Braithwaite School

Our Segregated Past

From 1885 until the US Supreme Court Brown v Board of Education decision in 1955, Florida schools were prohibited by law to teach white and black children in the same school. In 1906, colored school #9 was established in Deerfield in a one room structure near NW 1st Avenue. It was destroyed in the Hurricane of 1928.

In 1929, Colored School #13 ( aka The Rosenwald School) was built to educate African American students in Deerfield. The school name was later changed to Braithwaite School in honor of ex-slave, poet and writer William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite . The school motto was “to educate, to elevate and to cultivate”.

It wasn’t until 1969-70 that the Braithwaite School closed with 464 students, 100% African American.