Gibbs Junior College was created in 1957 by the Pinellas County Board of Public Instruction to serve African-American students in St. Petersburg, Florida.
It was the first and most successful of Florida's eleven new African-American junior colleges, founded in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid the racial integration mandated by the unanimous 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision.
[1] It was named for the minister and abolitionist Jonathan C. Gibbs, who opened a private school for freed slaves after the Civil War, and was later Florida's Secretary of State (1868–1872) and then Superintendent of Public Instruction, the first African-American member of the Florida Cabinet.
[4] Free bus transportation was provided to the college by Hillsborough, Manatee, and Sarasota counties.
[7] In view of the decline in enrollment, and the pressures for integration that caused Florida's other black junior colleges to close in the mid-1960s, the Pinellas County Board of Public Instruction, on the recommendation of St. Petersburg Junior College, closed the campus in 1967.