Alumni, former staff look back on Jones High School's 130 years

Yahoo

26-02-2025

There is a unique pride and confidence that resonates throughout the campus of the historic Jones High School, a school that is marking 130 years.
When students walk onto the campus, there is an expectation of excellence, and there are daily reminders of what it means to be a Tiger. All of that pride derives from the segregation its early founders, students and staff persevered through, determined to create a space for Black children filled with hope, love and courage. But most of all, belief that no matter the color of their skin, no matter the obstacles of the world, with an education from Jones High School, students can overcome and be successful.
More than 20 former students, administrators and teachers spoke to Eyewitness News about their experiences at the school and how it shaped who they've become today as they commemorate 130 years of Jones.
Jones High was believed to be established in 1895.
'It started out as elementary for the most part, with some high school elements. And then they moved,' said Jones High graduate Walter Hawkins.
The school was located on three sites prior to landing at its existing location. It started on land in the area of the former Orlando Police Department headquarters.
'And then later it moved to another site, which is Chatham Avenue and Washington Streets, which is a block from the Callahan Center. And that was also Johnson Academy. And they started to add on higher grades in school,' Hawkins said.
The name Johnson Academy is derived from its third principal, Lymus Johnson. The school had no electricity on campus, so the principal - in his small office - kept time by using a handheld bell to start the school day, alerting students and teachers that it was time for recess, lunch and the end of the school day.
Teachers took turns providing lunch and snacks, according to historical records at the Jones High Historical Society Museum, which Hawkins oversees.
Eventually, in 1912, L.C. Jones became the principal of Johnson Academy, and his family donated nearby land for construction of a new building on Parramore Avenue and Washington Street, naming it Jones High School.
'The school was seventh through 12th grades. The school was a two-story frame, and the home economics department was like a white frame building, and it sat in the back of the campus just away from the basketball court,' said former student Lorraine Harris. 'We had a clay basketball court out back. And in addition to being a storage, that was like, I guess we would call it a basement, but it wasn't down under, and that was the physical education department where they kept equipment. When we got to the unit on dance, folk dance, modern dance, that's where we danced in the basement before the prom. We always had a unit in dance.'
Hawkins said that at the time, the area where the school was located wasn't called Parramore. It was just a Black community.
'And each one of those areas had their own sub- areas of the community. As we see it today, everybody is located in one district and they use that purpose for the Community Redevelopment Agency to get state funding, that was part of money coming into the district. And as we all know ,the community did not have representation for the longest of years. We didn't have an Orlando City Council person. Other areas had their district representative, but the Washington Shores, Parramore area didn't have that representative,' Hawkins said.
Orlando was still small at the time, but it was growing.
'And in the Black community, almost everybody could know everybody. Certainly everybody in the church that you attended knew you. And so the teachers knew you as a student, but they also knew you at home too, and knew your parents,' Harris said.
Charlie Walker, the first Black Orlando fire chief, was a student at Jones too.
'This was the only African American high school in the city of Orlando, Jones High School was, and so everybody that lived in the city of Orlando, even out in the county, went to Jones,' said Walker.
Florida mirrored the rest of the South prior to desegregation. And Barbara Burns has a clear recollection of what that meant for children in school at the time, recalling that Black students from as far away as Groveland in Lake County and Tildenville in west Orange County had to find their way to Jones.
'All the teachers were Black and all the kids were from the Black neighborhood. It was community. If your parents didn't scold you, the other parents would take care of that. But everybody was looking out for everybody,' Burns said.
There were no buses for Black children, and the growing community forced the school board to consider how to manage the exploding student population at Jones and what had been Kentucky Street School, which was later renamed Holden Street Elementary, the only schools for Black children in first through sixth grades.
'And those schools had been in double session,' Lorraine Harris explained. 'Part of the kids came to school early in the morning up until just past midday, and others came a little later, like 11:00 a.m. or so, and they were there until 5 p.m. because the schools were not large enough. We had not kept up with building enough schools.'
There was a lot of resistance from the white community to build new schools for Black students, particularly in their neighborhoods.
