The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 491

ClO-The Post, Sunday, February 5, 1984 SNPB Leaders: Future Dependent on National Economy By James Gogek Staff Writer What does the future hold for black communities in Palm Beach County? Some black leaders have expressed concern about it but are still optimistic. "There are more black homeowners In Palm Beach County than in Dade or Broward, which is a good sign," said Percy Lee, president of the county's Urban League. "That bolsters the black community and makes it stronger." But Lee said the future of blacks in the county is dependent on the economic future of the country as a whole. Like most black lead- ers, Lee said he is dubious about the direction President Reagan is taking the country and worried about the negative effect on blacks of his administration. That sentiment is echoed by Sam Wright, assistant director of the county's Community Action Council and a Boynton Beach city councilman.

"Reagan is turning back the clock for blacks," he said. "He has dismantled the civil rights commission, equal opportunity quotas and affirmative action. The direction the country is taking has serious implications for blacks. People have been complacent too long and now it's time to stand up and be counted. "Too many blacks aren't registered to vote, and the strength of the black community will be told at the ballot box." Because of Reagan's stance concerning blacks, "more blacks have to be wiser with economic development and become entrepreneurs and get jobs so they can employ themselves and other people," Wright said.

"Blacks have to do more for themselves than just wrestling to get a job." Despite some areas of newer homes in black communities, improvement of existing housing is lacking, according to West Palm Beach Mayor Eva Mack. "I've been very concerned about the lack of improved housing in the city," she said. "That's one of my main concerns. The last improvement was 18 years ago with the Westwood expansion." Mrs. Mack said it's "difficult to find nice houses to rent or to buy in the inner city area." A commission was appointed in December to study the housing problem in West Palm Beach, she said.

Race relations in Palm Beach County are considered by some to be better than in other areas of South Florida. Black leaders and white officials in Palm Beach County "can and do talk without threats," Lee said. "There is better communi cation here than in neighboring counties, although I'm not saying you don't have your share of rednecks. It's just that the communities here have a tendency to adjust so a lot of the tension is eased." Even taking into account what some people see as a move away from civil rights under the Reagan administration, "There are still a lot of genuinely good people in this country who care about what happens to blacks," Wright said. "A lot of whites have stood for what is right.

That's why America is what it is, not like other countries where there are still people in virtual slavery." Black Roots From CI- ml i 1 nil ii if Jfc5 Iff Amsmmmk wMnnwr iwiwiiiAiiiMwiiH.il 'iniiiaMiiiii urn rr nnf --J-rf Jr" jl 1 A si, r'Att'- Portrait of the Past Although those knowledgeable about the beginnings of the county's black community are becoming fewer each year, some of the scenes and people remembered include (clockwise from upper left): the Sunset Auditorium, which was a hot spot of the 1930s and today is an apartment building and lounge; George (Pa) Hannah, WCr you in jail or put a nightstick to your head." Calloway said he found a different world in the 1950s when he played professional baseball in New Haven, in the Pittsburgh Pirates' organization. "Living in the North took the blinders off of my eyes," he said. "I always thought I was in heaven living in Riviera until I got to the North and saw that blacks could do other things than they could do in the South. Calloway returned to Riviera Beach in 1963. "Everything started changing," he said.

"There had been race riots in Harlem and there was violence down here, too. It was a terrible time. The Police Department was atrocious down here. I saw black guys get beat on the head and kicked by the cops. "Finally, in the '60s, they put some black guys on the police force, but they couldn't arrest a white.

Black cops couldn't work on the east side of the tracks or arrest anyone there." Integration caused racial tension at schools. "At Sun-coast High School, there was rioting and the police went in there and shot the kids with mace and tear gas," he said. "That infuriated the whole black community and blacks began to go in and register to vote. "That riot is what changed the face of Riviera. Blacks became politically minded and began electing black coun-cilmen.

Blacks gained a 4-1 majority on the council. That's when we got the first black police chief, Boone Darden." Today's black youths "don't know the way it was," Calloway said. "Ninety percent of them don't know the way it was. I think they should be made aware, but they should have a historical backround, but not so they go out and retaliate against whites. "For this town to survive, we should go back over history and look at where we've been and then look at where we're going." Boynton Beach The original black section of Boynton Beach was only three streets.

Today, the black community stretches over 15-20 percent of the city, according to City Councilman Sam Wright, the first black elected to that office. Wright's mother Rovina grew up in Boynton Beach. "It was just a small area, and you couldn't go into white town except to go to the store and then you had to run right back," she said. "We gretv up in hardship. Segregation was all around you and you had to notice it because the black part of town was so small.

