 4,000 Black students had boycotted Brevard schools to protest plans that would bus only Black pupils from Poinsett Elementary.

Those records show the Stone name moving from a segregated high school to the elementary and middle grades as Brevard reorganized. G. White's 1987 Florida Today article, School Days before Integration, listed in the Florida Tech bibliography, is one of the published recollections of the Melbourne Vocational and Stone years.

The Stone name continues in Brevard Public Schools. Stone Magnet Middle School is located at 1101 E. University Blvd in Melbourne, according to the district's school site, which lists magnet offerings including AVID and a science research program. The chronology records that in 2013 the Brevard School Board approved a resolution establishing Stone Middle and Palm Bay High as new magnet schools.

The history of Melbourne Vocational and Stone is preserved mainly through local journalism and Florida Tech's annual African American Read-In, held each February with Evans Library, whose chronology draws on Weona Cleveland's Melbourne Times columns and her 1994 book Crossroad Towns Remembered. Brothers Park on the old Melbourne Vocational site and the Gopher name at Stone Magnet Middle are the two visible links between the segregated school and the campus that serves Melbourne students in 2026.