Week Three: "Headlines"

Hello, reader! What a week it has been in the course of my research! On Tuesday, I met with Dr. French to kick off the Fall semester of my independent study and catch up. In this week’s blog, I wanted to pass on a wonderful resource that was shared with me. During our call, Dr. French suggested I check out the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, a public online resource from the University of Florida, to find new secondary sources about the Gladdens. They have an entire Apopka Chief collection ranging from the 1950s to the present. While it does not cover the paper’s full history since its founding in 1923, it offers a glimpse of when the Gladdens established themselves as community leaders. Through this resource, I was able to find multiple examples of Mr. Gladden’s civic activity, which had been a murky area in my research prior to this amazing discovery. One article I found from March 28th, 1968, described the formation of the City of Apopka’s Colored Advisory Committee, which served to address the needs of Apopka’s Black community. Dr. Shofner also references this event in “History of Apopka and Northwest Orange County,” but never confirms his source for the committee members. 

The Apopka Chief: "City Council Nixes Laundromat, Appoints Six Man Colored Advisory Committee," 03-28-1968.

Within the text of this snippet, it describes the appointment of none other than Michael Gladden Jr., Marvin Zanders, Faithey Dowdell, Milton Sanders, Fletcher Sweeney, and Herman Dericho to the Colored Advisory Committee- all icons of Black history in Apopka. One pattern I noticed in articles describing Mr. Gladden’s civic legacy is that he is consistently painted by the Apopka Chief (a white newspaper) as an agitator to be proven wrong by the City. I discovered that even as late as 1981, a year before his death, Mr. Gladden demanded that Black Apopkans have equal access to sewage systems and other city amenities that were given to white residents with no questions asked. Mr. Gladden’s life work would lead to the events of Dowdell vs. City of Apopka (1983), which was a landmark lawsuit filed by Black residents in 1978 against the City of Apopka. The plaintiffs, led by Faithey Dowdell, claimed that they were deprived of their right to equal municipal services, including street maintenance, stormwater drainage facilities, water distribution, sewer access, and parks and recreational facilities. Mr. Gladden’s pestering and refusal to back down on this issue quite literally resulted in a win for Dowdell and Black residents of Apopka when it was found that the City of Apopka was virtually ignoring all complaints from Black residents in the court findings, despite their denial of such blatant discrimination. 

Mrs. Gladden's Teacher's Handbook, 1967-1968.

Along with this new resource, I found myself on a hunt for Mrs. Gladden’s lesson plans in order to be able to digitize them soon. After communicating back and forth with Ms. Boykin as to where they could possibly be located, Ms. Boykin suggested that they might have been with the Gladden Collection binders all along! After describing what the cover looked like, I was able to locate it in a binder focused more on the subject of Phyllis Wheatley's history. The book Ms. Boykin was describing turned out to be a teacher’s handbook that Mrs. Gladden wrote while working as principal of Phyllis Wheatley Elementary School. The handbook is from the school year of 1967 to 1968, and even names William Gladden Sr. as the school’s bus driver in the first few pages. I have yet to examine the artifact in full, but I can’t wait to tell you more about it next week, reader! See you then!