When Lincoln High School football coach Jesse Heard’s team ran onto Citizens Field to compete for a spot in the playoffs in the fall of 1969, they knew it could be their last time wearing their red and white jerseys.
The all-Black Fighting Terriers faced Jacksonville’s all-Black Raines High School, who were coached by one of Heard’s former teammates.
As with every LHS football game, Gainesville’s Black community showed up in corsages and dressed to the nines with nothing but pride to cheer on their Lincoln football boys. They filled the stands and poured onto the field.
Murmurings that LHS would be closing that school year to integrate the Black students into white schools had already surfaced to the players’ attention before the football game. In November 1969, a federal court ordered all-Black schools to either desegregate or shut down.
The football team decided to take their fate into their own hands. As long as their district competitor, Lake City, lost to keep LHS in the playoffs, they’d stay in school. But that wasn’t the outcome.
“The kids said they knew they were leaving,” said Heard. “They said that they would stay in school as long we were in the playoffs. Lake City won that night, so we turned in all our equipment, and school was over. I started school the next morning, and they were telling people to go back.”
On Jan. 31, 1970, during the middle of the academic year, principal John Dukes officially closed the doors of LHS, ending an era of Gainesville’s first all-Black school, which began as Union Academy, as well as a refuge of identity and belonging the Black community was denied everywhere else.
Black families were forced to decide which white schools to relocate their children to, while teachers, administrators and coaches were transferred to white schools. LHS students boycotted the shutdown by not going to school and taking to the streets to peacefully march in protest. Starting from LHS, they marched to the Plaza of the Americas at UF and then to the school board office.
“The football team had organized with some leadership on it, and they held rallies and protests and all that,” Heard said. “They marched downtown, and they had meetings. I attended one meeting.”
On Saturday—over 55 years since LHS was shut down—dozens of alumni, former faculty and staff, and Alachua County School Board and community members put on their Lincoln reds and whites and gathered at the entrance of Lincoln Middle School (1001 SE 12th St.)—the site of the former LHS—to celebrate the LHS Memorial Wall’s final installment.
The LHS Alumni Association’s Memorial Wall project was spearheaded by Albert White, a 1962 graduate and the first quarterback of Heard’s, and has been 15 years in the making, with each stage getting completed as funding has allowed. Saturday’s event unveiled the final piece: 2,869 names of LHS graduates from 1923 to 1970 etched into the red granite walls.
“Lord, you gave us all an opportunity to come and be in a great institution where we were cared for, where we were loved,” prayed Rev. Ronald Foxx, LHS class of 1969, at the event. “We thank you.”
The LHS Alumni Association designed the wall in the shape of a T for the Terrier mascot. Along with the rosters of graduates, etchings enshrine LHS’s alma mater into the wall and honor wall visionary White and former principal A. Quinn Jones’s legacies.
Costing over $140,000, many of the funds were raised through donors and sponsors. The construction companies building the wall donated most of their time and resources. With around $30,000 still to cover, the LHS Alumni Association also sold T-shirts and memorial bricks at the wall event to help with the remaining costs and will hold a fundraiser at 4 p.m. on March 28 at David’s BBQ.
The wall’s design leaves room to fill the surrounding grass with bricks commemorating future Lincoln Middle School graduates, making the wall a “living wall.”
“As we stand before this beautiful memorial wall, we see more than just engraved stone,” said White’s daughter, Candice White Jackson. “We see a school reborn. We see a community that refused to forget. We see a living, breathing piece of history that will stand for generations telling the story of Lincoln High School, its students, its leaders and its unwavering spirit.”
After standing to sing the alma mater together, alumni unwrapped the memorial and walked around touching their names and friends’ names carved in the reflective walls, thinking back on the memories of faith, hard work and love lived out by their LHS educators, celebrating another milestone of healing the past.