'Then you saw housing and subdivisions coming up. You had Lake Richmond Estates, you had Demetree and all those places start building houses, so Blacks started moving out to those too, but the projects remained,' said former Jones High student Ernest Page Sr., who also served on the City Council and was the interim mayor.
Finally there was talk about moving Jones to a new site.
'Orange County specifically said 'let's do it' because they were starting to see some migration in the Washington Shores area. You start to see the Washington Shores Homeowner's Association. You start to see Murchison Terrace. So a lot of the shift of the Black community move west,' Hawkins said.
Moving Jones further west didn't change much for Black students.
'If you can visualize Washington Street and the Parramore area over there by the soccer stadium. We had to walk to school. They told us that we didn't live far enough to have buses, so we had to walk to school. Rain, sunshine, heat, we had to walk to school every day. And there's even kids that lived farther than we did on the other side of Robinson Street and those areas over there. They had to walk to school. We were used to it, and we loved coming to school. We wanted to learn, and we had to navigate through some white neighborhoods. And of course some neighborhoods, they didn't want us to come through there, which was like shortcuts, so we had to kind of go around, but knowing us, we always found a way. The best way to get to school without having to go through those neighborhoods,' said Walker.
Students of the old Jones recollect a campus that was very clean amd where teachers would stand at the doors to greet students every morning.
'And they always had something positive to say to us. I really liked that environment. And I knew some of the teachers. I didn't know all of them prior to arriving at Jones, but I got to meet the rest of the teachers that I did not know,' said Jones. 'All the academics were great. And you would love the teachers. You didn't have the same books that they had at other schools.'
'No, we did, we did. We had that. So you said, like hand-me-down books,' Walker said.
'All of our books had all those schools, which were the white schools name stamped in them. Sometimes they had writings of the prior student's name,' Harris said.
'I think we were aware of that we were getting these old books. Why can't we have new books sometimes,' Harris said. 'It wasn't until I finished college and came home to teach, and I discovered what was happening in the public school in Florida. Every seven years we rotate books. You get with newer information, newer updates. And so when those books were outdated, so that meant we were being taught from books that were like seven years behind in terms of information.'
But the students weren't discouraged by the outdated books. Many reflected on how the teachers made up for what wasn't in black and white.
'We had great teachers that taught us from those books, and I think they had some of the books that the other schools had. They had some of those books, but we didn't have them as individuals, so they would teach us from the books that some the other schools had, but we didn't physically have them to study at home,' Walker remembered.
And it wasn't just the books that the students got secondhand from the white schools.
'Because of segregation, we were getting the hand-me-down books from Boone and all the schools, we got their leftover (band) uniforms, but it was the community that made sure that orange and green real proudly wear,' Carl Maultsby said.
'The parents took the white stripe that goes down the side of the pants, they removed that white stripe and sewed on a green stripe,' said Ernest 'Pete' Boyd.
In 1952, Jones High School was finally moved to Rio Grande in Orlando, where it remains.
The school board had been forced to figure out how to manage the growing Black population of students still learning under legal segregation with outdated books handed down from white schools.
'With the teachers that we had, we never felt that we were well behind because teaching comes from more than the books. I think from the time I was elementary to high school, the teachers were extremely good, educated teachers. They went beyond every day, beyond what was in that used book that was presented to them. I remember specifically one of my - history - what he taught me government, Mr. Gripper, and every day each student had to give a report on two articles from the daily paper. I laugh because there was one student, he would just make up stuff and Mr. Gripper would say, 'Boy, stop throwing dust in this class.' I guess it was telling you to take responsibility for yourself. You define, you pursue, you work hard. If you study hard, you can be, and that's what we were taught, 'you could be,'' Harris said, reflecting on her time at Jones.
'I think we owed that to the community because there's a lot of people in the community that went to bat for us and they want us to succeed in life and everything, and we felt like we didn't want to let them down,' Walker said.
Jones High was built on the needs of the Black community since its inception.
'It was also the location of where Jones High had its major community events. From there Mr. (Lymus) Johnson was eventually succeeded by Mr. Jones, L.C. Jones. Now all these people I've been naming, they lived in what we now call the Parramore district, with the exception of Mr. Johnson. He may have lived in the old Jonestown. But the whole point is that the teachers lived in the community and most of the teachers were married to either professionals or business people that live in the community or the preachers. So if you went to Jones High School, you were bringing your whole community and family history with you,' Maultsby said.
