Seventy years ago, the Robert F. Hungerford Normal and Industrial School — and by extension, the town of Eatonville — was at a crossroads.

After a two-year court battle eventually decided by the state Supreme Court in 1952, Orange County Public Schools, then called the Board of Public Instruction, took ownership of the Black boarding school.

Over the next seven decades, the school board would transform the private school first into a segregated public high school for Black children, then a desegregated one. After Interstate 4 bisected the land in the 1960s, OCPS in the 70s cited the highway to justify the removal of a requirement that the site could only be used for educational purposes.

The school board would build and rebuild Hungerford Elementary School, donate a small portion of the land to the town to build a public library and close then demolish Hungerford high school. Finally, the district would sell all but the last 100 acres, which is now under contract to be developed.

If the $14 million deal closes as planned at the end of the month, OCPS will make $10 million from the sale and Eatonville will receive $4 million. But residents are worried that the housing planned for the land will be unaffordable to them, leading to displacement and changing the character of their small city, the first incorporated Black town in the nation.

Until now, it seemed the 1950s sale of Hungerford and its property to OCPS was the only choice at the time for a struggling school.

A judge’s approval was needed to allow the property to be transferred from a public trust to OCPS. News articles from the time referred to the court battle as a “friendly suit” needed only to clear up “legal technicalities.” Supreme Court Justice John E. Mathews’ 1952 opinion argued Hungerford could no longer exist as a private school because it lacked money and enough Black students “desiring a high-class boarding school” to keep the doors open.

But newly obtained documents from the 1952 case file show that the school and Eatonville could have had a different future.

As OCPS attempted to purchase the land, a coalition formed to oppose the sale. Among them were Robert Hungerford’s daughter Constance Hungerford Fenske, Nobel Peace Prize winner John Mott and Bethune-Cookman University founder Mary McLeod Bethune.

Under their plan, Hungerford would have remained a private Black boarding school. The court-appointed trustees who approved the sale would have been replaced and Bethune would have been added to a new Board of Trustees.

“The plan of the Bethune-Cookman delegation was to make Hungerford an affiliated institution,” a brief written by attorneys for Fenske said. “It did not propose to under-write the school financially, but it planned to extend to the school the invaluable aid of its advice and counsel, publicity in the college catalogue, and a referral of all inquiries of secondary school education.”

Given the chance, Fenske said she was certain the school would attract enough students to operate.

According to court documents and meeting minutes from the time provided by OCPS, this plan was disregarded and in a series of four meetings spread out over eight weeks, the trustees approved the sale. With that, the district got the school, 11 buildings and 300 acres of land appraised at more than $220,000 for just over $16,000.

“I remember growing up and my mom would say, ‘They wanted this to be a college town,’” said Eatonville Mayor Angie Gardner, who learned of the Bethune proposal from the Orlando Sentinel. “And that’s what I was visualizing. What if our town had become that college town? … It would have really made a difference in regards to jobs, in regards to who it attracted to live in our town and the growth prospects.”

Karen Castor Dentel, the school board representative for Eatonville, said she also did not know about the history before now, adding that it is “certainly an important part of this whole process and it’s not something that should be denied.”

OCPS spokesperson Lauren Roth, in a statement responding to questions, said the 1952 Supreme Court records were not “new information” but rather an example of “repeated rehashing, second-guessing and attempts to twist a decision from 73 years ago.”

“OCPS is focused on the needs of students and taxpayers of today and of the future,” she said. “That is our first priority as a school district.”

But Gardner said she fears the proposed sale and development of the last Hungerford land represents history repeating itself, to Eatonville’s detriment.

“It makes me very sad that we were undervalued then and we are still being undervalued now,” she said. “I want to make certain that right now we aren’t reliving that.”

Trustees ignored Bethune-Cookman plan

Hungerford trustees first considered selling the school as early as 1947.

