Booker High School

Description

Booker High School is a high school located in Sarasota, Florida. It is located in the northern area of Sarasota and is part of the school district of Sarasota County. The athletic teams are known as the Tornadoes.HistoryBooker High School is named after a teacher and educational leader in Sarasota's black community, Emma Edwina Booker. Booker moved to Sarasota in 1910 and soon helped start Sarasota Grammar School, for the education of young black children. In 1925 she led a procession of students and teachers from the old school (in Knights of Pythias Hall) to a new school built next to the railroad tracks at Lemon and Thirteenth Street (now Seventh Street) by the Rosenwald Fund. Booker served as an inspiration to many of her students and was eventually commemorated by having three schools named in her honor: Emma E. Booker Elementary, Booker Middle School, and Booker High School. The school expanded to include a high school, which graduated its first class in 1935, and in 1939 was relocated to a location on Orange Avenue in the Newtown neighborhood in north Sarasota; in the 1940s the grammar school was consolidated there as well.With the advent of school desegregation in the 1960s, proposals arose to close Booker and other traditionally African-American schools and send the students out of the neighborhood to white schools. The school was closed in 1967. The community objected to the negative impact this loss would have on the area, and eventually a boycott took place in s