The foundation at Jones was built on that sense of community.
'The people had very high respect for school and school people. You had to be very good to tell your parents something bad about a teacher because they were all in in that boat together pushing for you to get out there,' Harris said.
It's what molded those who lived here and shaped the students into who they'd become. Because it was the only school for Black families in the greater Orlando area for decades, it was a revolving door for generations.
'My sister Barbara Burns graduated from Jones High School, and her two children, Bakari, who took my place as a (city) commissioner, and her daughter graduated from Jones High School. Now for me, it was Ernest and Tammy, and then they had two children and they too were interested in going to Jones High School. But the generation grew, so they had to go to other schools,' Ernest Page Sr. said.
'I'm the third generation in my family who's attended Jones, and we still have family members attending today. So my dad, my uncles, aunts, they all attended Jones High School,' said Sherry Paramore, who is the vice president of institutional advancement at Bethune Cookman University. 'One thing I will say about Jones is I knew that this was bigger than myself, like I knew that I was a part of a community, but that's all I've ever known. My math teacher lived across the street from my grandmother. We lived down the street from my dad's classmate (Alzo Reddick) who was a state representative of ours already. So it was definitely a sense of community, .
Her math teacher was Barbara Burns, whose son Bakari is now an Orlando city commissioner and former student of Jones.
'It was always known that we will go to the great Jones High School. And it was a source of pride for us as well. Where I was raised, we were scheduled or zoned to go to Oak Ridge, so a lot of the individuals in my neighborhood actually went to Oak Ridge, but it was one street. All the kids went to Jones High School, and that was the street that I lived down. So it was it was a badge of honor, truly, to attend Jones High School,' said Bakari Burns.
And his mother, like so many other teachers, lived in the neighborhood. The impact of that can't be understated.
Teachers were invested in the future generations not only because these were Black children they were trying to raise during height of segregation and inequality, but there were personal connections.
'I wanted them to keep on understanding that it's important as a Black person to succeed, so you need to do your best in everything that you did. I was strict, but they appreciate. I see them now and they appreciate it,' Barbara Burns said. 'I didn't want anybody to fail. And I don't think anybody could tell you that they failed my class. They could call me up to 9:00 at night and I would help them with their assignment. Now when they came back the next day, if they didn't call me, I'm like, 'why didn't you didn't call me.''
Paramore recalled Burns was more than a strict teacher, saying 'She made sure that we that she was preparing us for the world, for careers and to be successful.'
The band and choral students at Jones operated on another level.
The Jones High School band is probably the best representative of how Jones was a community venture. James Wilson came to Jones to start a band in 1950 at the request of the community. 'Chief Wilson' was an icon at Jones, paving the way for the Jones High band to perform all over the world and developing students into musical greats.
'Chief was from Sanford, and he came in 1950. Well, if you ever see any pictures of the first Jones High School concert or the first band sitting on the stage at the old Jones High School there wearing black bottoms and white tops. They didn't have uniforms yet. They somehow or other got their first set of uniforms from Boone High School, and it was members of the community who were seamstress that took those orange and white uniforms from Boone High School, which at the time I think may have been called Orlando High School, but we know it as Boone High School. It was orange and white. Members of the community who were seamstress bought these green ribbon stripes and sewed them over those old uniforms. Not only were we the students at Jones High, because of segregation, getting the hand-me-down books from Boone and all the schools, we got their leftover uniforms, but it was the community that made sure that orange and green real proudly wear,' Maultsby said
It was 'Chief Wilson' who got students in the community interested in the band.
'The piano teacher in the community was the choral director at Jones High School, Mrs. Leslie B. Weaver, and she evaluated me and told my mother that, yes, I should begin piano lessons. So I began piano lessons at age 5. I became interested in the band, going to Chief Wilson coming to the elementary school, and I became interested and I wanted to play the saxophone and I picked it up. I picked it up so quickly that I needed a great a challenge, so he encouraged me to play French horn,' said Portia Maultsby, who split her time between band and piano.
