Activism in Gainesville, Fla.

In Gainesville, over 1,000 community members came together to march through the city last summer. Many of them were students at the University of Florida, carrying on Gainesville’s significant legacy of student activism, dating back to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s.

Since the Civil Rights Movement, groups of UF students and Gainesville community members have used their voices to promote racial equality and justice. Through the decades that have followed, Gainesville’s racial and political landscape has changed. While the reason for this fight has remained similar, the means and voices have changed with new technology and legislation.

Voices of Gainesville’s Past 

Denifield Player, a Black man, was one of the first people who organized against civil rights disparities in Gainesville. In 1963, Player went to downtown Gainesville Woolworth’s, a whites-only lunch counter, with his brother and two friends. They were refused service on the basis of their skin color.

Player and his friends began testing other restaurants in Gainesville to see who would serve them. With the encouragement of his pastor, Player and his friends organized the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Youth Council in a direct effort to integrate restaurants and movie theaters.

Player as a teenager worked at the Florida Theatre, a whites-only theater in Gainesville. White audiences would often throw popcorn at him while cleaning isles. In 1963, two Black men were denied tickets to the same theater and refused to leave, which resulted in picketing. Player said the demonstration was met with venom, but not violence.

After continued picketing, particularly at the Florida Theatre, the city of Gainesville formed a biracial committee in the summer of 1963.

“That committee negotiated the integration of the movie theaters and the restaurants here in the city. And that’s how everything got started,” Player, 81, said.

Dan Harmeling, a white student, started at UF in Fall 1962, a semester when the school admitted only seven Black students. He and his brother, Jim Harmeling, would later become prominent activists in the Civil Rights Movement. In the summer of ‘63, they heard about the demonstration at the Florida Theatre on the radio. That evening, they went to the NAACP Youth Chapter meeting and signed up to picket at segregated restaurants around Gainesville.

Peaceful protest against discrimination outside College Inn across from the University of Florida campus. (Photo: Carolyn and Samuel Johnston)

Dan Harmeling later joined UF’s Student Group for Equal Rights and would picket the College Inn, a restaurant known for denying service to Black people that once stood where Social, located at 1728 W University Ave., now stands.

Dan Harmeling recalled that he was usually only joined by about 25 people when picketing.

Now, as the university and the city of Gainesville has grown, so too has its activism. Some 60 years later, the students and faculty at the university continue to advocate for the fair treatment of Black people.

The University Through the Years

In 1962, there were just a handful of Black students at UF. Harmeling estimates there were around 10,000 to 15,000 students attending, making the population of Black students far less than 1%.

Today, UF’s population of Black students is at 6.7%, well below the statewide Black population of 17%.

Player, however, was not allowed to attend UF in 1957. After growing up in Gainesville, he had to leave his hometown to attend college. UF wasn’t accepting Black students at the time, so Player graduated from Howard University. He would later return to Gainesville as a faculty member at UF.

“The irony was that when I graduated high school, I wasn’t allowed to attend the University of Florida,” Player said. “We were allowed to take the test, the entrance exam, but we weren’t allowed to attend the University of Florida, so I ended up going to Howard University in Washington D.C., and came back and got a job on the faculty. So, I find a little irony in that.”

The university did not begin admitting Black students until over a century after its founding. Dan Harmeling said the administration saw UF’s desegregation efforts as an experiment.

“My attitude about the administration — this was J. Wayne Reitz and Lester Hale and Dean Grinter, and all these names you hear all the time, and O’Connell,” Harmeling said. “As far as they were concerned, it was an experiment, and it seemed like they were … hoping that it would fail.”

Marshall B. Jones, a former UF assistant professor of psychiatry and psychology, discusses his difficulties with UF’s administration as a white activist in a memoir titled “Berkeley of the South: A History of the Student Movement at the University of Florida, 1963-1968.”

In the book, he shares how Reitz denied his tenure after Jones’ own department had already approved it. There was a subsequent trial before the Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure in 1968, with Stephen C. O’Connell, Reitz’s predecessor, who continued to deny tenure.

Jones wrote that he was seen by O’Connell and Reitz as a “radical” with too much influence on UF’s student body. He originated the Student Group for Equal Rights and was a published author advocating for the resistance against the treatment of Black people in the 1960s.

According to Jones’ memoir, the administration cited an article he wrote for an academic journal advocating for resistance as the reason for his denial of tenure.

“The administration regarded my presence on campus as a threat to the institution as it was constituted, and Reitz … had the forthrightness to say so,” Jones wrote.

However, during Jones’ trial, Reitz stated Jones encouraged students at every chance to confront authority. In the memoir, Jones reflects on a specific trip to St. Augustine, where he and other students protested for Black rights. Many students, including Harmeling and Jones, were arrested.

Dan Harmeling, along with other students from UF, traveled to Tallahassee to meet up with students from Florida A&M. It was during one of the demonstrations in Tallahassee that Harmeling was arrested along with 348 other students. (Michaela Mulligan/WUFT News)

In the end, Jones was not afforded tenure in a 3-2 decision siding with UF’s administration.

The New Faces of Activism

This past summer, over 1,000 people marched against police brutality in multiple organized marches in Gainesville.

Tiffany Pennamon, 26, is a graduate student and journalist at UF’s Smathers Libraries, Special and Area Studies Collections. Pennamon is studying African American literature and cultural studies and has documented community protests. She helped curate a historical display in the George A. Smathers Libraries and participated in some of the marches during summer 2020.

Despite the major difference in size between today’s activism, Pennamon said she sees some parallels between now and the past. For example, she said she noticed a mix of student and community-based involvement during last summer’s marches.

Pennamon said she noticed another difference between the movements — during last summer’s marches, there was support for a wider spectrum of people. For example, she said she saw a protestor holding a sign that said “Black Lives Matter” in American Sign Language.

“That also reminded me of just the accessibility and the range of people that are participating in this movement,” Pennamon said. “Sometimes we forget that there’s sub-movements within larger movements.”

She said the attention given toward the different identities and groups within the Black community — such as Black women, queer and trans folks, or disabled people — helps raise awareness for those who are oppressed or marginalized in more than one way.

But for Pennamon, some of the parallels are also disheartening.

“I’m sad because we still are fighting the same fight that our elders have had to fight before,” she said.