14 minute read
sands of time
The West Settlers Historic District charts community and change in Delray’s oldest
neighborhood BY RICH POLLACK
ennis Murray was 5 years old in 1950 when his family moved from a farmworker’s camp west of Delray Beach to a home of their own on Northwest Fifth Avenue, then the heart of the city’s tightly knit Black community. “It was the first time we had indoor plumbing and running water,” says Murray, whose family set roots in the area almost a century ago. “The bathtub and the shower were new inventions to us; we’d never seen them before.” Outside the home, Murray and his family found a thriving
African-American business community lining Fifth Avenue in the 1950s and ‘60s, filled with restaurants, grocery stores as well as a pool
hall, a pharmacy and several churches. As he looked north across Second Street—when not shooting marbles with friends or gathering mangoes and oranges from trees throughout the area—Murray could see a handful of small shacks and shrubs dotting an almost snow-like white sand that gave the area its name: The Sands.
Today much of what was The Sands is now part of the West Settlers Historic District, designated in 1997 to mark and preserve what remains of Delray Beach’s earliest history, dating back to the mid-1800s and predating the arrival of white settlers. It’s a story of perseverance in the heat and the mosquitoes and the storms. Later, the story shifts to finding ways to work around the restrictions during an era of segregation, and even later it’s a story of the erosion of neighborhood identity brought about partly by desegregation and the opportunities that came with it.
From its early days, the West Settlers District was a community where families gathered in small enclaves, with houses expanding as more relatives arrived and where an aunt, an uncle, a cousin or a grandfather lived within walking distance—and never too far away to lend a hand.
EARLY YEARS
Decades before white settlements rose up in South Florida, the area was home to African-Americans—some freed slaves as well as Seminoles and Black Seminoles. The area was still mostly wilderness, swampy, infested with mosquitos, and considered largely inhospitable by white settlers. Florida had become a state in 1845, and soon after the end of the Civil War, Wisconsin native Captain William Gleason and his wife Sara began buying thousands of acres of land in Florida from the U.S. government for $1.25 per acre, including property in what would become Delray Beach.
By 1885, Henry Flagler was moving ahead with his Florida East Coast Railway, and purchased land from Gleason, who had served as Florida’s lieutenant governor from 1868 to 1870.
While there is little documentation prior to 1894, it is widely believed that African-Americans from Georgia, South Carolina and North Florida migrated to the area to help farm, and settled in the Sands area, north of what is now Atlantic Avenue and south of Lake Ida Road. Despite the expected hardships and challenges that came with having to grow their own food
Dennis Murray
On the loss of community and the deterioration of the neighborhood: “It’s sad to see what it’s become.”
—Dennis Murray
and build their own shelter, many of those who toiled in the plantation felds came south—some by mule—seeking a better life.
At the same time, Bahamian residents began settling south of Atlantic Avenue in an area of of Southwest Fifh Avenue, which would become known as Frog Alley.
When William Linton, David Swinton and Major Nathan Boynton arrived, also in 1894, they discovered members of the African-American community providing for their families as farmers and fshermen. Linton would return a year later with about a dozen others and would name the town Linton. Among those arriving with that group was Adolf Hofman, who purchased land between the Intracoastal and Swinton Avenue for farming and who would later employ many of the African-Americans as sharecroppers. Homes in Te Sands were still ofen more like palm-thatched chickees, and there were dirt paths rather than roads through much of the palmetto scrub.
In 1896, School #4 Colored, with B.F. James as the teacher, started, with classes held in a thatched hut on what is now Northwest Fifh Avenue—the same year the frst church, Mt. Olive Baptist Church, opened next door.
Troughout the 1890s, construction of Flagler’s railroad continued, and many of those who worked on the railroad were African-American. A white settler by the name of Allen built a group of houses for the railroad workers on the east side of Northwest Third Avenue between First and Second streets as bedroom rentals, all painted red with tin roofs. The area became known as the Redline neighborhood.
In 1898, after Linton defaulted on his land payments, the name of the town was changed to Delray after a town in Michigan.