The community built what would become necessary as the students and staff prepared for desegregation. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in 1954, Florida was slow to comply.
'They first transferred teachers. Teachers who were teaching at Black schools were reassigned, many of them to white schools. Teachers who were assigned to white schools in the Orange County public school system were reassigned to Black schools. I had my first white teacher when I was in the fifth grade, and there was some turmoil around that whole issue because teachers on both sides were upset about having to be forced to go somewhere that was not where they had ever taught before,' Mayor Jerry Demings said.
Demings said he had about 270 students in his class at Jones in the early 1970s and only about 30 students who went to Jones High School were white.
'Many more whites should have been going to Jones High School, but because of rebellion, either they moved out of their homes where they lived to avoid being forced to go to a predominantly Black high school, or they couldn't afford to leave and those students typically lived within walking distance. And that's why we had white students, but it was very few of them that attended,' Demings said.
It took more than 15 years to fully desegregate schools in Florida, leading to legal battles. Documents are inside of a museum on the Jones High School campus.
Barbara Burns, who was a teacher by then, recalls what it was like for her, saying 'When I came to Orlando in 1976, they wouldn't allow me to teach at Jones. They said they had their quota of Blacks. That's where they were putting their names and fishbowls.'
In explaining the fishbowl system, she said, 'They would put Black people names in a bowl and pick them. 'OK, you're going to go to this white school. You're going to go to this school.' I had to go to Liberty to teach, and my principal would let me come after school to teach. Would help Mr. Wilson, I was his assistant band director. And then I told Mr. Wright, I said, 'If you can't get me over here to teach at Jones, I can't keep leaving Liberty coming over here.' And so Mr. Carter, he retired, so they eased me into Jones. And when I got here, I didn't leave. I was here 28 years. I was not going anywhere. And I remember when they built, Dr. Phillips, we had several white teachers who went to Dr. Phillips, and they were trying to recruit me to go to Dr. Phillips to teach. I said, 'What are we going to do at a football game? I'm rooting for Jones.' They tried to recruit me, but I want to stay here. This was my school, and I wanted to help the kids. And I knew the kids need me,' Burns said.
It was still a school system of inequalities.
'When I was bused to the predominantly white school, Memorial Junior High School, the school was completely air conditioned. When I came to Jones High School in 1974, very few portions of the school was air conditioned. The library, the maintenance of the school. it was different,' Demings said.
Jones High took a beating, physically and academically. The lack of resources, maintenance and other environmental conditions wore on Jones, its students and staff, despite expanded offerings of vocational training in dry cleaning, automotive and other trades.
It's where chef Nick Aiken learned how to cook, which he had started during his time at what was Holden Elementary.
'I went out and start washing dishes and smelling all the good cooking. And back in the day they didn't have but four tables back there, and they would say 'you're a good worker because you show up on time every day.' I saw how to do things on a large scale, cooking with big pots and stuff,' Aiken said.
The trades and vocational programs were part of one of three tracks at Jones, including one for students with unique abilities and, of course, academics.
But enrollment was declining from a high of about 1,900 students to just 800 by the early 1970s.
'The pattern was close down the Black school. Make it a vocational school. Make it a junior school and save the white high school. I couldn't understand that because Jones, Edgewater and Boone were all similar construction. What was wrong with our school,' Reddick said.
Talk at school board headquarters was that Jones needed to close.
'The thought of taking the school away or closing it down, was just not what we were going to do. So what we did a group of us, the whole class, we marched off the campus. I'll never forget - Wilbur S. Gary was our principal - we walked off this campus and told them we were going to school board and at the time the school board headquarters was on Tampa Avenue. And we told them you're not going to close down Jones High. We will sit here every day,' school board Commissioner Vicki Felder recalled.
'It was an age of rebellion, an age of being able to recognize. It was an awakening, for us to know that we needed to preserve this school. Most of us had grandparents. I didn't, but many of my classmates, their mothers, grandmothers went to Jones High School, so we felt like we needed to fight, and look at it 130 years,' Felder said.
It worked, but it wouldn't be the last time the school board tried to come for Jones.
