This story aired on WLRN on December 6, 2024. Listen here.
A $500,000 investment is boosting the momentum for a Black history museum and research center in West Palm Beach’s historic Coleman Park neighborhood.
Danita DeHaney, President and CEO of the Community Foundation for Palm Beach and Martin counties, announced this week that the large financial contribution came from the Quantum Foundation in West Palm Beach, a private grant-making organization devoted to improving the health outcomes and well-being of underserved communities.
Eric Kelly, the group’s president, says the capital investment will help advance the development of the project.
“This place is a rich settlement of Black history. All of our stories matter,” Kelly said. “And it’s important to continue to lift the stories of black people who really were the workers of the soil here in Florida.”
The construction of the museum and the renovation of a high school campus is part of a years-long effort to revitalize the distressed, predominantly Black community, which was once a bustling hub for thriving professionals and businesses during racial segregation.
The planned African-American Museum and Research Library, at the former Roosevelt High School site on 15th and Tamarind Avenue, will act as the cornerstone for the community’s revitalization efforts, said DeHaney.
The organization is helping spearhead the project for the “heartbeat of the African-American community.”
The plan for the 20,000-square-foot museum aims to “attract tourism and provide educational and cultural opportunities,” like youth programs, cultural events and oral history projects, said DeHaney.
“We have octogenarians and nonagenarians who are still with us,” DeHaney told WLRN. “We are going to capture their stories. So that our children and their children can hear from the people who were once members of this amazing community of what it was like for them.”
She said the county invested $1 million in seed funds to enable the nonprofit’s involvement in the museum’s design, planning, and construction phases.
The foundation is sending a Request for Proposal, or RFP, to six architectural firms, narrowed down from 30 options.
The Coleman Park neighborhood included prominent residents Dr. Hampton Jackson, the physician who operated on President Reagan’s knee and community leaders like Alice Mickens. The community also welcomed Negro League Baseball stars like Josh Gibson and Jackie Robinson, who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier on April 15, 1947 when he started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Various community stakeholders, such as the Industrial-Roosevelt High School National Alumni Association & Friends, the Palm Beach County Board of County Commissioners, the School District of Palm Beach County, and an advisory council of local women, are working to “restore the neighborhood” that has experienced “disinvestment for the past six decades,” Kelly said.
The $80 million project is part of a series of construction phases approved by the School District. The first and second phases of the project, school district officials told WLRN, could take up to three years to complete and the first phase will cost an estimated $21 million.
The Roosevelt High campus, which is renamed the Historic Roosevelt Full Service Center, is being redone nearly seven decades after it first opened its doors — when completed, it will also include several new buildings and renovated spaces for adult education.
Following the end of segregation in 1970, the closure of the Roosevelt High institution, the once-thriving all-Black school and pillar of the community, dealt a devastating, economic blow to the neighborhood — leaving behind an educational and cultural gap.
During the groundbreaking of the Center earlier this year, Cora Studstill-Perry, a former teacher and alum, class of 1965, told WLRN the school “was our home away from home.”
“It was our home, a church, and the school — all of them came together,” she said.
The Quantum Foundation commissioned a nearly 20-minute documentary, the award-winning Through These Doors: The Roosevelt High School Alumni Story, which features alumnus discussing on the revitalization of the historic Roosevelt High School campus.
One alumni, Juan Borrows, said the Roosevelt instilled pride in the students during segregation. He said the school had a sign posted in the gym that read “Through these doors walk the greatest students in the world.”
Groundbreaking for the Black history museum in Coleman Park is scheduled for early 2025.