There weren't but two grocery stores in the area. "To go to school, we had to go down to Delray and I never liked going to school down there. Delray blacks didn't care for Boynton blacks and even most of the teachers except a few weren't nice to us. I guess they didn't care for out-of-towners." During the 1960s, "the black community grew 500 percent," Wright said. The growth was sparked by the availability of housing following the civil rights movement, he said.

"Blacks came here from other towns because they could afford to live here and the children of the people living in the original black area came back to live in Boynton," Wright said. Growing up in the '50s and '60s, Wright has watched Boynton change. "It's changed physically and improved in some instances in the way it looks. It's changed politically in terms of blacks realizing that there is a chance for a black to be elected to office. And it's changed in terms of racial barriers in that people are more open because of more contact between blacks and whites." Boca Raton While Boynton Beach's black community flourished, those in Boca Raton have been squeezed out of existence.

Florida Atlantic University is on the site of a black community called Yamato, according to Lois Martin, a resident of Pearl City, Boca Raton's last surviving black community. Blacks who lived in Yamato and worked on a pineapple farm were moved out when the Army Air Corps built a base where their houses once stood. The base was closed after World War II and FAU was built. South of Yamato was another black community called Sugar Hill, Ms. Martin said, which disappeared at the same time.

"My dad was a sharecropper in that area which is now Boca Raton," she said. "But that land became valuable and what wasn't taken by the Army was sold to build houses instead of farms." The blacks who lived in Yamato and Sugar Hill moved to Delray Beach, Deerfield Beach and Pompano Beach. Meanwhile, Pearl City struggles to endure in the face of increasing commercial development. Its five streets are enclosed by shopping centers, the walls of apartment complexes, a fire station, a car wash and an Elks Lodge. "Pearl City used to be bigger but it has been eroded by commercial development," said Sandra McGinn, director of Community Improvement for Boca Raton.

"At one time blacks owned property across Federal Highway, but it became smaller as Boca grew." Lake Worth The Osborne section, founded as an eight-block segregated district in 1917 shortly after Lake Worth was chartered, was neglected for years. Until a community development project began in the '70s, Osborne had no paved streets, street lights, parks, sewers, fire hydrants or services taken for granted in white neighborhoods. Until about 1970, Osborne "looked awful," Lake Worth Mayor Betty Cortese said. Then, it was labeled a Neighborhood Strategy Area, and federal funds poured in for renovation. Streets were changed from limerock rubble to asphalt.

Street lights went up, sidewalks were built. A park with a lighted baseball diamond and a soccer field was built and a community center is to be built. "It looks pretty good now, better than it used to, said Johnny Polite, an Osborne resident for 22 years and member of the local Community Action Council. But the problem of substandard housing still exists. Shortly before Christmas, a landlord sent contractors into Osborne to repair the roofs of some apartments.

The contractors took the roofs off and went away. Two days later, 4 inches of rain fell and the residents literally had no roofs over their heads. The county had planned to build a housing project in Osborne, but Mrs. Cortese said the project has been delayed for lack of funds. "We're still going to push for it because there's definitely a need," she said.

"I don't know when we'll get it, I hope in the near future. We don't want to wait another five or 10 years." Instead of building new housing, some Osborne residents say, existing housing should be brought up to standard. To do so, Mrs. Cortese said, residents would have to be moved out and structures rebuilt from the ground up. We can't just go in and put people out on the streets," she said.

Polite is confident the county will come up with funds for the project. We're going to get that housing," he said. "Therrwe're going to tear out those dilapidated buildings and things will be looking up." Extended families thrive because "elderly blacks tend to stay in their own homes or move in with a relative, while nonblacks put their elderly off in nursing homes or senior citizens' centers," he said. "If blacks leave home to go out and make their livelihood, they usually come back home for retirement." Hence, the history of black communities is often family history. Because Palm Beach County history is relatively recent, the sons and daughters of black settlers are alive and can tell how the present came to be.

But black history is seldom printed and those knowledgeable about the beginnings of black communities are becoming fewer each year. "When I went to school, you never used to hear about black history," Lee said. "Today, you can get some of it out of black history books, but we'll never really get all of it until there is just one history of black and white. It's starting to mesh these days in the history books, but they haven't done justice to black history and black history hasn't really caught up with white history." Until the end of segregation, black communities in Palm Beach County remained small and isolated because of "the red line," Lee said. "The red line was drawn around black communities and that was the only place where blacks could buy and finance homes," he said.

"There were also deed restrictions on property owned by whites so that the land was not available to blacks. Blacks were boxed in." Change began in the 1950s when more land was set aside for blacks. Their communities began to spread out when civil rights legislation in the 1960s made it illegal to refuse to sell them land. The original black communities "from Jacksonville to Miami are usually just west of the Florida East Coast railroad," Lee said. "Every city that ended in 'Beach' had a black community that was separated from the white community." Most black communities in Palm Beach County grew in similar patterns and had similar problems of urban or rural blight.

