The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Fred L. C. Conner

Four years after the city council tried to throw out the Black precinct’s votes, Avon Park hired its first Black policeman. The account of how it happened survives because a reporter, Romona Washington, sat down with him in 1995, and because his son brought the clipping and the photographs to the Depot Museum thirty years later for its first Black-history exhibit.[newssun-conner-1995][newssun-treasure-2025]

How he was appointed

In the spring of 1955 the town’s Black churches, organized as the Progressive Civic Club and led by Queen Coward, went to a city council meeting and asked for a liaison officer to police the Black community. Mayor E. A. Delaney put the request back to the group, and the group chose Conner — without, by his own account, his knowing beforehand. He was appointed in April 1955.[newssun-conner-1995]

The same census, five years before his appointment, finds Fred Conner himself in the Black neighborhood: twenty-nine years old, born in Florida, a fruit picker at a citrus packing house.[census-1950-ed-28-8] Queen Coward was already a figure in the neighborhood: the 1950 census finds Queen Ester Coward keeping a beauty shop on Fairfield Avenue, one of the handful of Black-owned businesses in the town.[census-1950-ed-28-8] The churches had organized themselves into a civic club with a name and a leader, and the council received them.

The job

He walked a beat. There was no patrol car for him at first. The council, by his account, directed that he be treated on the same footing as the white officers. He served more than seventeen years, under chiefs who included Earl Gordon, whom he remembered with affection, and Ferland Cribb.[newssun-conner-1995]

Something over two years after his appointment — about 1957 or 1958 — he was given a partner: Robert Britt, who served seven years as an officer and whom the same article calls “the late councilman and first Black mayor” of Avon Park.[newssun-conner-1995] A separate, uncited local account says Britt was the first Black person elected in Highlands County, serving one term on the Avon Park council from 1973.[byrne-toney] The two accounts agree that he was elected and disagree on how far he rose; nothing found yet dates a mayoral term, and no death record or grave has been found for him. A Robert Britt Street runs through Avon Park today; it is very likely named for him, and that has not been confirmed.

Why he matters

Between the annulled precinct of 1951 and Britt’s election in the 1970s, Conner’s appointment stands as the clearest record of how Black Avon Park dealt with its city government: the churches organized, went to the council with a specific request, and got it. The men the town first let carry a badge are the men it later elected.

References

Where this comes from

Evidence
corroborated — More than one independent source agrees.
Review
unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
Rights
society

Sources

  1. Romona Washington, Highlands News-Sun, Conner first Black to serve as police officer — Highlands News-Sun, 25 February 2025, reprinting Romona Washington's profile of 1995 (2025)
  2. Highlands News-Sun, The treasure to the community in Avon Park — Highlands News-Sun, March 2025 (2025)
  3. Jason Byrne, Florida History Blog, Mary Toney was a bus driver turned six-term politician (2022)
  4. United States Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950, Population Schedules, Florida, Highlands County, ED 28-8 (1950)

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