“I think this wall is going to say a lot of things,” said Catherine Mickle, a former math teacher at Lincoln. “We’re going to think about history, number one, and we’re going to think about the love that the students and the faculty have for Lincoln High School. And we’re going to think about integration too. We’re going to think about integration and how it was back then.”
At 89 years of age, Mickle smiles when she closes her eyes, recalling her days at Lincoln, what she calls the “best days” of her decades-long teaching career.
When Mickle came to LHS in 1957, she was a new Bethune-Cookman College graduate and newlywed to LHS tailor teacher and swim coach Andrew Mickle. After working as A. Quinn Jones’s secretary for a few years, Catherine was hired as a math and general business education teacher.
Mickle said Lincoln was special because it was more like a family than a school. The teachers knew the parents and the parents were invested in their children’s education. She said home visits were a regular part of her weekly routine, as well as updating a large register on attendance, grades and other disciplinary measures.
Mickle said Lincoln taught courses that prepared students for college and classes like tailoring and carpentry that gave them skills to succeed in trades the community needed.
But like most all-Black schools at the time, the teachers did not have the proper teaching resources. The problem was exacerbated at Lincoln by overcrowding. According to White and Kevin McCarthy’s book “Lincoln High School: Its History and Legacy,” some 70% of LHS students were bused to Lincoln from surrounding cities.
“The problem is that we just weren’t equal,” Mickle said. “We weren’t equal in textbooks and materials, and we were given hand-me-down books and things were just not equal from the county office. The books we were using, we opened them up and they had GHS [written] in them and other schools’ names.”
They also weren’t equal in pay. Arthur White wrote in “The History of Lincoln High” that Lincoln teachers averaged 10% to 30% less in salary than white teachers with similar experience.
But no matter the discrepancies in treatment, Mickle said she always taught her students to do unto others as they would have done unto them—to respect themselves and respect others.
This investment in believing in the individual student to overcome through love despite what the world taught them is what 1969 LHS graduate and former student of Mickle’s, Barbara Watson Andrews, said keeps her indebted to her time at LHS.
“My teachers, I give them credit for the goals that I achieved in life,” Andrews said. “They helped us in a whole lot of ways not just in the classroom, but to be young ladies, how to carry yourself in the community…When I needed something and I needed to confide in my teachers, they were there to help us and to guide us and they worked with our parents.”
After Lincoln shut down, Mickle was transferred to the county office before eventually getting back into teaching at Eastside High School. She said overall it was just a sad time.
“We just felt unwanted, not appreciated, taken advantage of, it was just not a good feeling,” she said. “You think you know you’ve done the best you could do, and then we don’t have the support to keep it open. [They said] students are not good enough, and they want to just send them away.”
Heard was transferred to Buchholz High School after the shutdown, where he became the school’s first football coach and athletic director. He said he and the Black community were “working so darn hard” to make the transition that there really wasn’t space to cope with it until challenges forced them to.
“The kids were fantastic,” he said. “There were some outside agitators telling them what they shouldn’t do and all this…and they came back and told me, and I said, ‘well, that’s all right. That’s his opinion. Let him go.’ It was a job to do, and we worked at it. You stay busy, make no excuses. Just line up and show up.”
Even though she graduated before the shutdown, Andrews said hearing of Lincoln’s closing still hurt. Although the class of 1970 was allowed to go back to Lincoln for a graduation ceremony, they did not receive diplomas from their red and white home.
But Andrews said seeing the community come together for the wall gives her hope. Hope that the community can remember Lincoln without a wounded spirit.
“I think it’s going to represent a healing time in the Black community and in Gainesville as a whole,” Andrews said. “A lot of whites and other races, they didn’t experience what we experienced at Lincoln. We come back to thank [the teachers]. We honor them. We honor the Lincoln High School Alumni Association. We honor the educators and letting them know how much we appreciated them, and thank them for all of their leadership, for their patience, for their understanding, for loving us as students.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated for the correct spelling of Raines High School and range of years of alumni honored on the wall as 1923-1970.