Today, they share the struggle to overcome the problems of the past. Palm Beach, West Palm Beach The Styx existed in the 1890s and 1900s along the Atlantic Ocean in Palm Beach, several blocks north of what is now Royal Poinciana Way. Like its namesake in Greek mythology, the Styx of Palm Beach has taken on a mythical quality. One story has it that blacks who lived there many of whom were fishermen and traders from the deep South and the Bahamas were chased out through a ruse concocted by Flagler. The story goes that Flagler, realizing the oceanf ront land was worth millions, invited Styx residents to a party in West Palm Beach.

While they were gone, their shacks were torched. Upon returning, blacks found their homes destroyed so they settled in Pleasant City. But Inez Peppers Lovett of West Palm Beach, who lived in the Styx, said that never happened. "I don't remember any fire," said Mrs. Lovett, the daughter of one of the county's earliest black settlers, Thomas Peppers.

She was brought to the Styx as an infant in the 1890s and lived there until blacks were forced out. "Maybe they did burn the shacks, but if they did, it was after everyone had already moved away," Mrs. Lovett said. The Styx was owned by "the white millionaires of Palm Beach," she said. They built their mansions on the water, but owned land that stretched across the island from Lake Worth to the ocean.

"They rented their back yards to the black people who had enough money to build a house and rent the land. It wasn't really a house, not like today. They were shacks. That was all they could afford," Mrs. Lovett said.

"The land cost about $3 a month. My father was one of the rent collectors. The millionaires who owned the land went north for the summer and the black people who lived there took care of their land. "In the winter, when the tourists came, the men and boys worked as caddies, pushed wheelchairs and peddled the afromobiles," a bicycle with a large wicker chair attached to the front, she said. "In the hotels, there was the Royal Poinciana, The Breakers, the Hibiscus and the Palm Beach Hotel.

The black women worked as chambermaids and in the laundry while the men waited on the millionaires' tables and were bllboys and elevator operators." Children traveled across the lake by ferry and walked to Lake Academy, a black school on what is now Tamarind Street in West Palm Beach, she said. Despite the hard work, life in the Styx sounds almost idyllic from Mrs. Lovett's account. "People used to fish in the ocean or use seine nets," she said. "A few people had boats and you'd go for boat rides if they weren't taking the millionaires and tourists fishing.

We used to have picnics on the beach and go swimming in the water, or chase each other around the trails at the beach." The landowners eventually realized the value of land they were renting to blacks and, during the first decade of the new century, the tenants were moved out. "The whites got together and decided they were going to use the land so they moved the people away," said Mrs. Lovett, who taught school in the county for 48 years. Most nf the people from the Styx moved between 15th and 23rd Streets in West Palm Beach from Dixie Highway to the FEC railroad tracks. The community was named Pleasant City.

By the time Pleasant City was established, some blacks already had settled near downtown West Palm Beach, from First Street to 15th Street west of the FEC. Pleasant City soon became the heart of West Palm Beach's black community. George Currie, a lawyer for whom a park in Pleasant City is named, laid out the tract and gave the streets names such as Easy Street, Lucky Street, Beautiful Avenue and Contentment Avenue. Pleasant City's residents still worked in the grand hotels of Palm Beach or in other service work. But fire ended much of the work.

In 1925, three of Palm Beach's four large hotels, all of which were wooden-frame structures, were destroyed by flames. Shortly after the fires, the Royal Poinciana, then the largest wood-frame building in the world, was torn down. The new hotels built were staffed mostly by whites. Delray Beach The black settlement of Delray Beach concentrated in an area which in the 1890s was called Linton is a study in blending cultures. Blacks came from the Florida Panhandle, the British West Indies, the Bahamas, South Carolina and Alabama, according to C.

Spencer Pompey, a black historian and retired educator who taught in Palm Beach County schools for 40 years. Several black communities were formed after each wave of settlers. They eventually combined to form today's large black community in Delray Beach. "The first blacks came in as labor, putting in the railroad from St. Augustine to North Dade County which is now Palm Beach County," Pompey said.

"They settled whaVas called Greg's Corner. Then came the settlement of Hannah Town," led by George Hannah, called me i a i uiaii seiiiei vi i-renay Beach; Children orphaned by the 1928 hurricane; and the Palm Garden Drug Store, a popular place in the early '30s. 'Pa' Hannah photo courtosy of Floranca Holloman. Othori from collection of Inorla Hudnall. "Pa" because he was a community leader.

The Hannah Town blacks came from the Bahamas and also worked on Flagler's railroad, he said. Davis Town was settled by blacks from South Carolina and Monro Quarters by blacks from the Florida Panhandle. These settlements were north of what is now Atlantic Avenue. The area south of Atlantic wasn't settled by blacks until the 1930s and '40s, when the Army Air Corps built a base in Boca Raton on the site of a large black community. Many of the displaced residents moved to Delray Beach.