'I was a little intimidated by that, to go to high school because I had no role models to see how it had been done by a female. This community loves Jones High School. One thing for sure that was even resistance was sending a woman here as a principal because some people thought this kind of woman went to high school, so you're putting a woman there so she can't run it, so you can close it.' Clara Walters said about her time as principal at Jones.
Inside of the school halls, Jones High was falling apart physically and academically when Walters stepped onto campus in 1981.
'There were some people who felt that way. There was resistant. If you look in the Sentinel records, there was an article on that in the Sentinel when I was sent. But I knew what my charge was, and what I was going to do. It was no time before the whole community was lined up behind me, and what I was trying to do for their school because I knew what they wanted. They wanted the best. They wanted the best for their children. They want their children to behave. They want their children to get a good education while they were out there working and busting their chops to get them to school, so I was just mom away from home,' Walters said.
Walters was the first woman to lead the school, following 11 men. Her predecessor expanded the curriculum, offering vocational training in cosmetology, dry cleaning, sewing and auto mechanics. And there was help for students with unique abilities.
'They taught me another lesson: how to make what I can be other than what I am. That's why I started thinking different. How do me more successful. That's why I got into food service. Because I could create. They showed me how to create apple pie, candy yams, recipes stuck in my head for the rest of my life. They told me without the customer, I would have no money,' said Aiken.
Still, there were other big hurdles for Jones as Walters took over the campus, like state testing and integration shifts.
'We also had rivals. We had Hungerford, which was over in Eatonville. We had Wheatley, which was in Apopka. We had all these historically Black high schools. Now all the all those schools are gone. Jones is the one that survived out of the local central Florida schools,' said Vice Admiral David Brewer III.
'The integration process forced a lot of the dynamics of neighborhoods changing also. Now African Americans could move anywhere they wanted to versus being restricted to a certain neighborhood,' Hawkins said
Walters knew she needed to focus on even as that shift was taking shape.
'They had started, and we were not doing well on the testing and the grade, the school grades. There were many issues with the state testing. When you haven't been exposed to some things, there's no way. It doesn't mean you don't have the ability. I could understand those things because I had graduated from a segregated high school,' Walters said.
She knew the children had the ability, but she wanted them to get the exposure and work to figure out what they needed at the school to help students achieve success.
'Because of the fact that all schools get the same funding from the state, but there are many other things that schools get money from. Parent groups raising funds, certain academic courses bring funds. And if you didn't have those courses, you miss that funding. So those were part of the problem, and we needed many additional things added onto to the school,' Walters said.
She and the other staff members controlled what they could. She focused on the identity of the school.
'The address for the school was 1400 West Cypress St. when I came here. Well, where's that? That's the road that comes through the school yard. I wanted this school to have an identity. I turned the back of the school into where the entrance is now. I turned it around. I wanted people to know where it was right away. And then I had them to build the wall there and put the name of the school,' she said.
From building the identify, Walters worked on relationships with the community and the students. Students felt it.
'One of my main memories that I have about how serious Dr. Walters was was that we couldn't wear shorts. Other high schools could wear shorts. But at Jones High School you were not wearing shorts while Ms. Walters was there. But she was very loving. And I can remember the motto at the time was 'excellence with caring.' You were always reminded how a Tiger acts, how a Tiger performs. And so that was always in our mind that if you were a Jones High Tiger, there was a high level of expectation,' Bakari Burns said.
Major renovations took shape under Walters' administration as she lobbied for a new campus that took years to become a reality just two years before Bridget Williams was moved to Jones in 2006 with very direct marching orders from the state, once again targeting Jones.
'The school had earned, I believe, five Fs in a row at the time, and there was a lot of pressure from the state and there were a lot of mandates that were put in place. For instance, we had to let all the teachers go. I had to rehire the entire faculty and staff. And I had a week to get all of that done. In addition to that, students were allowed to leave on transfers because the school that earned an F,' Williams said.
The same foundation the school was built on throughout the early 1900s, that sense of community, is what showed up at the front office to help Williams save Jones High School.
Surrounding homes and neighborhoods looked different, but that Tiger pride and a love for Jones High School remained.