About a decade prior, the school, which had only accepted boarding school students since it’s founding, started educating “day students” — which is what they called local Black children from Winter Park and Maitland who did not pay tuition or live on school grounds, court documents said.

Starting with just 19 day students in 1938, by the 1947-48 school year, boarding school enrollment had dropped and the school had five times as many day students as boarding school students. With the increase, OCPS took on the expense of paying for teachers and janitors and eventually also paid rent to use buildings.

As the economics of the school changed, trustees consulted D.E. Williams, director for negro education for the state Department of Education to determine what the best option was to secure the school’s future.

According to Williams, Hungerford could not go on as a hybrid boarding and day school. He recommended that Hungerford find a church to take over operations of the school, as it was common for churches to manage the education of Black students. In this plan, OCPS would have to build a separate Black public school in Winter Park.

If Hungerford trustees could not find a church to take over, Williams recommended selling to OCPS and becoming a public school.

According to a timeline of events laid out in court documents, the trustees started negotiating with the national Presbyterian Church but after more than two years of talks, the church declined to purchase the school in a telegram on Jan. 19, 1950.

Two days later, the trustees, who were court-appointed and did not live in Eatonville, met and voted to begin formal negotiations with OCPS. It took less than two months for the school to be turned over.

Fenske, past Hungerford donors and representatives from Bethune-Cookman were alarmed. The group met with the trustees on Feb. 4, 1950 and asked them to consider the possibility of a partnership with Bethune-Cookman.

According to meeting minutes and a summary of events included in court documents, the trustees never considered the plan.

“Although but a few days had passed since the trustees’ decision to negotiate with the School Board, they informed the Bethune-Cookman people that they had already made a commitment to give Hungerford to the County School Board and could not entertain the proposition of Bethune-Cookman,” lawyers for Fenske wrote in a brief appealing the decision to turn the school over.

Bethune-Cookman representatives met again with trustees on Feb. 16, 1950 and requested permission to meet separately with school board officials in hopes that they could convince OCPS to cancel the purchase.

No minutes are available to show what happened when Bethune-Cookman representatives met with OCPS but documents say the school board passed a resolution shortly after, asserting that it was the best choice to provide education to Black students in Central Florida.

The president of Bethune-Cookman was able to meet with Hungerford trustees just once more.

In that final meeting on March 18, 1950, Bethune-Cookman presented the plan for the partnership that would have made Hungerford an affiliated preparatory school for Black students who hoped to attend the historically Black college.

But when the presentation was complete, the representatives left the meeting. Once they were out of the room, Hungerford’s trustees unanimously determined that Bethune-Cookman’s plan did not solve the needs of Hungerford school, then unanimously voted to give ownership of the school to OCPS.

Segregationist judge gets final say

Though Fenske filed multiple briefs opposing the sale, the state Supreme Court upheld the decision two years later.

Mathews, a former lawmaker who had served in the state House and Senate and joined the Supreme Court in 1951, wrote the 1952 opinion that cleared the way for OCPS to take over the school.

According to his official Supreme Court bio, as Hungerford trustees were debating the school’s future in 1947, Mathews, then a senator, was fighting against Black voting rights and school desegregation.

“He led an unsuccessful effort to exclude black citizens from the Democratic primary election in 1947,” his bio says. “He also opposed racial integration at the University of Florida when a qualified black student applied to the law school.”

In a news article that followed Mathews’ failed attempt to exclude Black voters from casting ballots in Democratic primaries, a Panama City lawmaker called Mathews’ bill “one of the most damnable pieces of legislation I have ever seen” while a senator from Daytona Beach called it “a pack of trash.”

Urging passage of his legislation, which would have eliminated all state supervision of primaries, Mathews warned that its failure would put “southern civilization, southern ideals and southern institutions... at stake.”

In his own defense, Mathews said: “I have been referred to as a negro hater. No man in this senate has any more love for the negro race than I.”

