The Buckman Act was a Florida law passed by the state legislature in 1905.
It reorganized the state's institutions of higher learning and created a Florida Board of Control to govern the system.
Gainesville was chosen for the location of the new school among several competing cities, and the UF campus opened in 1906.
The Buckman Act was discontinued after World War II, when the GI Bill provided a college education for returning U.S. military veterans, the overwhelming majority of them male.
Civil rights efforts and federal legislation in the early 1960s also led to all three institutions becoming racially integrated during that decade, although FAMU remains a historically black university, with over 87% of its student body African-American as of 2014.