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Booker T. Washington School (Tampa)

Schools in Tampa, Florida

Booker T. Washington School was the first high school for African Americans in Tampa, Florida. The original school opened as a junior high school and expanded to include a high school program. It closed in 1971 in the wake of desegregation. An elementary school in Tampa is named for it. A.J. Shootes was the school's first principal and Blanche Armwood Beatty was supervisor of Negro schools of Hillsbourgh County. Her firing of Shootes was controversial. Benjamin Elijah Mays of Tampa's Urban League wrote about African American audience members of a pageant held at Tampa Bay Casino being relegated to the balcony. The casino was city owned. There was also a Booker T. Washington School in New Port Richey, North of Tampa. Clemmie James and Ethel Jones, former teachers at the school, were interviewed about their experiences. A historical marker is at the site of the original school in Ybor City. The University of South Florida Libraries have a copy of the school's 1928 yearbook. The elementary school is now behind the Robert W. Saunders Sr. Public Library. It was a middle school, but in 2005 it became an elementary school. The school mascot is the hornet.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Booker T. Washington School (Tampa) (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

Booker T. Washington School (Tampa)
East Estelle Street, Tampa

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N 27.9588 ° E -82.45 °
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B. T. Washington Elementary School

East Estelle Street 1407
33605 Tampa
Florida, United States
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hillsboroughschools.org

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Ybor City
Ybor City

Ybor City ( EE-bor) is a historic neighborhood just northeast of downtown Tampa, Florida, United States. It was founded in the 1880s by Vicente Martinez-Ybor and other cigar manufacturers and populated by thousands of immigrants, mainly from Cuba, Spain, and Italy. For the next 50 years, workers in Ybor City's cigar factories rolled hundreds of millions of cigars annually. Ybor City was unique in the American South as a successful town almost entirely populated and owned by immigrants. The neighborhood had features unusual among contemporary communities in the south, most notably its multiethnic and multiracial population and their many mutual aid societies. The cigar industry employed thousands of well-paid workers, helping Tampa grow from an economically depressed village to a bustling city in about 20 years and giving it the nickname "Cigar City".Ybor City grew and flourished from the 1890s until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when a drop in demand for fine cigars reduced the number of cigar factories and mechanization in the cigar industry greatly reduced employment opportunities in the neighborhood. This process accelerated after World War II, and a steady exodus of residents and businesses continued until large areas of the formerly vibrant neighborhood were virtually abandoned by the late 1970s. Attempts at redevelopment failed until the 1980s, when an influx of artists began a slow process of gentrification. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a portion of the original neighborhood around 7th Avenue developed into a nightclub and entertainment district, and many old buildings were renovated for new uses. Since then, the area's economy has diversified with more offices and residences, and the population has shown notable growth for the first time in over half a century. Ybor City has been designated as a National Historic Landmark District, and several structures in the area are listed in the National Register of Historic Places. In 2008, 7th Avenue, Ybor City's main commercial thoroughfare, was recognized as one of the "10 Great Streets in America" by the American Planning Association. In 2010 Columbia Restaurant, which is Florida's oldest restaurant, was named a "Top 50 All-American icon" by Nation's Restaurant News magazine.