Willie Mae Jackson and Irene Carswell in Pearl City during the 1950s.
Lois Martin in 1980
Carolyn Brown on her tricycle in the ’50s.
Aerial photograph of Pearl City and Dixie Manor in the 1940s.
Photos courtesy of the Boca Raton Historical Society
By Deborah S. Hartz-Seeley
On June 20, Boca Raton will celebrate its African-American heritage and the centennial of Pearl City with longtime residents sharing their “rocking chair” memories. Boca Raton Mayor Susan Haynie will present a proclamation of recognition and a “pop-up” exhibit will feature archival photos and artifacts.
This is a chance to discover what life was like in this African-American community that was originally platted in 1915 and still exists today, says Susan Gillis, curator of the Boca Raton Historical Society, which is co-sponsoring the event.
Pearl City began as an area set aside for African-American pioneers who wanted to own land and build homes. It includes Northeast 10th, 11th and 12th streets in Boca Raton, which originally were called Sapphire, Pearl and Ruby streets.
No one really knows how the area got its name but the first residents were mostly sharecroppers and agricultural workers on nearby farms. Before Pearl City was set aside, these workers lived in a segregated area of Deerfield Beach and walked to the fields each morning.
Pearl City’s first house was built in 1925. Lois Martin, 86, who still lives in Pearl City, arrived soon after when a midwife at her family’s home, then at 140 NE Ruby St., delivered her.
Starting her education in the area’s one-room schoolhouse, she later became Boca Raton’s first African-American to attend college. She graduated as a mathematics teacher, married and, after a few years of teaching in Alabama, returned in 1970 to raise her son in Pearl City. She’s been there ever since.
Amos Jackson, 82, moved to Pearl City in 1937 when he was about 5. He remembers growing up without electricity, running water or plumbing. There was no air-conditioning so screened-in porches on the front of the wooden houses were almost a necessity.
Jackson, who started out as a laborer for the city of Boca Raton but after desegregation worked his way up to superintendent of parks, also recalls neighborhood boys and girls playing together. “It was one big happy family,” he says.
But it wasn’t all fun.
Martin recalls her mama had to take in laundry she’d do by hand to earn extra money. The youngest of seven children, Martin was responsible for keeping the heavy metal smoothing irons clean and hot over a pot of coals so they were ready when one of her four older sisters needed them to attack the wrinkles.
Even so, sitting in her Pearl City living room today, Martin thinks back on the old times with fondness.
“We just accepted the area as being segregated. But it was Pearl City, a tight community. It was families with everybody knowing everybody else,” she says.
With the coming of war, a land boom and a bust and then desegregation and recession, things have changed in this tiny area of Boca Raton.
For example, Jackson moved to Pompano Beach in 1961 and, although he still owns a duplex in Pearl City, he’s not moving back. “My wife has passed and my children are grown so I’ll be staying where I am,” he says.
But Martin can’t imagine living anywhere else. “I want my grandchildren to be able to say that their grandparents and great-grandparents came here when it was nothing but woods and helped develop this place,” she says.
Gillis hopes that the Centennial Celebration will educate people about the small gem that is Pearl City and increase interest in its preservation since it was designated a historic district in 2000.
“People in this part of the world associate historic preservation with mansions, not ordinary folks’ houses. The very ordinariness of these structures makes them important. I’m agog that Pearl City still exists,” she says.
The Pearl City Centennial Celebration will begin at 9 a.m. June 20 with a ceremony at Ebenezer Baptist Church (200 Ruby St., Boca Raton) followed by a walk, beginning at 10 a.m., across Glades Road to Friendship Baptist Church (1422 NE Second St., Boca Raton).
There at about 10:30 a.m. visitors can see historic exhibits and speak with longtime Pearl City residents as well as enjoy refreshments, music and fellowship. The event ends at 2 p.m.
For information, contact John Brown, 221-4701; Mitch Smith, 305-7663; or Marjorie O’Sullivan, 213-6214.
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