"People who lived here were just like one big family," said Julia Taylor Simms, 94, who came to Delray from Bimini in 1898. She is Pa Hannah's granddaughter. "When I first came here, there was nothing but woods and swamps and Seminole Indians," she said. "There were so many of them out in the woods and bushes. But they never bothered us." Mrs.

Simms said she and ber family used to meet "groups of Indian youngsters with bows and arrows" while picking huckleberries. She said her grandmother "used to stand us on top of boxes at night to watch Indians do a fire dance." There was little pressure from whites. Blacks could live and work their land without interference. "Land was readily available," Pompey said. "You could come down here and settle land just like out West.

The only thing you had to worry about was mosquitoes." By the time Delray Beach was incorporated in 1911, blacks were firmly entrenched, working on farms and fishing. The Mt. Olive Missionary Baptist Church, Delray Beach's first church was established in 1896. The first white church wasn't founded until after 1900. In the first election of 1911, a black ran for Town Council, Pompey said.

"Whites and blacks came to Delray around the same time, but blacks were here in a more permanent fashion," he said. "Most of the whites just came down for the winter while blacks were here to live and they had brought their families with them." Western Palm Beach County Rural life usually meant hard work from sunrise to sunset for a pittance. During a harvest, blacks often worked seven days a week. From the 1910s to the '50s, many blacks in the western county lived in "quarters," or shanty towns set up on a wealthy white farmer's property where the blacks worked the land. There also were black sections in Belle Glade, Pahokee and South Bay, where people rented houses and worked on bean or sugarcane farms and mills.

Elisah Baines, who came to Pahokee 50 years ago to cut sugarcane, worked in the fields all his life. "It was 12 hours a day, all day, as long as there was light," he said. "Hard work. If you lived in the quarters, you were paid every week, but for us living in town, we were paid every day. One dollar a day it was in the '30s.

"People living in town would socialize a great deal, mostly centered around church. But the people who lived in the quarters, were pretty isolated since they had everything they needed right there. They'd come once in a while to go to church." The 1928 hurricane devastated the Gla'ds, flooding low-lying areas, flattening homes and killing more than 2,000 people. Witnesses reported Pahokee, Belle Glade and South Bay had outdoor morgues where hundreds of bodies were stacked. Blacks were especially hard hit.

"It pretty near wiped the place out," Baines said. Many blacks "only had little shacks and things and most of them were knocked down. To save themselves, people went up to the ridges where the water couldn't reach. There were a lot of people killed." Jupiter Off Florida's Turnpike on Indiantown Road, just west of Jupiter, is a black community that retains the rural flavor of the 1930s. Work was mainly found on farms.

Georgia Mae Walker was born in 1916 in a house that stood a stone's throw from the cinderblock home in which she now lives. A path winds through a pine forest past her house, a hog pen and a few rusted cars stand behind it. Relatives live nearby, on land her father owned. "All my life, I've only known Jupiter," she said. "As children we used to run through these woods and there was nothing around here but one store and one post office, and we had to go out there in wagons.

There wasn't much around here. Tequesta wasn't anything but woods where we used to go pick huckleberries." A one-room schoolhouse was built on land herlather donated. If children from West Jupiter wanted to go to high school in the '20s and '30s, they had to travel to West Palm Beach. "I quit high school after two years to go to work," she said. "We got 50 cents a day doing laundry from 7 to 7.

It was 50 cents a day to pick beans or tomatoes, too." In West Jupiter, "we all used to be just one people, everybody around here knew one another," Mrs. Walker said. "Now, they're really building up around here." Riviera Beach "I didn't notice it (segregation) when I was coming up as a boy," said Dan Calloway, Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office employee who grew up in Riviera Beach in the 1940s. "We were living in an all-black area with no paved streets, but we were happy. Almost everything was split into "white only" and "colored only." Even the ocean was segregated.

"The beach for blacks was on Singer Island where the Hilton Hotel is today," Calloway said. "They called it the colored beach and that's where all the blacks went When they built the hotel, they moved the colored beach up to the Jupiter Inlet and that's where blacks had to go." The black community west of Old Dixie Highway in Riviera Beach had no electricity until 1951, no indoor plumbing until 1953 and no paved roads until the 1960s, he said. Everyone used kerosene lamps and outhouses. When it rained, some people had to use rowboats to get out of their houses, he said. "Everything west of Avenue was swamps," Calloway said.

"When it rained hard, we couldn't go to school, we couldn't get out of the house." Just north of Riviera Beach was Lake Park, an all-white community. "Lake Park was another country as far as I was concerned," he said. "If you re black you weren't caught after dark in places. If you 'were, the police would throw.