'I will never forget that. I had teachers that had graduated from the school or those who had kids that had graduated from the school that showed up in the lobby and wanted to work for Jones High School. And that's what I wanted. I wanted teachers that wanted to be here, and at the same time, teachers that understand the standards. I wanted every kid here to be in a position to where they had a goal. They had a plan, and that game plan was for them to walk across their state, period,' Williams said.
That's not the end of the story. The success of what started to develop inside of the classrooms there made headlines because it was truly unbelievable, except the state didn't account for a community willing to fight for what it built.
'I gave the school everything I had, and it worked. We went from a 47% graduate, which was the lowest in the state at the time, to 93.4%. The only school that beat us that last year, had a higher graduation rate than us, was Winter Park High School, and that bothered me. And we went from five Fs in a row to a B, I think we were like five points from an A. So the students, the parents, the community, everyone stepped up to the plate. The state actually had someone housed on this campus who was with me every day. That was the first time I had ever heard of that,' Williams said.
Williams said if she had failed, the school might not be open today.
'The state actually, at the time the option was to turn it over to a charter school because the first year, once again, students were given an option to come and go. Enrollment went down, but we got that enrollment right back up. But once again, it was the hard work and not just from me, from the folks that we hired, from folks that believed in me, believed in the school. And that's, to me, what's so unique about Jones High School. This is a community school. They love this school. And I learned a lot about Jones when I was here. There's no school like Jones. There's no community like the Jones High School community. That's why the school will always be here. They will fight for this school because there's so much history here,' she said.
There are many notable faces attached to the Jones High School. It's a constant reminder for current and future students of what's possible.
The hall of fame outside of the Jones High Historical Society Museum on campus showcases many of their faces.
'It's really showing all of our students that they can be somebody, that no matter what your hurdles are, no matter where you came from, whether you're poor, you're middle class, rich, you can do anything that you want to do. And we see that in all of the different students that came through Jones High School, that are commissioners, that are in our a political environment, as well as doctors, lawyers, all of those professions. There's nothing that you can't do,' Adrienne Bell said.
Lorraine Harris, who remembers Jones before it was on the existing campus, says the persistence of the students is a staple of their character. She said, 'It's more than just a building and the books. It's the people.'
This sentiment is shared by Walters. She said, 'When you look at all of the people who are making such contributions to this community, what can you say. We've made our contributions to this community, and no matter how you try to crush that down, it's there. You can't erase it.'
The students who attended Jones also learned the importance of giving back during their time on campus because it was the community who poured so much into their success.
'My (late) brother knew that he had received a great education at Jones High School, and he knew that other people, especially Black students, needed to receive a quality education,' said Janice Rogers Choice.
Choice's brother Ron Rogers, along with Belvin Perry, started an organization on campus to mentor students and worked with the community to raise money for scholarships.
'We've given close to, with the community's help, close to $2 million in scholarships to graduates of Jones High School. And that's a part of giving back. That's a part of taking what we got from Jones and imparting it to others,' Perry said.
If you ever spot Demings around town, you'll see he still wears his class ring from Jones. He worked hard to purchase that ring himself.
'I wear my Jones High School class ring because this is where I got the foundation. This is where I interacted with people like Dr. James R Smith, Admiral Brewer and others who would come back and they would tutor us to ensure that we would do well on the entrance exams to get into college,' he said.
Demings also remarked on his school pin, saying the school pushed students to believe they could be as successful as we wanted to be, regardless of their color or heritage.
The alumni also started a foundation back in 1993, in part because they wanted to be the ones to provide and fill gaps for resources students needed on campus.
'Louise Denkins, my classmate, started the Jones High School Foundation, and that was started in 1993 to really empower and anchor the school. We've raised over $500,000 in the last eight years,' Brewer said.
'The foundation has been laid. It's up to you now to walk across the foundation and feel good at the end, and that you are a Tiger at the end of your experience here,' Walker said.
'We're celebrating 150 years of Orlando and also celebrating 130 years of Jones High School. So when you think about the history of Orlando, there was only 20 years in Orlando's history where Jones High was not established, and so I truly believe that Jones High is a very important piece of Orlando because of all the people who have been educated here and all the people who have been educated have come back to this community who served,' Bakari Burns said.
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