Published on February 23, 2026 at 6:24 pm
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BLACKSONVILLE 100 | People who left Jacksonville, and the world, a better place than they found it.
Pearl White
Educator, swim instructor | Pearl White taught hundreds of Jacksonville children how to swim at the Johnson Family YMCA in Northwest Jacksonville between 1969 and 2004. White’s aquatic advocacy began when she nearly drowned in the St. Johns River as a toddler. Later she joined the Jefferson Street Swim Club. It was operated by Jacksonville Recreation Department employee Julius Guinyard, who also taught scores of people to swim at the city’s first pool for Black residents.
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(Photo submitted by the White family)
Clanzel T. Brown
Community organizer | Clanzel T. Brown served as executive director of the Jacksonville Urban League during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Brown recruited Black people to apply for jobs within the Jacksonville Police Department and Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department, as well as the local construction industry. Under his leadership, in 1977, the Jacksonville Urban League produced its inaugural State of Black Jacksonville report, a precursor to the Jacksonville Community Council’s annual race relations report. Brown was also the first Black person to serve on the Downtown Development Authority. Brown died in 1982 at age 49. A park and playground at Golfair Boulevard and Moncrief Road in Northwest Jacksonville was renamed Clanzel T. Brown Park in 1983.
(Photo submitted by Mickee Brown)
Brig. Gen. Emmett Paige
Military officer | Jacksonville native Emmett Paige grew up on the Eastside and attended the Franklin Street School. He dropped out of school at 16 and joined the Army in 1947, months before it was desegregated. According to a U.S. Army biography, Paige earned a perfect score on the Army’s Morse Code exam, which allowed him to join the Signal Corps. He became a military officer in 1952, and, in 1976, became the first Black Signal Corps officer promoted to brigadier general. Between 1993 and 1997 he served as assistant secretary of defense for command, control, communications and intelligence. Paige dedicated a majority of his 41-year military career to improving communications systems. Paige went on to earn an undergraduate degree from the University of Maryland and a master’s from Pennsylvania State. He retired from the Army in 1988. “To be just as good would cause me to be considered below average,” Paige said during his lifetime. “So I worked harder. I studied harder. I tried to be sure that I knew my job and everybody else’s job. I read everything I could get my hands on. I survived by being the best.” Paige died in August 2017. He was 86.
Joyce Morgan
Public servant, broadcaster | Joyce Morgan grew up in Columbus, Georgia, and graduated from Jacksonville State University in Alabama prior to moving to Jacksonville in the 1980s. She served two terms on the Jacksonville City Council representing the Arlington community and, in 2023, became the first Black person and the first woman to serve as Duval County property appraiser. Before entering public service, Morgan was a broadcast news anchor for News4Jax/WJXT for 11 years.
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(Photo submitted by Joyce Morgan)
Elaine Ford Jackson
Community advocate | Jacksonville native Elaine Ford Jackson grew up on the Eastside. The daughter of prominent Eastside restaurateur William “Buster” Ford, she has preserved Jacksonville’s Gullah Geechee heritage through storytelling and community advocacy.
Sharon Coon
Community advocate | Jacksonville native Sharon Coon, a graduate of Stanton High School, is the founder of the Friends of Brentwood Library. In addition to raising funds to help save the Jacksonville Public Library branch in Brentwood, the nonprofit also sponsors community events and promotes the preservation of local Black history. Coon has also devoted more than 40 years to preserving the legacy of James Weldon Johnson, introducing children to Johnson’s impact as an educator, lawyer and poet and advocating for Johnson to be accepted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 2000. “Black history is important,” Coon said in 2025. “Our heritage is important. A lot of kids don’t know it. Their parents don’t know it. We have a great responsibility as a community to teach them. If we teach our history to our kids, get them involved, keep them involved, let them know their history, we will compete with the gangs in eliminating them. Now, we get our kids back. Because they know that they too could be a James Weldon Johnson, John Rosamond Johnson or whatever they want to be.”
(Photo by Will Brown, Jacksonville Today)
MaVynee Betsch
Environmentalist, opera singer | Jacksonville native MaVynee Betsch was born in January 1935. She grew up in the Sugar Hill community and earned an undergraduate degree from Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1955. She moved to Europe and performed as an opera singer for a decade. In 1975, she committed her life to saving American Beach, the Nassau County beach community her great-grandfather, Abraham Lincoln Lewis, developed in 1935 as a hamlet for Black beachgoers. Her environmental advocacy helped save portions of the largest dune system along Florida’s Atlantic Coast and generated the financial and community support for the A.L. Lewis Museum to open in September 2014. She died in September 2005 at age 70.
(Photo courtesy: A. L. Lewis Museum. Photo by Bob Self.)
Anna Jai Kingsley
Plantation owner | Anna Jai was born in Senegal in 1793. In 1806, at approximately 13 years old, she was captured in Senegal, sold at a slave market, endured the Middle Passage and enslaved in the Americas. She was enslaved by the 40-something Zephaniah Kingsley Jr., who impregnated the teenager. In 1811, after Kingsley granted Jai emancipation, she managed Laurel Grove Plantation along the St. Johns River. In 1814, Kingsley and Jai moved to Fort George Island in what is now Jacksonville. Anna Jai Kingsley was an enslaver of more than 200 people, living in both Haiti and on Fort George Island, where her more than 32,000 acres produced citrus, sugar cane and corn. In the years ahead of the American Civil War, and after Zephaniah Kingsley’s 1843 death, Jai sold most of the people she enslaved, allowing Duval County to become one of the few pockets in Florida where free Black people lived. Kingsley, who died in 1870, was the great-great-great grandmother of Johnnetta Betsch Cole and MaVynee Betsch.
Reuben Brigety II
Diplomat | Jacksonville native and Sandalwood High graduate Reuben Brigety II served as U.S. ambassador to South Africa from 2022 to 2025 and, before that, U.S. ambassador to the African Union from 2013 to 2015. He earned his undergraduate degree from the U.S. Naval Academy and his master’s and doctorate from the University of Cambridge. Brigety served as dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University between 2015 and 2020. He has also served as a professor at American University and George Mason University. He has devoted his career to diplomacy and international relations with a focus on the African continent.
(Photo courtesy U.S. State Department)
Charles Spencer
Union leader | Jacksonville native Charles Spencer grew up on the Eastside and graduated from Matthew W. Gilbert High School and Edward Waters University. He has been affiliated with Jacksonville’s maritime industry since 1963. In 1984, Spencer was elected president of the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1408, where he served for 15 years before being elected executive vice president for the ILA South Atlantic and Gulf Coast. In 1995, Spencer helped create the Local 1408’s scholarship fund, which has awarded more than $1 million to local students over the last 30 years. Jacksonville Mayors Jake Godbold and John Peyton both recognized Charles Spencer Day to celebrate his service to Jacksonville. Spencer has also been an entrepreneur and has served on the boards of local organizations that focus on shipping, social justice and education.
(Photo by Will Brown, Jacksonville Today)
This entry is part of Jacksonville Today‘s Blacksonville 100, a list of influential people with ties to Jacksonville, compiled on the centennial of Negro History Week. See the whole list.
