St. Pete is celebrated for its fabulous weather, beautiful vistas, world-class food scene, and thriving cultural atmosphere but the people of St. Pete truly make this city something special. In appreciation, each month Green Bench Monthly shines a light on one of the many people who make St. Pete unique.
As the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate at a Florida university, Dr. Johnnie Ruth Clarke’s accomplishments as one of the state’s leading educators provided a platform for her pursuit of a wide variety of humanitarian causes including uplift through education and improving health care for Florida’s impoverished populations. Although Clarke died in 1978, her legacy lives on in the Dr. Johnnie Ruth Clarke scholarships for disadvantaged and other underrepresented Pinellas County school students and with the Johnnie Ruth Clarke center opened seven years after her death as the nation’s first federally funded holistic medical clinic.
“You’re going to be somebody, or I’ll die trying.”
Despite her obvious talents, Clarke’s success was not a given. Born in 1919 and raised during the Jim Crow era, she faced significant obstacles. As Clarke noted in 1977, “My sex and race have denied me the opportunity to do some things. They set ceilings on what I can do. …. (I) have developed strategy to get around it … but the handicaps are far greater than the advantages. I still get slapped in the face every once in a while.” She began developing these plans at a young age, with the support of her parents, who were determined Clarke would, in the words of her mother, “be somebody, or I’ll die trying.” Becoming a schoolteacher was the first step in this plan; in part, because it was an “allowable” goal for a young Black woman in the pre-Civil Rights era, but mostly because her teachers at Davis and Jordan Elementary had provided inspiration. As she noted, shortly before her death, “Those wonderful black women” like Fannye Ponder and O.B. McLin, modeled a concept of “being somebody … and making a contribution.”
Education and Service
This model served her and the community well. Refusing to be limited by St. Pete’s few options for Black students, she relocated to Tallahassee, where she earned her high school diploma and then her bachelor’s degree from Florida A & M, the state’s only public historically black university. In the decades afterward, Clarke married a local dentist, gave birth to five children, taught at Bethune- Cookman College, Florida A & M, and in the Pinellas County public school system before becoming the dean of instruction at Gibbs Junior College in the 1950s. After earning that groundbreaking doctorate at the University of Florida, she became the assistant dean of academic affairs for St. Petersburg Junior College and served as a consultant to the U.S. Office of Education. Always seeking to repay (as she described it) “the society which made me” through “education and service,” she also wrote a local newspaper column, was county campaign chair for Edmund Muskie’s presidential bid, and was assistant director of the Florida Regional Medical Program. There, she established programs to battle sickle cell anemia. And that’s just a small sample of her contributions. Disparaged by some as a “militant and aggressive woman,” she understood herself to be a strategist forging a necessary path. Only months before her untimely death at only 58 years old, she spoke of this need to help: “If I died tomorrow, I would be unfulfilled because I haven’t helped all the people I can,” she said.
“I wouldn’t have learned enough.” Despite her doubt, her legacy would say otherwise.
Sources include prior research by Scott Taylor Hartzell and interviews with Clarke published in the Tampa Bay Times.
