Black Deputy Broker Barrier In 1948

Question: Who was Palm Beach County’s first black law-enforcement officer?

Answer: It probably was Wilbur Burney, the first black Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputy and one of the first in Florida.

Even before he broke barriers in 1948, Burney had been an unofficial deputy, he said in 1983, two years before he died at the age of 80 in 1985 in West Palm Beach.

Starting in 1939, while driving a cab, “I was kind of undercover,” Burney said. “I wasn’t bonded and couldn’t arrest whites. They just wanted certain things done.”

Burney finally was hired, but he actually had been approached first by West Palm Beach Police Chief Truman Matthews to attend a training school. Sheriff John Kirk had nabbed him, though.

“Kirk sent his chief deputy to get me, but I was leery,” Burney recalled. “I said, ‘Just in black town?’ ”

He said the chief deputy showed him a badge and responded: “That’s what you’re going to be. You arrest anyone who breaks the law, black or white.”

Said Burney, “That’s what I wanted to hear. I was sworn in right there, and that afternoon, I marched in a parade in uniform.”

Burney said he was met with some resentment but that Kirk later sent him throughout the state to recruit blacks.

Soon after Burney’s death, the Sheriff’s Star, magazine of the Florida Sheriff’s Association, ran a feature about him.

Retired DeSoto County Sheriff’s deputy George Brown, of Arcadia, took the article to his sheriff. Brown had been sworn three years before Burney. DeSoto County, about to celebrate its centennial, promptly passed a resolution to recognize Brown, which only partially diminished Burney’s feat.

Burney founded the Florida Association of Negro Deputy Sheriffs in 1952, when the state had three black deputies who were banned from white organizations.

While Burney was the county’s first black deputy, individual police departments might have had black officers before that. Readers: Can you help?

Tags: African Americans, black icons, police, unanswered questions