September 6, 2010
On Sept. 11, 1961, the first two black students to enroll in a white public school began classes at Lake Worth High School, making Palm Beach County the fourth in the state to begin integration. Later that day, Palm Beach Junior college admitted its first black student. The Palm Beach Post declared that "integration came quietly and smoothly" to the schools.
Click on the image to browse the Sept. 12, 1961, Palm Beach Post....
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September 2, 2010
Teens now attending the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Jr. School of the Arts might not know the legacy of the historic complex on “The Hill.”
Forty years ago this week, on Sept. 1, 1970, the original Palm Beach High changed its name to Twin Lakes. The moniker was shortlived, and the complex shut soon after. But it was too important to let go.
Let’s revisit a 2004 column:
Twin Lakes formed for all the right reasons, but it had a less than charmed life. For decades, white students had attended Palm Beach High, while blacks attended Roosevelt, about 2 miles to the north.
In the fall of 1970, pressed by the U.S. Supreme Court, Palm Beach County integrated the schools. Forced to create a single entity, school officials named the two campuses “Twin Lakes North” and “Twin Lakes South.”
The old Roosevelt High eventually became a middle school.
“Twin Lakes High” finally closed in June 1988.
It briefly operated as Palm Beach Lakes High until that school’s new campus opened Jan. 30, 1989, then shut down again.
For years, it stood vacant. A total of $29.5 million was spent to renovate the buildings. The Dreyfoos school opened in 1997.
The May 2004 column had said logic suggested “Twin Lakes” referred to Lake Mangonia, which fronted Roosevelt, and Clear Lake, near Palm Beach High.
That prompted a call from Polly Kelly called in Lake Worth. She’d been Palm Beach High’s treasurer from 1967 to 1988.
Polly said our conjecture was correct. She said a committee comprising faculty from the...
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August 19, 2010
The Rev. Marguerite Lewis Redding wrote recently to ask about the home her family has owned since 1963, at 818 Fourth St., in the Northwest neighborhood near downtown West Palm Beach.
Redding says the home might have been designed by Hazel Augustus, recognized as the city’s first black architect.
And in the 1940s or 1950s, it was one of the first kindergarten schools for blacks in the city, she says.
Redding is an associate minister of the historic Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth, which was founded in Tennessee in 1903 and in Riviera Beach in the 1920s.
The church dissolved in the 1930s but reorganized the following decade.
Redding’s parents, Felix E. and Helen M. Lewis, were both ministers. Helen Lewis, a chief executive officer in the church, died in 2001.
The home at 818 Fourth St. appears in a “State of Our City” brochure issued in 2005 by the Chamber of Commerce of the Palm Beaches as well as city preservation surveys.
Redding, a retired school librarian, said her family bought the home in 1963, through Preston Tillman, a real estate agent and a historian of black West Palm Beach. Redding was married there in 1973.
She said her family bought it from the Ambrose family, which had used it as a rooming house.
Records show Allen Ambrose bought the deed in 1916, the year city records show it was built.
According to a 1989 city preservation survey, the two-story home “represents a period of phenomenal ...
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