Four years later, Mathews was appointed to Supreme Court where he would quickly uphold the decision to turn Hungerford over to OCPS, arguing that when Hungerford was founded “there was a real need for a private boarding school for negros” but “since that time, conditions have radically changed in Florida and throughout the south.”

In a separate opinion written in 1954 related to the Brown v. Board of Education decision that led to desegregating schools across the country, Mathews referred to the eventual integration of Florida schools as an “evil day” and argued Black people had “made more progress under segregation in a shorter time than any other race.”

He went on to say that no consideration had been paid to how school integration might harm white children and that being educated alongside white children would surely make Black children feel inferior.

OCPS: Giving away land ‘would be irresponsible’

Eatonville residents Julian Johnson and N.Y. Nathiri are among a group working to stop the sale of the land. Both said they had heard rumors of some of the details but had not seen the documents for themselves until they sat for an interview with the Sentinel.

“I have always felt that Orange County Public Schools was in an ethically compromised position,” said Nathiri, executive director of the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community. “Frankly, I have thought this for decades and I have wondered if the enormity of their ethical dilemma was really apparent to them.”

Nathiri and Johnson had both previously argued that OCPS should cancel the sale and give the land to the town in a public trust so residents and elected officials can determine the best use of it. Many others, including Gardner, have agreed.

Johnson said seeing the more detailed history has only strengthened his opinion.

“If anything, to me, they should give the land back plus money to the town because they have economically destroyed us,” he said.

But so far, OCPS seems unlikely to do that.

In a statement, OCPS spokesperson Roth defended the process that led to the land transfer in 1952, rejected that the district had stood in the way of the Bethune proposal and accused the Sentinel of a “continuously one-sided, racially inflammatory and inaccurate framing of this story.”

“B-CU was not offering any funds or administrators to operate the school, and the district was already providing most of the students and funding for the school,” Roth said. “...The school board did not stand in the way of anything. The Trust made their own decision based on economic and demographic realities, as they detailed in their own minutes.”

Roth noted the land never belonged to the town. She said the sale of the property is being handled like any other surplus land, adding that municipalities rarely get to participate in land sales but OCPS involved Eatonville’s government as a courtesy under a previous mayoral administration.

“OCPS is one of the fastest-growing school districts in the nation and has tremendous need for new schools around the county while also renovating or replacing existing schools, such as the 2018, $22.5 Million replacement of Hungerford Elementary,” she said. “It would be irresponsible for the district to give away this property, the proceeds of which will be used for projects such as Orange Technical College – Eatonville, which includes a welding lab and classrooms being put into a building on the Hungerford Elementary property for adult education.”

The sale of the land is set to close on March 31.

It’s unclear if developers will continue with the purchase as planned. At an Eatonville town council meeting last month, officials voted against changes to the town’s comprehensive plan that would have been necessary for Winter Park-based development company Sovereign Land Co. to build the retail and housing it had hoped to add to the land.

After the Feb. 7 meeting, Derek Bruce, attorney for the developer, said his client was “regrouping” to determine how it would proceed. Bruce did not respond to a request for comment regarding the history of the land.

Castor Dentel, the school board member whose district includes Eatonville, said that history “does have some bearing on what happens with the property.” She added that district officials had not discussed this history previously.

With the land sale closing just weeks away, she isn’t sure the district has enough time to consider alternatives if the developer still wants the property. She was also unclear on whether the developer would continue with the purchase.

Though the future of the property has yet to be decided, Nathiri said revealing the history of the land is a cause for celebration. She said though time is running out, she has seen the town win against what she views as inappropriate development before, citing how the town crushed a plan to expand Kennedy Boulevard in the 1990s when residents decried it, saying a five-lane road would have harmed the town.

“I know experientially we’re going to win this,” Nathiri said. “Listen, I have no doubt in my mind that Orange County Public Schools is going to transfer that land back to a community trust. I have every confidence of that.”

dstennett@orlandosentinel.com