Lake-Sumter State College

Johnson Junior College, located at 1200 N. Beecher St. in Leesburg, Florida, opened its doors in 1962 for black students at the same time as Lake-Sumter Junior College for white students. It was designed to serve Lake and Sumter Counties. It was one of eleven black community colleges which were founded, at the urging of the Florida Legislature, in the late 1950s and early 1960s to show that a "separate but equal" educational system for blacks existed in Florida; the Legislature wished to avoid the integration mandated by the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. At the time, there was no nearby college for Negroes, and the distances and lack of funding effectively closed off most local Blacks from college. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)