Remembering woman described as "the face of the civil rights movement in Jacksonville"
When we recall leaders of the civil rights movement in Northeast Florida, we often highlight some of the local men who were involved in making history.
James Weldon Johnson, A. Philip Randolph, Rutledge Pearson, Earl Johnson, Wendell Holmes, Rodney Hurst, Alton Yates.
These men and more certainly deserve to be remembered.
But there also are local women who shouldn’t be forgotten — like Eddie Mae Steward.
When Steward died of a heart attack at age 61 in 2000, newspapers all over the South ran news obituaries, the first sentence noting her role in a historic school desegregation case in Duval County.
Times-Union columnist Bill Foley wrote: “To me, the face of the civil rights movement in Jacksonville belongs to Eddie Mae Steward.”
In the years after her death, Steward was honored in several ways. Congress voted to name a post office in Springfield after her. The state renamed a portion Main Street, between 6th and 8th streets, “Ms. Eddie Mae Steward Avenue.” And Mayor John Peyton issued a proclamation declaring Feb. 17, 2004 to be Eddie Mae Steward Day in Jacksonville.
A couple of decades later, while the post office and street names remain, to some degree her name has faded from the retelling of local civil rights history. So on Saturday, the 20th anniversary of Eddie Mae Steward Day, her children — who as the plaintiffs in that desegregation case are a part of her history — plan to walk through the Eastside neighborhood where they grew up. They’ll be joined by some of the people who knew their mother and also remember what she did.
“She made Jacksonville a better place," said Venetia Steward, the fifth of Eddie Mae Steward’s six children. "We want to keep her memory alive."
The battle over Boylan Haven
Eddie Mae Steward has a lengthy civil rights bio, but the piece that inevitably was cited first in her obituary: In 1971, her lawsuit against the Duval County School Board led to the desegregation of schools via busing.
The desegregation lawsuit originally was filed by Sadie Braxton, on behalf of her children, in 1960 (the same year not so coincidentally as Ax Handle Saturday). It alleged that six years after Brown v. Board of Education, Jacksonville still had completely segregated schools — 89 schools with white students, teachers and staff; 24 schools with Black students teachers and staff.
By 1965, not much had changed. Fewer than 150 of Duval County’s 30,000 African-American students were attending integrated schools.
An important battle, since overshadowed and often overlooked, came in 1968. Nearly 300 Black students were told they would be attending Boylan Haven, as an annex for overflowing Mathew Gilbert Junior-Senior High. The three-story building at Jesse and Franklin streets, built around 1910, had been a private school for African-American girls until it closed in 1959.
The Times-Union described the building as “unfit by any standards as a place to send children to school.” The Jacksonville Journal education editor, Ron Martin, said it was more suited to be the set of a horror movie than a school.
This coverage came after a 30-year-old mother — Eddie Mae Steward — rallied parents and attracted attention to the conditions.
She also convinced Mayor Hans Tanzler to visit Boylan Haven with her. Just 10 days after consolidation led Jacksonville to proclaim itself the “Bold New City of the South,” the mayor looked at the building and found the setting to be deplorable.
“I don’t think anybody in the world would have any different impression,” he said.
After a three-week standoff — during which parents boycotted Boylan Haven, held alternative classes for their children at Tabernacle Baptist Church, and talked of countywide boycotts — the board relented and sent the students to another nearby school.
But, as Bill Foley would write decades later, “the civil rights career of Eddie Mae Steward had just begun.”
Threats to her life
By 1971, the Braxton children who were a part of the 1960 lawsuit no longer were in school, leading attorney Earl Johnson to file a lawsuit in federal court with different plaintiffs: Steward and her children. Jerry, Ervin, Angela, Alta, Carla and Venetia.
“At the time, as children, we didn’t know the whole thing about what was going on,” Venetia Steward said. “But we knew the fight. We heard it every day. … And the courts agreed with her and ordered Duval County School Board to desegregate the schools.”
For Eddie Mae Steward, busing wasn’t just a desegregation tool that would involve other peoples’ children. It involved her own children.
When the lawsuit started, Venetia Steward was attending R.L. Brown Elementary on the Eastside. She ended up being bused to Southside Middle and Andrew Jackson High.
“By the time I got to Andrew Jackson, it was a very diverse school,” she said. “We had wonderful people in our classes. I loved my teachers and I learned a lot. There still were disparities, but I enjoyed attending high school.”
She says she still hears from people who want to thank her mother for making it possible for them, or someone in their family, to get the kind of education that led to college or a career.
That, of course, is not to say that everything suddenly was rosy, or that everyone appreciated the woman whose name was on the lawsuit that led to busing — and who in the 1970s became the president of the local and state NAACP.
To some, she was a troublemaker.
“There were a lot of threats made on her life,” Venetia Steward said.
She recalls one night when she was about 12 years old, going with her mother to the NAACP office off Soutel Drive.
Her mother was sitting in a chair when someone fired a shot through the window. They dove to the floor.
“I thought to myself, ‘Surely she’s going to give it up now,’” Venetia Steward said. “They were threatening us before, but this is an actual act.”
Her mother didn’t give into the threats or even this act. To the contrary, Venetia remembers quite well what her mother did moments after a bullet came through the window.
She got off the floor, sat down in the chair and returned to work.
Venetia still marvels at her mother’s fortitude. She was a single mother, divorced, raising six children. And yet she was both a tireless advocate and a caring mother.
“For her, everything was a teaching moment,” she said. “Every time she would do something, she would teach us how to do it.”
Eddie Mae Steward showed her children how to type, how to sew, how to cook. And she also showed them, and many others, how to get off the floor and keep fighting to make Jacksonville a better place.
mwoods@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4212
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Eddie Mae Steward remembered for civil rights in Jacksonville
