U B Kinsey Palmview Elementary School of the Arts

African American Schools

The first high school for African Americans in Palm Embankment Canton was built in 1917

U.B. Kinsey. Courtesy Palm

Beach Postal service.

on 11th Street, in the Northwest neighborhood. Although its student body was intended to include children from Pleasant City a mile away, at least one private school opened for students unwilling to travel to 11th Street. Today the primary Industrial High School building is occupied by U. B. Kinsey/Palmview Elementary Schoolhouse of the Arts and is office of the Florida Black Heritage Trail. The balance of Industrial's buildings were demolished, except for the chapel.

In 1918 two early wood-frame schools were phased out. The one-room Colored Schoolhouse No. 8 on 22nd Street was sold to H. H. Greyness for $125, and the 2-story West Palm Embankment Colored School (Lake Academy) to Russell Hopkins for $two,000. But there was no shortage of students; in 1919 attendance was reportedly every bit high equally fifty to 60 children in some blackness classrooms. In 1923 Pleasant Metropolis residents presented a petition to the schoolhouse board for a new school, and had a patron. The Toilers of Mt. Parnassus Order No. 6233 (Odd Fellows) offered their ii-story stucco building on Lucky Street (now 21st St), which had been designed in 1914 by Hazel Augustus, the outset blackness architect in Palm Beach County.

Although the canton canonical the request and assigned Mrs. A. 50. Duncan and Mamie Holmes as teachers, residents complained the building was not well maintained. In add-on, the Lodge was backside on mortgage payments to the Hammon Estate. In 1926 the school lath took over the payments and title to Odd Fellows Hall, located well-nigh back-to-back with the original one-room schoolhouse. It is now the Pleasant City Community Multicultural Center within Pleasant City Park, and role of the Florida Black Heritage Trail.

In Delray (which became Delray Beach in 1928), another black resident took action to promote teaching of local black children. In 1914 William Robinson wrote to Dr. Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee Institute, request for advice on reopening Colored School No. 4, which had been closed since 1907. Washington wrote to Clarence Walker, instruction at an Alabama college, and recommended he help the people of Delray. Although Walker arrived to find a rundown schoolhouse surrounded by scrub palmetto, he turned it into the first county training school in Florida under the Smith Hughes National Vocational Pedagogy Human activity of 1917, designed to encourage agricultural training. From 1917 to 1921, Walker developed the Delray County Preparation School with a broad curriculum.

Soloman D. Spady. Courtesy

Spday Cultural Heritage

Museum.

Again on the recommendation of Dr. Booker T. Washington, Solomon David Spady, a former student of Dr. George Washington Carver at Tuskegee Institute, replaced Walker in 1921 equally instructor and principal of Delray County Training School. By 1934, the school expanded to grades 1-10. When George Washington Carver High School was built on the aforementioned site in 1937 for grades 1-12, Spady was its principal.

In nearby Boca Raton, education came to the black neighborhood of Pearl City through the efforts of Alex Hughes, its first resident. In 1923 Hughes petitioned the Board of Public Instruction, as the county school board was and so chosen, for a schoolhouse. He afterwards recalled: "They told me that if I could find eight children, they would provide a instructor. I came right on dorsum and mustered up; eight children, and they sent a teacher down, Miss Robinson." The city named Hughes Park at 200 NE 14th Street to honor Alex Hughes.

Plaque in Hughes Park, which is named for

ane of Pearl City's leading residents, Alex

Hughes. Courtesy Richard A. Marconi.

For a building, the county offered the sometime schoolhouse for white children on Palmetto Park Route, only west of the Florida East Declension Railway tracks, presently the site of Boca Raton Elementary Schoolhouse. Farmer Frank Chesebro, Alex Hughes' employer, took 18 days to roll the small forest building to 11th Street and Dixie Highway, where it reopened as the Boca Raton Negro School. The structure remains there today, although a larger building was added in the late 1930s, at North Dixie Highway and nowadays Glades Route.

Jupiter'south black students attended a separate two-room schoolhouse in Limestone Creek through 8th grade until 1961. After the 1928 hurricane, both blackness and white residents sought shelter together in the school until they could render to their homes. Costing $150,000, the new school included a library, science lab, and auditorium with phase.

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Source: https://www.pbchistoryonline.org/page/african-american-schools

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