Booker T. Washington School

Booker T. Washington School. . , Booker T. Washington School was named after the famous African-American educator who, in 1881, founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and who served as principal until his death in 1915. In 1912, at his speech in the Tampa Bay Hotel Casino, a sheet was placed down the aisle to separate the African-Americans in the audience from the whites. Booker T. Washington School opened in 1925, and much of the original structure still stands. Its first high school graduating class in 1926 included twelve students. A. J. Shootes was its first principal and Blanche Armwood Beatty was the supervisor of Negro schools of Hillsborough County. Booker T. Washington served as both a junior and senior high school for African-American students until the mid-1930s. When Middleton High School opened, Booker T. Washington became a junior high. Howard W. Blake was then its principal and continued in that position through the 1953-54 school year. In 1960, some Booker T. Washington students participated in peaceful demonstrations calling for the desegregation of downtown lunch counters. After the widespread integration of the Hillsborough County School system, Booker T. Washington became a seventh-grade center in 1972. It reverted to a junior high school in 1981 and served as a Magnet Middle School for International Studies from 1996 through 2003. The words of Booker T. Washington. “Excellence is doing a common thing in an uncommon way,” still ring true today in the halls of this historic institution.