Florenz Maxwell doesn’t like to give her age.

She feels she’s lived through racism and sexism and doesn’t need to add ageism to the mix.

“People can see I’m old,” she said. “Why do I need to say more?”

Mrs Maxwell was in her 20s when she joined the Progressive Group, the secret society behind the 1959 Theatre Boycott that led to Bermuda’s desegregation.

Seeing the way the island divided over Government’s plans for extensive immigration reform made her feel despondent.

It seemed like Bermuda hadn’t really changed in the last 57 years.

“It was whites on one side and blacks on the other,” she said of the protests that took place this month outside Parliament. “We wanted to desegregate Bermuda. Not just for black Bermudians but for all of Bermuda.”

She said life following the Theatre Boycott was a little anticlimactic.

“At first we kept things secret out of fear of retaliation,” she said. “We didn’t have anything, but we were afraid they would go after our parents or people associated with us. Afterward, nobody cared who we were because we’d achieved things non-violently.”

The group was proud to see new opportunities opened up for black Bermudians after the boycott, she said.

“They could live anywhere and apply for whatever jobs they wanted. That didn’t really impact me because I hadn’t been held back from a particular job. After the boycott, there was still work to be done, and we just changed our focus to universal suffrage.”

She grew up on Friswell’s Hill in Pembroke, the middle child of five. She was 12 when her mother, Ella Webbe, died, and she helped to raise her younger siblings.

“It was a very good neighbourhood,” she said. “You had to play in your own yard, but neighbours looked out for you.”

Sometimes adults were a little too sharp-eyed.

“It meant you could never get away with anything,” she said.

But racism made life far from idyllic. She recalled one incident when she was a nine-year-old student at Central School.

At that time, black and white children from across the island took cooking and sewing lessons separately, in a building on Front Street.

The black students were often made to clean up after the white students. One day, the teacher ordered Mrs Maxwell to clean a bunch of shoes. She refused.

“The children were all sitting there on the floor with their shoes in front of them, waiting for me,” she said. “I told the teacher: I’m not going to clean anyone’s shoes.”

At home, that was something that her brothers did.

The teacher thrust a suede shoe at her; Mrs Maxwell dabbed at it with brown shoe polish.

“I’m not even sure if I knew what I was doing or not,” she said. “I know I was so angry I didn’t even feel remorse.”

The teacher threw her out of the class.

The headteacher at Central threatened to expel her until her English teacher backed her up.

Today, she frequently talks with students about the Progressive Group and Bermuda’s history of segregation.

“They bring me out of mothballs, occasionally,” she joked. “I’ve been to five different schools to talk about it in the last three months alone.

“I think it is very important that young people know about Bermuda’s history of segregation.

“I think it makes them understand that it is not a myth. I want them to know that there is a solution to things. If you hide something, then you don’t deal with it. That is what Bermuda has been doing, making believe that everyone always got along like one big happy family.”

Despite that, she finds Bermuda’s students aren’t ignorant on the topic.

“They’ve already been taught so much about it, it’s often pointless for me to tell the story again,” she said. “So I let them ask questions.”

She’s frequently asked whether she was scared during the boycott.

She said she wasn’t.

“I was young,” she said. “I didn’t have anything to lose. I don’t think I knew to be scared. At that age you often aren’t scared of things you should be. That is why young people need proper guidance. If they don’t get it anything can happen.

“I went through my teenage years without trauma. I didn’t know you were supposed to have ‘hormones’. Nobody had ‘hormones’ back then. If there is any problem today, it’s that we have robbed children of their childhood.”

What kept her out of trouble was writing.

She started at eight to counteract the racial stereotypes she saw in some of her books.

“It became an addiction,” she said.

She published The Spirit Baby & Other Bermudian Folktales in 2008 through the Bermuda Department of Community and Cultural Affairs.

More recently, her unpublished book Girlcott was named a finalist in CODE’s Burt Award for Caribbean Literature.

It’s about a young girl in Bermuda dealing with segregation in the 1950s. Girlcott was chosen from nearly 60 entries.

First prize in the competition is $10,000 and publication.

“I’ll find out if I’ve won at the end of April,” she said.

“The letter from the competition organisers said it was a captivating story that highlighted important aspects of Caribbean history.

“They said it was true to life, and smooth. I was so proud of that alone.”

She worked for nearly 30 years mostly as head librarian at the Youth Library.

“Children just give me goose bumps,” she said. “They have so much potential. I really didn’t want to retire. I loved watching the children get eager to read.”

But her 1997 retirement wasn’t the end of her work with Bermuda’s young people.

For the last 12 years, she has taught Saturday school at St Theresa’s Cathedral.

“I tell them Bible stories. They love it. They never seem to get bored.”

She doesn’t believe that children today are much different than when she was a child.

“It’s our expectations that have changed and the environment they’re growing up in,” she said. “I think all the technology around them means they are much less protected than I was when I was growing up.”

She married former Berkeley Institute classmate Clifford Maxwell, the year after the theatre boycott.

“I remember that at Berkeley, he was very good at maths,” she said. “He would be reeling off these complicated maths theorems like they were poetry.”

After she graduated from Berkeley she taught until she saved enough money to study abroad. She attended Millersville College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania for three years.

Unfortunately, she had to leave before finishing because of severe hay fever.

“I’d never had so much as a cold,” she said. “But the doctor said if it continued I might develop asthma. The sneezing stopped as soon as they closed the doors of the plane home.”

She returned to Bermuda hoping to get her green card and go back to the United States.

But in the meantime she became reacquainted with Dr Maxwell.

They had two children Clarence, and Alphonso, and were married for 53 years before Dr Maxwell’s death in 2013.

When their sons were small, he encouraged Mrs Maxwell to return to finish her degree.

“He said you go and I’ll take care of the boys,” she said. “They were quite little at the time.”

She did return to Millersville and completed a degree in library media with a focus on creating library programmes for children.

She is very proud that her son, Clarence, now teaches history at her alma mater.

Today, she loves playing Scrabble. She is also a member of the African Diaspora Heritage Trail committee, is on the Berkeley Education Society and sings in her church choir.

She was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1996.