Middleton High School — Tampa, Florida

George S. Middleton High School is a public high school in East Tampa whose history reaches back to the segregated school system of the 1930s. Hillsborough County describes Middleton as originally founded in 1934 as the first public high school for African American students in Tampa. In a 2022 history for Tampa Magazine, county historian Rodney Kite-Powell calls it the first traditional high school for Black students in Hillsborough County.

The record of the school falls into three chapters. From the 1930s until 1971 it served Black students in and around Tampa from a campus in Belmont Heights. In 1971 desegregation ended its life as a high school and the building was turned into a junior high. In 2002 Middleton reopened as a high school on North 22nd Street, in the same East Tampa neighborhood where it began.

The founding date appears two ways. Hillsborough County gives 1934 as the year the school was founded, while the Tampa Magazine history states that Middleton opened in 1935. Both accounts place the school in East Tampa, and the magazine gives the original site as 22nd and Chelsea streets in the Belmont Heights neighborhood.

The school took its name from George S. Middleton, whom Tampa Magazine describes as a noted business, education and civic leader in Tampa. The building was designed by M. Leo Elliott, a Tampa architect. According to the magazine, the school board spent a considerable amount of money building and equipping Middleton, and the Belmont Heights campus was state of the art for its time, measured against the separate but equal standard of the era and the white campuses at Hillsborough High and Plant High.

The new school also took on its lasting identifiers. Tampa Magazine lists Middleton's colors as maroon and gold and its mascot as the tigers. Hillsborough County notes that over the decades the East Tampa school overcame adversity that included two debilitating fires.

For most of its first four decades, Middleton was one of very few choices open to Black teenagers in Tampa. Tampa Magazine reports that African American students were not allowed to enroll at Hillsborough or Plant, or almost any other white school, until the county school system fully integrated in 1971. Middleton and Blake were the only public high school options for Black students in and around Tampa, with two exceptions: George Washington Carver school served grades 6 through 12 during the 1930s and 1940s, and the Don Thompson Vocational High School operated in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Howard W. Blake High School opened in 1956 on Spruce Street along the Hillsborough River in West Tampa and became Middleton's rival. Tampa Magazine ranks Middleton against Blake, together with Hillsborough against Plant, as the county's most important and most contested rivalries of the years before integration, an East Tampa versus West Tampa contest that the magazine says continues today.

Middleton students also appear in Tampa's civil rights record. The Hillsborough County historical marker page for the Woolworth sit-in records that on Feb. 29, 1960, about 40 students from George S. Middleton and Howard W. Blake high schools took part in a peaceful sit-in at the F.W. Woolworth lunch counter on North Franklin Street in downtown Tampa. The same county page states that by September of that year, Tampa's lunch counters were integrated.

The educators of the segregated era are documented as well. The USF Libraries Otis R. Anthony African Americans in Florida Oral History Project holds a 1978 interview with A.J. Ferrell, identified as the principal at several schools, including Middleton High School. In it, Ferrell discusses education and the former segregated schools of Tampa.

Integration changed Middleton's status in 1971. Hillsborough County states that Middleton High closed due to desegregation in 1971. Tampa Magazine describes the reassignment of Middleton and Blake as junior high schools as one of the unintended consequences of school integration in Hillsborough County, since both schools lost their original buildings and their existence as high schools.

The Belmont Heights building itself stayed in use for public education. According to the magazine, the original Middleton building is now Ferrell Middle School, while Blake's original building on the Hillsborough River became Stewart Middle Magnet School. In both cases the later high schools were rebuilt in the same parts of Tampa as the originals.

Middleton's high school program returned in 2002. Hillsborough County describes the school as having come back strong after being closed for 31 years. Blake had made a similar return in 1997, so by the early 2000s both of Tampa's historic Black high schools were again operating as high schools. Tampa Magazine places the new Middleton at 22nd Street and Osborne Avenue in East Tampa.

Federal data describe the current campus. The National Center for Education Statistics lists Middleton High School at 4801 N 22nd St in Tampa as a regular public school serving grades 9 through 12 in the Hillsborough district. For the 2024-2025 school year, NCES counts 1,637 students and 66.14 full-time classroom teachers, a student to teacher ratio of 24.75.

The modern school emphasizes technical study. Hillsborough County reports that Middleton is nationally recognized for its focus on science, technology, engineering and math, known as STEM, with pathways built on rigorous academics and industry partnerships. The county's Black History in Hillsborough series frames the East Tampa school as an institution with more than 90 years of history.

Middleton belongs to a short list of Tampa high schools with long institutional histories. Tampa Magazine identifies Hillsborough High, opened in 1885, as the oldest high school in the city and county, and Henry B. Plant High, opened in 1927 in the Palma Ceia area, as the next of the public schools. Middleton followed in the mid 1930s, and Blake in 1956, an opening the magazine reads as a sign of the growth of the Black population in West Tampa and the Dobyville area of northwest Hyde Park.

The county school map has grown far beyond that group. According to Tampa Magazine, Hillsborough County had 28 public high schools in 2022, almost double the number that existed before 1984, when there were only eight high schools in Tampa and its immediate suburbs. Of all of them, the magazine singles out four public and two private Tampa high schools for history and tradition, and Middleton is one of the four public schools on that list.