Page 7 - Florida Sentinel 11-30-18

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Local Journalist Inducted Into UF Hall Of Fame
Walden Lake resident, Jeraldine Williams rose to the occasion in 1963, when she integrated the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. Her intent, as a 17-year-old high school leader from “The Bottom” in Tampa’s Ybor City, was to qualify to walk into doors formerly closed to African Americans dur- ing years of racial segrega- tion.
Fifty-one years later, in salute to her singular and heroic act, Williams rose to ovation when she was one of five alumni featured for each of the decades that her School of Journalism and Communications has been operating as an award-win- ning College.
At a recent gala, 200 alumni, students, faculty, and staff celebrated the in- duction of 33 graduates into the Hall of Fame during the Golden Anniversary of that institutional transition from school to college.
When Williams matric- ulated as the only African American student and grad- uated in 1967, the same year that the school-to-college change occurred, she singu- larly altered the demo- graphics at her college at Florida’s flagship bastion of segregated higher educa- tion.
A graduate with highest honors from Middleton Senior High School in Tampa, Williams is a product of the segregated school system in Hillsbor- ough County. She qualified to enroll at the University of Florida when she was one of three in her high school class of 222 to pass the col- lege entrance examination that had been previously re- served for White students.
Williams recalls having been introduced to the dis- cipline of journalism by C. Blythe Andrews and his son, C. Blythe Andrews, Jr., owner/publisher and editor, respectively, of the Florida Sentinel Bulletin Bi- Weekly Newspaper in Tampa. Williams worked as a school reporter, under the tutelage of the father- son duo, from ninth grade at Booker T. Washington Junior High in 1959 to twelfth grade at Middleton
ATTY. JERALDINE WILLIAMS
in 1963.
“Integrating a college
was one of my contributions to racial integration in my home state,” Williams re- calls. “Daddy, Judge Williams (an Ybor City business owner), forbade me to march, demonstrate, or protest against segrega- tion in the streets with the masses.”
In addition to the bold move to integrate Florida’s bastion of segregated edu- cation, Williams said her second meaningful contri- bution, that her uneducated father approved, was for her to help three other young people to open the Tampa office of the National Asso- ciation for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She is a lifetime member of that association.
In the same month that she became the first African American graduate from the University of Florida, Col- lege of Journalism, Williams was honored in Washington, D. C. as a na- tional Hearst Journalism Awards winner. When U. S. Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and William Randolph Hearst, Jr., presented the medallion and check to Williams in the Senate Chambers, she became the first African American in history to win the award on the national level.
However, Williams re- calls that even in the U. S. Senate chambers, she had a brush with racism.
“I still have memories of the racial slight perpetrated by Florida’s senior senator, Spessard Holland. He was a Bartow native, who was also a UF alumnus, for- mer Florida governor, con- gressman, and was one of 101 southern United States
Jeraldine Williams, right, is shown with Vice President Hubert Humphrey and William Randolph Hearst, Jr., in Washington, D. C., when she received the Hearst Journalism Award.
and former Sen. Lyndon Baines Johnson, of Texas, who had become President after John Kennedy’s assassination, felt vindicated; they were the three Southerners who had refused to sign the Southern Manifesto.”
Honors for the Negro student from “The Bottom” continued into the new cen- tury. The Hearst Founda- tion featured Williams during its 50th Anniversary at the Hearst Tower in New York in 2010.
“I made a difference that my daddy approved,” she said. In partial retirement as a practicing attorney, Williams had been named an Alumnus of Distinction at UF in 1988. She was hon- ored in 2017 by the National Association of Black Jour- nalists as the oldest profes- sionally educated Black journalist from Florida. And, in that same year, she became the first African American undergraduate to be inducted into the Univer- sity of Florida’s Grand Guard Society.
senators who defiantly signed a Southern Mani- festo to bring about a rever- sal of the U. S. Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, which ordered an end to racial seg- regation in education.
“Holland reluctantly responded to Vice Presi- dent Humphrey’s public insistence that he person- ally approach the podium to acknowledge the academic achievement of a “Negro” from his state and his alma
mater,” Williams said. “Holland was visibly un- comfortable; I represented all that the senator was against,” the integrationist from Florida said. Holland finally approached the podium to congratulate Williams; however, she re- called, “He refused to be a part of the historic picture on which I was shown re- ceiving the award.”
“I felt that Senators Al Gore, Sr., and Estes Ke- fauver, of Tennessee,
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