TURN OF THE CENTURY
Te early part of the 20th century saw Delray Beach take form as a city, with growth sprouting on both sides of Swinton, but living conditions were still harsh. Hofman wrote in letters to friends up north around 1910 that mosquitoes were so thick they had to be brushed of before you could enter someone’s home. He also mentioned watching for rattlesnakes in palmetto scrub and of diseases such as malaria, yellow fever and typhoid.
African-Americans from southern states, however, were not deterred.
One of the most infuential early African-American settlers in Te Sands was William Robinson, from Yemas-
Top: 1920s picture of the greater Sands neighborhood Below: Teacher Frances Bright with her 1901 class at Colored School No. 4
—Charlene Farrington
see, South Carolina, known as “Bro Rob,” who arrived in 1901. A farmer and a builder who was born in 1881, Robinson was a deacon at the church and became one of the more affluent members of the community, according to his granddaughter, Fredreda Akers. Robinson built the first of several houses in 1904 on Northwest First Street, and would later build a packinghouse next door for the crops he grew, including beans, pineapples and watermelon. The house is still standing and serves as a rental property. Another house that Robinson built on Northwest Fourth Avenue is now home to his great-grandson.
The Robinson home was one of the first in The Sands to have electricity and running water and, later, a telephone and a sewage disposal system. It was a social gathering place for many in the community, and during the 1940s the home was designated an official Red Cross shelter. An activist who took correspondence courses to help him become a carpenter and entrepreneur, Robinson was influential in ensuring that children in the community received an education. After the school was closed in 1907 for lack of attendance (children were often called to the fields to work, instead), Robinson in 1914 set out to get it reopened and wrote to Booker T. Washington, who recommended Clarence C. Walker become the principal.
Between 1910 and 1920, Delray experienced a population boom with more than 1,000 pioneers settling in the area, many—both Black and white—coming from other southern states, seeking work in the fields.
In 1926, another prominent resident arrived and built a house in The Sands: Solomon D. Spady, an educator sent to Delray by George Washington Carver to replace Walker as principal of the school. The two-story masonry blockhouse on Northwest Fifth Avenue—then Blackmer Street—eventually became a rooming house and now is the home of the Spady Cultural Heritage Museum.
Agriculture continued to thrive during the first half of the 20th century, many in the West Settlers District working as sharecroppers on whiteowned farms. Others started businesses that transformed Fifth Avenue, both north and south of Atlantic Avenue. With limited resources, families had to be self-sufficient, and Fredreda Akers, granddaughter of early settler William Robinson, remembers mak-
Charlene Farrington
William Robinson
—Charlene Farrington
ing her own clothes and eating the catfish her grandfather would catch. She also recalls walking to a regular Friday night fish fry right down the street.
Segregation at the time was a driving contributor to both the deep sense of community as well as the development of businesses in the Black community. Delray Beach was known as a Sundown Town, meaning black residents needed to be west of Swinton Avenue before dark. As a result, restaurants, dance
clubs, barber shops and drug stores sprung up along Fifth Avenue. The La France Hotel would arrive too, and would become a fixture on Northwest Fourth Avenue, providing rooms for Black entertainers and others traveling through town.
It was during the 1940s when leaders of the community, including Carver High School educator and coach C. Spencer Pompey, formed the Nacirema Club, a civic and social group that discussed issues of the day. The name of the club is American spelled backwards. Longtime resident Addie Lee Hudson, 95, says that the club focused on social activities and remained mostly apolitical, even though Pompey would later take a leadership role in the struggle for equal rights.
CHANGE COMING
Change was coming to America, however, starting in the mid-‘50s, as the Civil Rights movement began to take hold. Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, and even Delray Beach began to stir. The city’s population grew dramatically;
The famous 1956 Delray wade-in, one of the turning points in Delray’s civil rights era; below, weapons seized at the wade-in
—Joycelyn Patrick
higher property values led to the transformation of farmland into housing developments, eliminating many of the agricultural jobs Black residents relied on. It was during that time that the “way things were” in Delray began to shift.
Dennis Murray says that a beach “wade-in” during the 1950s, in which Black residents protested to demand access to all of the public beach, rather than just a small section at the south end, was a turning point that strained relationships between the Black and white communities. It was after the wade-in that Delray drew media attention, which in the late 1950s led to the arrival of Ku Klux Klan members.
