Gifford High School — Vero Beach, Florida

Gifford High School was the high school for Black students in Indian River County during segregation, located in Gifford, the historically Black community just north of Vero Beach. It grew out of a small elementary school founded on donated land in 1901, added high school grades in 1938, moved into a new county-built campus in 1952, and graduated its last class in 1969 when Indian River County schools were integrated. The Gifford High School Sundial Landmark marker records that the school then became a middle school, which still occupies the site.

The school began with a railroad worker's gift of land. According to state Marker 1009, William Edward Geoffrey, an African American man from Darlington, South Carolina, came to Gifford in 1892 to work on the Florida East Coast Railroad. The town's first school, built in 1898, served only white children. In 1901 Geoffrey bought eighty acres in Gifford and donated part of it for a park and a school for Black children, a small building on 38th Lane east of what is now US Highway 1. It taught grades one through six, and older students had to travel to Fort Pierce for high school.

The Gifford School and Hosie Schumann Park marker, dedicated in 2020, adds that the Gifford School was built with help from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation, which supported hundreds of Black schools across Florida and the Southeast. Its textbooks, furniture and equipment arrived secondhand. In the early years parents and the local church ran the school, and classes for Black children ran three months a year, when there were no beans to pick in the Gifford fields.

For decades, a Gifford child who wanted more than six grades had to leave Indian River County. A 2004 History of Gifford, prepared for the county's Gifford Neighborhood Plan and summarized by the Indian River Guardian in 2019, says Black students could not attend school in Vero or Fellsmere and families lacked the means to send children to Fort Pierce or Melbourne. John Broxton, a Wabasso settler who had sent his own children to Bethune-Cookman in Daytona, bought a used car and began driving Black students to Fort Pierce. In 1931 the Indian River County School Board agreed to pay him $10 a month for the trips, and he later bought an old school bus to carry students from Wabasso, Gifford, Oslo and St. Lucie.

A 2013 Vintage Vero oral history in the Indian River Guardian, first broadcast on WQCS, opens with the same point: decades before integration, Black children in Indian River County traveled to Fort Pierce to go to school.

In 1938 the Gifford School expanded to include a high school, according to both Marker 1009 and the county history. Marker 1112 records that three students graduated in Gifford High School's first senior class in 1938, and that approximately 68 students graduated between 1938 and 1951. The marker lists the principals of that era by name: W.A. Peck (1936 to 1940), Lamar Fort (1940), Arthur C. Madrey (1941 to 1945), Marcellus Goodwin (1945 to 1950) and James R. Wiggins (1951 to 1960). Vero News reported in 2023 that a yearbook photo at the Gifford Historical Museum shows Dr. Samuel A. Hunter, the last principal of Gifford High School.

Conditions reflected the gap in county spending. Marker 1112 notes that on cold days Gifford students huddled around a fire on the outdoor basketball court, and the Guardian's county history says textbooks reached the school when they were too outdated and worn out by white students. In 1952 the Indian River County School Board funded a new high school building at 45th Street and 28th Court, but the county history says teachers and students still dealt with a shortage of equipment, and teachers spent hours raising money in Gifford for supplies. The 2013 Guardian oral history adds that the new Gifford High of the early 1950s, unlike Vero Beach High School, had no laboratory or gym at first.

Gifford High closed as a high school because Indian River County integrated its schools. The county history quoted by the Guardian traces the push to Joe Idlette Jr., who said that in 1962 he asked for his children to attend Vero Beach Elementary School, was turned down, and went to the NAACP, which sent a lawyer from Jacksonville and started a process that took seven more years. Vero News, citing his son, reported in 2023 that Idlette sued the School District of Indian River County in 1964.

Marker 1009 states that following the integration of Indian River County schools in 1969, Gifford High School graduated its last class and became a middle school. The Guardian's county history says the schools were integrated without serious incidents that year. A second Guardian essay, republished in September 2023, calls integration a double-edged sword: Black students gained access to the same education as white students, but it meant decommissioning Gifford High School, and for a community where family, church and school formed a single bond, the loss reached its social fabric.

Public office changed in the same years. The 2023 Guardian essay reports that in 1964 Walter Jackson became the first Black man in Indian River County to hold elected office, on the school board, and the county history says Idlette was elected to the school board in 1974 and served four consecutive terms. Vero News named other Gifford figures in county schooling: Dr. A. Ronald Hudson, the first Black principal of Vero Beach High School and co-founder of the Gifford Youth Achievement Center, and Kathryn Wilson, the first Black woman to serve on the Indian River County school board, who also served as interim superintendent.

The 1952 building's front survives. Marker 1009, placed in 2017 at the Gifford Middle School campus on 28th Court, says the original facade is now part of that campus, along with a sundial presented by the Class of 1964 at graduation, and calls the facade and sundial the last material remnants of the original Gifford High School. The site of the first Gifford School has its own history: Marker 1112 says the owners donated the property to Indian River County in 1971 as a community park, today Hosie Schumann Park on 39th Street.

The school's story is kept across the street from its old campus. According to Vero News in August 2023, the Gifford Historical Museum & Cultural Center sits alongside the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park and Trail, across from Gifford Middle School, in the former Historic Macedonia Church, built by Black railroad laborers in Sebastian in 1908 and moved to Gifford in 1994. Under the Progressive Civic League of Gifford it reopened as a museum on February 24, 2018. The same report says a $493,000 grant from the Florida Department of State's African-American Cultural and Historical Grant program, awarded in 2022, is meant to expand the museum. Its newspaper clippings, posters and school yearbook photos, described by Vero News in July 2023, preserve faces and names from the Gifford High years.