Black Roots of Broward County

A county shaped by Black labor, institution-building and migration

Broward County's Black history is not a side note to the county's growth. It is part of the foundation on which the region was built. Black families farmed, worked on railroads and in agriculture, established congregations, educated children, created businesses and organized for equal access to public life. Broward County Government's historical collections document Black pioneer families in communities including Deerfield Beach and Dania before and soon after Broward County was established in 1915. The Howard family arrived in the Deerfield area around 1897, and William H. Howard registered to vote before the county itself existed. The Mizell family, including the future physician and civil-rights leader Von D. Mizell, settled in Dania in 1912.

These family histories matter because they counter the idea that Broward's Black presence began only with recent migration. African American communities were already helping shape the area during the county's formative years. Under segregation, however, Black residents were denied equal access to many hospitals, schools, beaches, neighborhoods and commercial opportunities. They responded by building institutions of their own while also challenging the laws and customs that restricted them.

Fort Lauderdale's Northwest community

As Fort Lauderdale developed in the early twentieth century, segregation confined many Black residents and businesses to the city's northwest section, west of the railroad tracks. The community was sometimes referred to in the language of the Jim Crow period as "Colored Town." What emerged there was not simply a residential district but a network of homes, churches, schools, medical services, shops, restaurants, entertainment venues and civic organizations.

NW Sixth Street became the community's principal corridor. It linked daily commerce with social and institutional life. Local businesses served customers who were often excluded or poorly served elsewhere, and Black professionals created services that the segregated city would not provide equitably. The corridor later took the name Sistrunk Boulevard in honor of Dr. James Franklin Sistrunk, one of Broward County's pioneering Black physicians.

Historic Sistrunk remains central to the story of Black Fort Lauderdale. Fort Lauderdale's Community Redevelopment Agency describes the neighborhood as rooted in arts, music and culture. Its importance is not limited to preserved buildings: it represents generations of entrepreneurship, mutual support, faith, education and political action.

Dr. James F. Sistrunk, Dr. Von D. Mizell and Provident Hospital

Medical segregation placed Black Broward residents at grave risk. White hospitals could refuse Black patients or restrict Black physicians from practicing. Dr. James F. Sistrunk and Dr. Von Delaney Mizell responded by establishing Provident Hospital, Broward County's first hospital created to serve African American residents. Broward County records date the groundbreaking to 1938.

Provident Hospital was more than a medical building. It represented professional independence and community survival in a system that denied equal treatment. The hospital allowed Black patients to receive care from trained physicians and gave Black medical professionals a place to practice. Its founders also became civic leaders whose influence reached far beyond medicine.

Dr. Sistrunk's name now identifies the historic corridor that carried much of the community's commercial and cultural life. Dr. Mizell became a leading civil-rights advocate and served as a major figure in the local NAACP. Their work demonstrates how Black professional achievement in Broward was often inseparable from institution-building and the fight for public equality.

Education and the legacy of Dillard

Education became another arena in which Black Broward residents built opportunity under unequal conditions. The institution remembered through the Old Dillard Museum traces its roots to Fort Lauderdale's early public education for Black children. The surviving Old Dillard High School building, constructed in the 1920s, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.

The school's history reflects both discrimination and determination. Black students and educators worked with fewer resources than white schools received, yet Dillard developed into a center of learning, culture and community pride. The historic building now serves as the Old Dillard Museum, preserving artifacts and exhibitions related to Fort Lauderdale's Black heritage, community milestones and influential residents.

Education leaders across Broward also left enduring legacies. Broward County's Black-history collections recognize educators such as Joseph A. Ely and Blanche Ely, whose names are associated with the development of Black education in the county. These schools and educators helped generations of students build lives and careers even while the school system remained segregated.

Churches as anchors of community life

Black churches provided much more than Sunday worship. They offered meeting places, mutual assistance, leadership development, education, social networks and organizing space. In the Sistrunk community, congregations helped residents endure segregation and mobilize for change. New Mount Olive Baptist Church, for example, marked a century in the historic neighborhood in 2018.

The influence of Broward's Black churches continues through food assistance, youth programs, civic participation, cultural events and ministries serving residents in crisis. Their endurance helps explain why churches and ministries remain a central part of SendMe Black Connect rather than an unrelated directory category: historically, they have been part of the community's social infrastructure.

The civil-rights struggle and the beach wade-ins

Broward's beaches were once segregated. Black residents were directed away from white-only beaches and denied equal enjoyment of the county's shoreline. In 1961, local civil-rights leaders, including Dr. Von D. Mizell and Eula Bandy Johnson, organized wade-ins that directly challenged beach segregation.

Johnson was president of the Fort Lauderdale branch of the NAACP and one of Broward's most important civil-rights organizers. Broward County Government credits her with organizing the 1961 wade-ins and identifies her as the first Black woman to vote in Broward County. Florida State Parks records that Mizell, Johnson and other participants entered white-only public beaches as an act of protest. The demonstrations continued despite resistance and legal pressure. After a judge declined to stop the protests, Broward beaches were desegregated in 1962.

The Dr. Von D. Mizell-Eula Johnson State Park in Hollywood now bears the names of these two leaders. The naming transforms a coastal landscape once shaped by exclusion into a public memorial to those who confronted it.