In his autobiography, Ozie Youngblood, the city’s first elected Black city council member, recalls a cross being burned in the black community. “I immediately collected a truck crew to put out the cross and carried it to Northwest Swinton Avenue and Atlantic Avenue and reset the cross burning in the white area,” he wrote. “To our surprise, no one showed up. We were a little disappointed.”
Joycelyn Patrick, a longtime leader in the Black community and one of the first Black students to attend the white Delray Beach Junior High School, says that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, school desegregation marked a turning point. “It was the turn of the decade, but it felt like the turn of the century,” she says. “With the coming of the civil rights movement, people here said they just weren’t going to take it anymore.”
Also illustrating the divide was the wholesale relocation of an African-American neighborhood north of Lake Ida Road to make way for a white neighborhood. Green’s Corner on Fifth Avenue between Second Street and Lake Ida Road, and Davis Town, which extended north of Lake Ida Road, were extensions of the Black community and included a small cemetery.
Addie Lee Hudson says the details are sketchy, but “when the white folks decided they wanted the land, [the Black residents] had to move,” adding that she didn’t know what happened to the graveyard but assumes it was just covered up.
Soon after, a wall was erected along Lake Ida Road to separate the new white neighborhood from the Black one to the south. The wall still stands, almost seven decades later.
Ernestine Holliday
“Everybdy knew everybody back then... ”
—Ernestine Holliday
DESEGREGATION
Following the civil rights movement and desegregation, some residents of The Sands and nearby areas began moving west to new neighborhoods that were suddenly accessible to them. Black residents were now able to go to the restaurants and shops on the other side of Swinton Avenue.
In some ways, the possibility of a better life also splintered the community, she believes. “Shared hardship creates ties that bind,” she says.
With integration, Carver High School—a Black high school and steadfast source of community pride (with one of the best football teams and bands in the state) became a middle school, and the talent that defined the school was absorbed into the fabric of Atlantic High School. Thriving businesses either closed or relocated. People began moving to newer neighborhoods and larger homes.
“I miss our neighborhood schools,” longtime resident Holliday says. “I miss the places where the community could go for entertainment, and I miss the sense of community. Some people don’t even know their next-door neighbors anymore. If they didn’t grow up here, they don’t have a sense of belonging like we do.”
For Dennis Murray, who still lives in Delray Beach’s northwest section, not far from where he played in the streets as a kid, the loss of community and the neighborhood deterioration is heartbreaking. “It’s sad to see what it’s become,” he says.
But Farrington sees a brighter future. She believes there is a lingering sense of unity that surfaces when issues arise, and that brings everyone together.
“There’s still a sense of community when something bad happens,” she says, explaining that residents pull together to protect the community’s historic culture. Even the long-abandoned family homes that were once bulldozed may be a thing of the past. Thanks in part to the West Settlers Historic District designation— which comes with strict rules—several remaining houses have a better chance of being preserved.
TODAY
In early 2000, the Delray Beach Community Redevelopment Agency began a revitalization of Northwest Fifth Avenue as well as Southwest Fifth Avenue, fixing sidewalks, improving lighting and improving properties.
In August of this year, however, the efforts to restore Fifth Avenue to a thriving business district suffered a setback as Donnie’s Place, a restaurant on the street with a 30-year-old history, closed permanently.
While the West Settlers District and some of its contiguous communities continue to remain a haven for descendants of early residents—including Murray, Patrick and Farrington—the larger community between Swinton and Interstate 95 and between Linton Boulevard and Lake Ida Road has seen dramatic changes.
The area now contains a large population of Haitian immigrants and is plagued by poverty in many areas. Sober homes still dot neighborhoods, and crime is a constant issue.
On the east side of the West Settlers District, a smattering of homes have been renovated and are now owned by white families, bringing fears of gentrification among many of the elders.
Farrington, however, is optimistic that continued redevelopment combined with preservation efforts will revitalize the community. She cites an effort by the city and the CRA to create a business incubator in the area and to continue developing properties. “I want to believe that once redevelopment is over, Northwest Fifth Avenue will once again be a vibrant hub in the West Atlantic Community,” she says. “It will be significant for the community around it.”
The La France Hotel
