Brevard Junior College, founded 1960 in Cocoa: how it became Eastern Florida State

Eastern Florida State College began in Cocoa in 1960 as Brevard Junior College. According to the college’s own history, its first students and 31 faculty members met in the old Cocoa High School building off Forrest Avenue, which has since been torn down.

Two colleges, 1960

Brevard opened two junior colleges that year. Also established in 1960, the college’s history says, was Carver Junior College, a two-year public college that served Brevard County’s Black residents. In 1963 the two merged, and the combined college moved to its present Cocoa campus, 87 acres beside Clear Lake.

Two colleges in one county, opened the same year, is what segregation looked like in Florida’s junior-college system. Carver was one of the state’s Black junior colleges, public two-year schools that ran alongside the white ones until desegregation ended them. The finding aid for Florida A&M’s Meek-Eaton Black Archives collection on these colleges dates their closure to 1966, and its papers, mostly from 1958 to 1966, include Walter L. Smith’s study A Study of Black Junior Colleges in Florida 1957-1966. Brevard folded Carver into Brevard Junior College three years before that statewide end date.

The first president

Brevard Junior College’s first president was J. Bruce Wilson, who ran it from its opening in 1960 until 1965, according to the college’s notice of his death in 2014. He left to become the first president of the junior college in Jacksonville that’s now Florida State College at Jacksonville, and stayed there until 1970. The gymnasium on the Cocoa campus, now the J. Bruce Wilson Gymnasium and YMCA Family Center, carries his name.

Names

The school has had three names:

Year	Name
1960	Brevard Junior College
1970	Brevard Community College, when the state organized its two-year colleges into a system
July 1, 2013	Eastern Florida State College, after it added four-year bachelor’s degrees

The first bachelor’s degrees, in 2013, were two business programs, and they’re what prompted the new name. The college now has four campuses, in Cocoa, Melbourne, Palm Bay and Titusville, covering 544 acres between them, and it says it was one of the first community colleges in the country to offer the associate in arts degree online.

The college and downtown Cocoa

The college also saved one of downtown Cocoa’s landmarks. In July 1985, according to the Aladdin Theater’s National Register nomination, Brevard Community College bought the 1924 theater from the City of Cocoa for one dollar, set up a nonprofit board to run it, and rehabilitated it with private gifts and state grants. The theater’s story is on our Aladdin page.

Further Reading

• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon