Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the namesake of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, was an activist who fought for conservation of the Everglades and the rights of the marginalized through her writing, political activism and community work. During a time when the Everglades was on the verge of destruction due to draining and building projects, she wrote material that created awareness around and organized everyone together in opposition to the destruction. Moreover, as many migrants arrived to work in Florida and women were not given the right to vote, she was on the forefront of the efforts to preserve the people’s rights.
During her life, she had two schools named after her, including MSD. However, in 1980, when the Florida Department of Natural Resources named its headquarters in Tallahassee after her, she told a friend she would have rather seen the Everglades restored than her name on a building. In 1993, when Stoneman Douglas was 103, former President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highesthonor granted by the United States of America.
Journalist
Stoneman Douglas joined the Miami Herald staff in 1915. She started as a society columnist writing about tea parties and society events.
In 1916, Stoneman Douglas was tasked with writing a story on the first woman from Miami to join the U.S. Naval Reserve. When the woman did not show up for the interview, Stoneman Douglas joined the Navy herself as a first class. However, she did not like waking early and requested a discharge. She joined the American Red Cross.
After World War I, Stoneman Douglas served as assistant editor at the Miami Herald. She became popular due to her daily column “The Galley.” She had many devoted readers, who read the poems at the beginning of her columns. Stoneman Douglas had the freedom to write about anything she chose. She promoted urban planning when Miami saw a population boom. She wrote supporting women’s suffrage, civil rights and better sanitation while opposing the ban of alcohol and foreign trade tariffs.
Women’s Rights Advocate
Stoneman Douglas was interested in women’s suffrage from one of her first days writing as a columnist. She focused on writing about women in leadership positions.
In 1917, she and a group of women went to the Florida Legislature to speak in support of women’s right to vote.
“All four of us spoke to a joint committee wearing our best hats,” Stoneman Douglas said. “Talking to them was like talking to graven images. They never paid attention to us at all.”
She spoke in Tallahassee to lawmakers in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would ban sex discrimination.
Environmentalist
Stoneman Douglas became involved with the Everglades in the 1920s when she joined the board of the Everglades Tropical National Park Committee. At the time, the Everglades was not a national park, but the group was working towards that recognition. By the 1960s, the Everglades was in danger of disappearing because of mismanagement in the name of progress, real estate and agricultural development.
At the age of 79, Stoneman Douglas founded Friends of the Everglades. The group was created with the purpose of protesting plans to destroy a large portion of the Everglades to build a huge jetport in the wetlands in the Big Cypress.
She toured the state giving hundreds of condemnations of the airport project, and increased membership of Friends of the Everglades to 3,000 members within three years. Due to her efforts and other Everglades groups, President Richard Nixon scrapped funding for the project and the jetport was stopped after one runway was built.
“We have to start small, which is what I try to do here locally at the school and get people to understand how important it is to conserve our wild habitats,” Advanced Placement Environmental Science teacher Tammy Orilio said. “On a larger scale, it’s important for us as voters to vote in the people who are going to best represent our ideals in terms of preserving.”
Stoneman Douglas spent the rest of her life defending the Everglades. She expanded Friends of the Everglades into Broward, Palm Beach, Lee, St. Lucie, Osceola, Hendry, Glades and Monroe counties, and criticized two groups that were doing the most damage to the Everglades: sugar cane growers and the Army Corps of Engineers.
The sugarcane growers in South Florida polluted Lake Okeechobee by pumping chemicals, human waste and garbage into the water, which is a major freshwater source.
“I’d like 10 more years,” Stoneman Douglas said, when she was interviewed at the age of 104. “I’d probably do the same sort of things I’m doing, but I’d certainly fight sugar.”
Today, the sugarcane industry continues to affect the Everglades ecosystem through pollution.
“Everglades conservation is even more important than when Marjory Stoneman Douglas first proposed everything,” Orilio said. “As more and more people are coming to Florida and living here, there is more and more pollution happening and a lot of habitat loss.”
Stoneman Douglas spoke out about the damage the Army Corps of Engineers was doing to the Everglades by altering the natural flow of water. The Army Corps of Engineers constructed more than 1,400 miles of canals to divert water away from the Everglades after 1947.
After Miami-Dade County approved building permits in the Everglades, the land flooded. When homeowners demanded the Army Corps of Engineers drain their neighborhoods, Stoneman Douglas was the only opposition.
During a hearing in 1983, she was shouted at by the audience of residents. However, the Dade County commissioners eventually decided not to drain the land.
When she died in 1998 at the age of 108, her ashes were scattered in the Everglades she worked to preserve.
Today at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, teachers and students preserve native plants within Marjory’s Garden.
“We have an area called the Everglades Zone specifically for that purpose,” Astronomy teacher Kyle Jeter said. “Mr. [Eric] Garner wanted to ensure that we had an area to represent what Marjory Stoneman Douglas fought to preserve. It’s a unique ecosystem in the entire world.”
This further educates students about Florida’s ecosystems and ways of conservation.
“Working in the garden made me learn about numerous plants and ways to minimize waste, such as using leftover foods or anything organic as compost,” Garden Club Co-President Luana Maldaner Kunzler said. “Also, I think it’s important that awareness is brought about native animals and plants that might be endangered… invasive species are not usually part of the native ecosystems and end up outcompeting the native species for resources and overtake the environment. Knowing which plants or animals are native and which are not can help people distinguish and be more mindful of what species they should try to help get rid of.”
Author
Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ love of writing started from a young age. She was a straight-A student at Wellesley College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1912. She arrived in Florida newly divorced and worked as a newspaper reporter.
After quitting the Miami Herald in 1923, Stoneman Douglas worked as a freelance writer. From 1920-1990, Douglas published 109 fiction articles and stories. In that time, she also wrote one of her most instrumental works that changed everyone’s perspective about the Everglades: “River of Grass.”
She wrote about the ecosystem, history and people of the Everglades.
Before Stoneman Douglas became an author, publisher of the “Rivers of America” series Hervey Allen dropped by her house to see her. He wanted her to contribute to the series by writing about the Miami River. However, upon researching it, she became more interested in the Everglades and convinced Allen to let her write about that instead.
During her five years of research to write the book, Stoneman Douglas spent time with geologist Garald Parker. He discovered that South Florida’s only freshwater source was the Biscayne Aquifer, which the Everglades filled. Stoneman Douglas asked him if she could call the freshwater flowing from Lake Okeechobee the “River of Grass,” hence the title of her most iconic book.
“[The book] was important in terms of getting out to the general public about this rare gem that we have in our backyards,” Advanced Placement Environmental Science teacher Tammy Orilio said. “A lot of people didn’t know about the Everglades and didn’t know that there is this large swath of area unlike anywhere else on the planet.”
The book was published in 1947 and sold out of its first printing in a month. The book starts with the words, “There are no other Everglades in the world.”
Migrant Rights Advocate
Stoneman Douglas worked to protect migrant farm workers and helped pass a law requiring Miami homes to have indoor plumbing.
“[Migrants face] the struggle for life that is little more than living,” Stoneman Douglas wrote. “Gambling, the numbers, lotteries, hardly help the monotony, the tragic weight of labor that the genius of their laughter cannot lighten, or their dulled unconscious despair. The non migrant sugar-cane workers for the great companies fare better. They have better houses and hospitals and ball games and schools.”
In the early 1920s she wrote “Martin Tabert of North Dakota is Walking Florida Now,” which was a ballad about the death of a 22-year-old who was beaten to death in a labor camp. The work was a criticism of convict leasing, a practice where corporations could contract incarcerated people–who were primarily Black prisoners–as a form of forced labor. This practice still continues around the U.S.
Despite Stoneman Douglas’ efforts to improve migrant conditions, migrant workers today live in overcrowded or substandard housing, including dormitories and mobile homes. Some housing may not be up to code, leading to a lack of oversight and potential safety hazards.
In the 1980s, Stoneman Douglas lent her support to the Florida Rural Legal Services, a group that worked to protect migrant farm workers who were centered on Belle Glade, and who were primarily employed in the sugarcane industry. She wrote to Gov. Bob Graham in 1985 to encourage him to assess the conditions the migrant workers endured.
Today, student gun violence activists, like MSD alumni Jaclyn Corin, cite Stoneman Douglas as an influence. Stoneman Douglas’ legacy lives on in those she still inspires into action.
This story was originally published in the May 2025 Eagle Eye print edition.
