Governor during time of change dies at 87

Farris Bryant, a Florida governor celebrated as a master builder of highways and universities who served during years of explosive growth and racial tension, died Friday in Jacksonville. He was 87. He died at St. Vincent's Hospital, where he had been for 10 days after he fell at home and hit his head. He subsequently suffered a stroke, daughter Cecilia Bryant said.

Bryant, Florida's 34th governor, served from 1961 to 1965, between fellow Democrats LeRoy Collins and Haydon Burns.

He left office, unable to succeed himself under Florida law at that time, and served as a White House appointee, founded an insurance company and practiced law in Jacksonville.

He made millions in the insurance business after his political career ended. He lived by himself in a spacious condominium that overlooked the St. Johns River. His home featured many pictures of his wife, Julia, who died several years ago. His study was like a museum of Florida history, the walls lined with photographs and mementos of four decades in state and national politics as House speaker, governor, and President Lyndon Johnson's coordinator of emergency planning, a job Gov. Bryant said also included acting as a mediator between LBJ and Southern governors.

Although elected on a conservative segregation platform, Bryant witnessed the rapid desegregation of Florida's public schools and the integration of public accommodations during his administration.

The most significant product of his term as governor, he said, was a constitutional amendment authorizing the sale of bonds for college construction. Three state universities were born: Florida Atlantic at Boca Raton, the University of West Florida at Pensacola and the University of Central Florida at Orlando. A dozen state junior colleges sprang up.

He spent $500-million on roads and highways, including such projects as the completion of the Florida Turnpike between Fort Pierce and Hollywood. Interstates 75, 4 and 95 grew. He also designated money for Alligator Alley between Naples and Fort Lauderdale.

His most controversial road project: extending the Florida Turnpike from Fort Pierce to Wildwood, providing a nonstop turnpike from Miami to I-75. Gov. Bryant and the State Turnpike Authority built the road by refinancing outstanding turnpike bonds, adding millions of dollars to the cost of the road. Speculators made millions of dollars.

Shocked, the 1963 Legislature stripped the governor's office of sole authority over highway borrowing, assigning it to the governor and Cabinet collectively.

Local road projects undertaken during the Bryant administration included making Gulf Boulevard and U.S. 19 four lanes in Pinellas County, completion of the Pinellas Bayway, and making U.S. 41 four lanes from Tampa to the Manatee County line.

Though he was elected as a segregationist, he commented little on the issue during the campaign. And he got little credit for Florida's peaceful progress in civil rights.

Surprising many, he sent his three daughters to integrated schools. To protect black civil rights demonstrators in the summer of 1964, he dispatched police forces into St. Augustine. When the Federal Civil Rights Act was signed, he urged his fellow Floridians to accept it without protest.

Gov. Bryant was a strong supporter of states' rights, a euphemism for segregation, and he once testified before Congress in favor of giving merchants the right to provide service to whomever they chose.

When a St. Augustine motel owner refused to let blacks swim in his swimming pool in 1964, sparking a series of racial disturbances, Gov. Bryant refused to meet with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The son of a farmer and self-taught accountant, Cecil Farris Bryant was born in Marion County near the farm his paternal grandfather established there in 1890.

After graduating from Ocala High School, he attended Emory University in Atlanta in 1931-32, completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Florida with a business degree, and at Harvard University, where he earned a law degree in 1938.

He went to work in the office of the state comptroller and met his future wife, Julia Burnett of Madison.

In World War II, he served as a gunnery and antisubmarine officer in the North Atlantic, Mediterranean and Pacific.

He was elected in 1946 to the first of five successive terms in the state House, becoming speaker for the 1953 session.

He ran for governor unsuccessfully in 1956, losing in the Democratic primary to Collins, but came back in 1960 to win the general election.

-- Staff writer Steve Bousquet contributed to this story. Information from Times files, the Associated Press and a Tampa Tribune story also was used.

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