Francina Boykin is a local historian born and raised in Apopka.
Recently, she gave a tour of the Museum of the Apopkans to former Democratic lawmaker Dick Batchelor. Apopka, she said, had a history in orange groves, in creating turpentine, and in growing potatoes.
She remembers going to see Thomas McBride, one of the first medical doctors in the Apopka area.
“He had a colored entrance around the back of his office,” Boykin said. “But at his house, if you got sick, you could go to his house.”
All this month, Central Florida Public Media is bringing you conversations around Black history. After the tour, Boykin and Batchelor sat down for a StoryCorps' One Small Step conversation.
They both attended public schools in Orange County during the time of segregation and integration.
“I’m learning so very much from you,” Batchelor later said.
“Everybody says that about me,” Boykins said. “And I often say all history lessons are not taught in the classroom. … I realized the importance and the significance of telling the stories of Black people who have been silenced.”
Meet Francina Boykin
Boykin is a retired paralegal and a community historian.
She is also one of the founding members of The Democracy Forum’s Ocoee Research Project, which helped shed light on the Ocoee Massacre, including helping to find Julius “July” Perry’s grave. Perry was a prominent Black business owner in Ocoee who was beaten and lynched when Black Ocoee residents tried to vote in 1920, sparking the Ocoee Massacre.
Boykin graduated from the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. She said her activism really started after a college class on race relations.
She also attended Phillis Wheatley School in Apopka during segregation. In her junior year there, her family got a letter that a court order was shutting down her Black school and she would have to finish high school at Apopka Memorial High School.
“I refer to it as the psychological traumas of school desegregation,” Boykin said. “Phillis Wheatley was my love, it was my life, it was culture, it was just beaming with anything a Black child would love to have in a community because it was all community based.”
Meet Dick Batchelor
Batchelor was born in North Carolina, and is the middle child of seven.
His parents were sharecroppers, and worked tobacco farms in the Carolinas. He said growing up, the only Black people he knew were field hands.
“But you didn’t know them,” Batchelor said. “And of course the attitude then, obviously a very pervasive attitude, it was racist. These are Black people, probably the kindest description that was used, and you don’t have anything to do with them. Even though we’d try to befriend the kids our age and play with them.”
As a child, he relocated to Orlando, Florida, where his father worked in construction and later as a carpenter. He went to Evans High School during segregation.
Batchelor said he didn’t make his first true Black friend until he joined the U.S. Marine Corps, which was integrated, and served in Vietnam.
“James Johnson,” Batchelor said. “We befriended each other, and he’s the one that really told me about race issues and civil rights issues and fairness issues.”
Batchelor was elected to the former Florida House of Representatives in 1974 at the age of 26 and served for eight years.
The Takeaway
Boykin and Batchelor ultimately talked for more than an hour.
Batchelor asked what Boykin thought about the news when Florida banned AP African American studies courses in high school. Boykin said you can’t rewrite history.
“But you can not tell it,” Batchelor said.
“You can take all the books you want or off the shelves or anything like that, but … it's gonna be somebody like me out here somewhere,” Boykin said.
Boykin said she draws strength from her grandmother, who survived the Spanish Flu and the Great Depression, and was only educated through second or third grade. She was also orphaned young.
“People talk about being afraid of all the changes that's coming politically,” Boykin said. “My grandmother survived through all of this when there was no rights. You know, she didn't have a right to go to school, she didn't have a right to vote. She could not get the best job.”
Boykin remembers her grandmother telling her she just needs to make a dollar. At one point, her grandmother sold homebrew from her front porch.
“I think my father was manufacturing things that he sold out of a jar too,” Bachelor said with a laugh. “But I think it was not legal at the time.”
“They had to make a living,” Boykin said.