Black business along the Sistrunk corridor

Segregation forced Black enterprise into a restricted geography, but it also produced a concentrated business district where residents could find services and build economic relationships. Along NW Sixth Street and nearby avenues, Black-owned shops, restaurants, professional offices and entertainment spaces supported community life.

The corridor's commercial strength weakened over time as desegregation changed shopping patterns, highways and redevelopment disrupted established neighborhoods, and capital remained difficult for many Black businesses to obtain. Yet Sistrunk has never ceased to represent Black entrepreneurship. Current redevelopment raises both opportunity and concern: investment can restore buildings and support new enterprises, but revitalization must not erase residents, stories or businesses that gave the neighborhood its identity.

For SendMe Black Connect, documenting businesses is therefore connected to documenting history. A directory can show not only where people shop today but also how Black enterprise has sustained Broward communities across generations.

Lauderhill: a modern center of Black and Caribbean life

Lauderhill's Black history differs from Fort Lauderdale's older Sistrunk story. Lauderhill grew into a major Black and immigrant community through later twentieth- and twenty-first-century migration and demographic change. U.S. Census Bureau estimates for 2020-2024 identify 76.3 percent of Lauderhill residents as Black alone and 37.6 percent as foreign-born. More than one quarter of residents age five and older speak a language other than English at home.

Those figures help explain the city's strong Caribbean presence, but culture is visible beyond statistics. Jamaican, Haitian, Trinidadian and other Caribbean communities have shaped Lauderhill's restaurants, churches, businesses, music, festivals, family networks and civic life. The City of Lauderhill describes its dining scene as a journey through Jamaican, Haitian, Trinidadian and American food traditions. City events regularly recognize Caribbean independence celebrations and cultural performance.

Cricket provides another public expression of the diaspora. Lauderhill calls itself the cricket capital of the United States, and Broward County Stadium at Central Broward Park has hosted international competition. In a region where many residents or their families come from cricket-playing nations, the sport connects South Florida with the Caribbean and wider Commonwealth world.

Lauderhill's identity demonstrates why heritage and physical location must remain separate in the directory. A Jamaican-owned business in Lauderhill is physically located in the United States, Florida, Broward County and Lauderhill. Its Caribbean or Jamaican heritage is an additional cultural connection, not a replacement for its actual address.

Haitian, Jamaican and wider diaspora influence across Broward

Broward's Black population is not culturally uniform. African American families with deep roots in Florida live alongside immigrants and descendants from Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, The Bahamas, other Caribbean nations, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere. These communities overlap through neighborhoods, schools, churches, businesses, foodways, music and public service while preserving distinct histories and identities.

Haitian influence is especially visible in churches, health care, professional services, restaurants, media and community organizations. Jamaican and Trinidadian communities have likewise contributed strongly to business, worship, food, music, sport and civic leadership. African immigrants and Black people from throughout the Americas add further languages, traditions and entrepreneurial networks.

Responsible local history should neither flatten these communities into one label nor treat them as disconnected. Broward's Black life is best understood as a meeting place: African American history and the modern African diaspora continually shape one another.

Preserving memory: AARLCC and community archives

The African American Research Library and Cultural Center stands on Sistrunk Boulevard as one of Broward's most important institutions of memory. Former Broward County Library director Samuel F. Morrison envisioned a research library dedicated to African American culture, scholarship, technology, gathering and lifelong learning. Community fundraising, public support and private donations turned that vision into a 60,000-square-foot facility that opened on October 26, 2002.

The library's collections connect local experience to the wider African diaspora. Holdings include the papers of Dr. Von D. Mizell, materials related to Provident Hospital, collections associated with actress and Pompano Beach native Esther Rolle, oral histories, photographs, rare books, manuscripts, art and records documenting African American, African and Caribbean life.

AARLCC also maintains the Black Broward Oral History Collection. Oral histories preserve experiences that may never appear in government files or traditional textbooks: memories of neighborhoods, institutions, work, migration, race relations, family and community leadership. These testimonies remind us that history is not only a list of famous names. It is also the accumulated knowledge of residents who lived through change.

Culture that continues to evolve

Broward's Black culture lives in food, worship, music, festivals, museums, libraries, parks and daily business activity. The Sistrunk Historical Festival celebrates achievements of people of African descent and honors the legacy of Dr. James Sistrunk. Restaurants preserve and reinterpret African American and Caribbean food traditions. Churches sustain spiritual and social networks. Artists and musicians connect local expression to wider Black cultural movements.

This history is still being written. New businesses open, older landmarks close, families migrate, and neighborhoods change. Preserving the past does not mean freezing Broward in one era. It means ensuring that growth acknowledges the people and institutions that made growth possible.

Why this history belongs beside the directory

SendMe Black Connect begins its public rollout in Broward County because local density and local knowledge create real value. The directory helps residents find businesses, churches, nonprofits, artists and events. The history explains why these community institutions matter.

Fort Lauderdale's Sistrunk corridor shows how Black residents created an economic and institutional center under segregation. Lauderhill shows how migration has produced a contemporary Black city with powerful Caribbean ties. Broward's civil-rights history shows that access to schools, hospitals, beaches and public life was won through organized courage. Together, these stories turn a list of addresses into a map of living community.