Left: Johnnie Ruth Clarke, academic Right: Johnnie Ruth Clarke, c1940, taught at Gibbs, first African-American woman to attain doctorate in education at UF, later Associate Dean SPJC. Photos courtesy of St. Petersburg Museum of History
People of St. Pete: Dr. Johnnie Ruth Clarke By Tina Stewart Brakebill 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
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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
