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"This is the beginning of a new history," declared FAMU president Castell Bryant. And it was - but not the history many expected to be written. For the first time, black students did not make up the majority of a FAMU graduating class. Enrollment at the new FAMU law school is 44 percent white and 12 percent Hispanic. Black students make up just 36 percent of the student body. Those percentages are not what Florida lawmakers had in mind when they agreed in 2000 to re-establish the law school, which had been shuttered by the state in 1968 after the beginning of court-ordered integration. FAMU supporters had promised the school would boost the small percentage of black lawyers in Florida. Instead, the percentage of black students entering Florida law schools has dropped since 2002, when FAMU opened its doors. And racial diversity at Florida's older, already established law schools also is declining. "The bottom line appears to be that we are redistributing fundamentally the same number of African-American applicants," said Joseph Harbaugh, the law school dean at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, which has seen its percentage of entering black law students shrink from 12.4 percent three years ago to 5.4 percent today. The numbers are similar at the University of Florida, where the number of black first-year law students dropped by half this fall. The law schools at Florida State University and the University of Miami also have seen declines.
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