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Lilla Holsey -
Lilla Holsey
This is the first part of a series that highlights local women, many of whom were migrant workers, who grew up in San Mateo and became teachers.
Three women will be recognized in this segment and the stories of another three San Mateo women will be shared in the next segment.
One woman’s journey in education started in a two-room San Mateo elementary school, which propelled her to becoming a tenured professor at East Carolina University.
San Mateo resident Lilla Holsey is known to many people as “Aunt Lilla,” she said, but she can also be called Dr. Holsey because she holds a Ph.D. in home economics from Florida State University.
“I remember the things that (motivated) me to move on and go into school was that I loved learning,” Holsey said.
She grew up in a San Mateo family of migrant workers that traveled up the East Coast harvesting crops every summer. Her father was a farm crew leader in Putnam County.
The lifelong learner believes she was one of the first, if not the first, Black resident from San Mateo to pursue a college education.
“I know that many of the younger people decided if Lilla can do it, I can do it,” she said.
Holsey attended San Mateo School #29, which served Black students in first through eighth grades, according to historical records. The school closed in 1956, the documents state, and children were then bused to an elementary school in East Palatka.
Holsey moved on to high school at Central Academy, where she was a library assistant, was involved in student council, worked in the school cafeteria and played “Miss Dictionary” in the school’s senior play, she said.
After graduating high school around 1959, Holsey decided to go to Hampton University in Virginia to pursue a home economics education.
“My parents worked very hard to send me there, and the whole time, we were doing the migrant work,” Holsey said, adding that she continued helping with the work through college.
Working in the field was not her strength, she said with a laugh. Holsey told the story of missing school one day to help pick potatoes with her family. She said the weather was hot and her mother let her take a nap in the family’s truck.
“When I woke up, I looked at her and told her, ‘Mom, I’m going to school for as long as you all send me because I cannot pick these potatoes,’” Holsey said.
Following her graduation from Hampton University in Virginia in 1963, she returned to San Mateo and substitute taught at Central Academy Elementary School as a librarian. The next year, she began teaching at Lincoln High School in Gainesville, which was the “only public high school for African American students” in Alachua County, according to the Alachua County School District.
Holsey taught there for eight years while also being an adjunct professor at a community college in Gainesville.
She said the Alachua County superintendent at the time pushed her to continue her education. Holsey went forward to receive her master’s degree and Ph.D. in home economics from Florida State University, according to East Carolina University, where she later taught.
“I had a very, very successful, rewarding, enriching experience at Florida State,” Holsey said.
In the fall of 1974, East Carolina University hired Holsey as the 11th African-American faculty member, having finished her Ph.D. from FSU that spring, the ECU’s website states.
University officials initially hired Holsey to teach home economics, but she finished her 34-year career in the College of Education’s Department of Business and Information Technologies Education.
In 2005, FSU’s College of Human Sciences recognized Holsey at its Centennial Gala as one of the program’s 100 Outstanding Alumni, according to ECU, which inducted her three years later into its Educators Hall of Fame.
About 10 years ago, Holsey moved back to San Mateo, where she has “settled into the community” and works with her church, New Bethel A.M.E. in San Mateo.
She is the aunt of Putnam County School Board Chairwoman Sandra Gilyard and another former Putnam educator, Regina Gilyard-Thomas, both of whom grew up in San Mateo and will be featured in this series.
“When I was being reared (in San Mateo), it truly was a family community,” Holsey said. “You were biologically related to almost everybody in the town. … Coming back home, everybody took me in and accepted me as being part of the family, an important part of the family.”