Styx conflagration more myth than fact

Sally Dye of Boynton Beach wrote that she recently read Jonathon King’s novel The Styx. She wanted to know how much of it was based on fact.

We visited the topic last year, but let’s do so again, for Dye, and because the myth can’t be refuted too many times.

It’s been passed down by oral tradition and is accepted as gospel by many. But the evidence all but dismisses it.

The shantytown sprang up on Palm Beach’s County Road, north of the Royal Poinciana Hotel, in the 1890s for the more than 2,000 black workers at nearby hotels.

The story is that Henry Flagler was eager to oust the residents so he could develop the land. He had it condemned on health grounds, then hired a circus to set up across the Intracoastal Waterway in West Palm Beach, gave black residents free passes, and while they enjoyed the show, burned their homes down. Another version places the incident on Guy Fawkes Day, Nov. 5, 1906.

Inez Peppers Lovett, who was born in 1895, said in 1994, a year before her death, that she recalled packing up and leaving the Styx but remembers no fire.

T.T. Reese Jr., of the pioneer family, wrote in 1994 “to lay these questions to rest.”

First, Reese said, Flagler didn’t own the property. The Bradley brothers — Col. E.R. Bradley owned the famed Beach Club casino — bought the 30 acres around 1910 and by February 1912 had cut it into 230 residential lots.

In 1912, Reese said, Bradley ordered his father to move the residents out. He said his father gave them at least two weeks, and he remembers seeing them walk across the bridge, hauling their belongings. After everyone left, Reese said, his father cleared the land, pulled up the trash and burned it. Newspaper clippings from the time back Reese’s version of events. He died in 1997.

Here’s King, a friend and former writer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

“My journalistic take is that the property considered The Styx was disbanded over time. Some of the inhabitants moved when told by the landowners to move, others held on until there were no options. Was there a fire on a single night that flushed the place out all at once? Probably not.”

Blacks who worked on Henry Flagler’s resort projects lived in a settlement near North County Road and Sunset Avenue, Palm Beach. The shantytown was known as the Styx. Up to 1,000 lived there at one time, some making a living by pedaling wicker wheelchair conveyances for Flagler’s hotel guests. (Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County)

Tags: African Americans, fire, legends, Palm Beach

This week in history: Eva Mack becomes West Palm Beach’s first black mayor

On March 25, 1982, Eva Williams Mack was elected the first black mayor of West Palm Beach in a unanimous vote by the city commission. Mack came to West Palm Beach in 1948 and worked as a public health nurse and as the first health specialist for the county’s school board before she and Ruby Bullock became the city’s first black commissioners in 1978. Mack died in 1998.

Tags: African Americans, black icons, This Week in History, West Palm Beach

‘Mr. Democrat’ Lake Lytal integrated courthouse facilities

Last week we noted the end of Black History Month. Not enough can be said for the role African-Americans played in securing for themselves the rights the rest of us take for granted.

But it’s also important to note the efforts of whites — some halfhearted, some brave and at the risk of life and limb.

And some subtle, yet powerful.

Lake Lytal Park in suburban West Palm Beach is a popular destination.

And last month the law firm of Lytal & Reiter merged with another to become Lytal, Reiter, Smith, Ivey & Fronrath.

But many might not know the story of the original Lake Lytal.

Lytal in 1989 (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)

He served 32 years on the Palm Beach County Commission, a record that still stands. Associates called him “Mr. Democrat” and described him as a politician who believed in using government to help the less fortunate.

His most dramatic act was one he likely hoped few would notice.

People like Lytal and Gov. LeRoy Collins (1955-61) were Southerners, raised under Jim Crow laws.

They knew integration was coming, and Florida could accept it with a minimum of fuss or count on the world seeing images that would drive away tourism for decades.

One weekend in the early 1960s, Lytal summoned workers to the Palm Beach County Courthouse, where they quietly painted over signs at drinking fountains that read “white” and “colored.”

The following Monday, “I do remember there were people, after it happened, that were upset about it,” lawyer Lake Lytal Jr., then a Florida State University student, said last month.

He recalled a white woman who saw a black woman in the restroom and “was going crazy.”

But like it or not, the woman found that county facilities had been integrated. And for good.

Lake Lytal, who moved from Louisiana at 12 in 1918 and graduated from Palm Beach High School in 1924, lived most of his life in Lake Clarke Shores with his wife, Ruth, a schoolteacher, who died in 1998.

In 1975, Lake Lytal Park, on Gun Club Road, was named for him. Then 68, he leaped from the high dive to celebrate.

He died at 85 in 1992.

Then-Palm Beach County Commissioner Lake Lytal made a splash at the dedication of a new county swimming pool in March 1975. He was 68 when he dove into the pool at the park named for him. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)

Tags: African Americans, parks, place names

1911 Delray Beach election had black candidate

This is Black History Month. In November, we quoted West Palm Beach historian Ineria Hudnell saying, “You don’t have to wait until Black History Month” to honor the struggles and accomplishments of the black community. Others have opined for a time when we don’t need a special day to single out one ethnic group’s accomplishments. Until then, we’ll carry on.

So let’s spotlight George Green of Delray Beach. Here’s a 1999 Post Time article:

George Green got more than one out of every four votes for the Delray Beach City Council. Not enough to win, but not bad for a black man in the Deep South in 1911.

Green was one of the pioneers of the fledgling town during a time of Jim Crow poll taxes and other forms of black voter intimidation. But in the town’s first election, on Oct. 9, 1911, Delray Beach’s blacks were not only allowed to vote, they put forward their own candidate.

Eleven of the first 57 electors were black, and Green was one of 10 people nominated for five alderman’s positions, coming in seventh with 16 votes.

Green’s family could well have been named Monroe. That was the name of his father’s master. But with emancipation, the name became a hated reminder, and the family became the Greens.

George, born in 1877 and one of six siblings, left the small town of Midway, near Tallahassee, with his wife in 1894. He joined a growing migration of Southern blacks lured to frontier South Florida by the promise of cheap and plentiful land.

Soon Green had a home in the neighborhood between Swinton and Northwest Sixth avenues, now called the West Settlers Historic District. He was a partner in a packing house that shipped winter vegetables to the north.

“My grandfather was quite a businessman for somebody who probably had only an eighth-grade education,” said Betty Jo Jenkins, a librarian at City College of New York.

“There was evidence of segregation, but I think the people seemed to have gotten along well,” Jenkins said. “They were all struggling to make it in this rather inhospitable area.”

Kidney disease felled Green at 50; he died in his family home and is buried, along with his wife, in Delray Beach.

Delray Beach pioneer George Green, with his wife Josie and children. He moved to Delray Beach in 1894 and ran a vegetable packing house. The Delray Beach pioneer got 16 votes to place seventh in the 1911 race for alderman. (Photo courtesy of EPOCH and the Spady Cultural Heritage Museum)

Update: Reader Edith B. Cowan of Jupiter caught a goof in our Dec. 30 column on Wallis Warfield Simpson and the Seminole Inn in Indiantown. “The Seaboard Railroad and the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad did not merge and become the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad until July 1, 1967,” she wrote. She should know; her father worked for the railroads both before and after the merger.

Tags: African Americans, black icons, Delray Beach

1960 film on migratory farm labor still resonates

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking CBS documentary Harvest of Shame. Here are excerpts from a Nov. 18, 1990, Post article by former colleague Lisa Shuchman.

Few documentaries have unleashed such strong feelings in America as Harvest of Shame did in 1960.

“Never before in the dismal history of migratory farm labor in the United States has there been such widespread personal knowledge as there is today of the shocking conditions under which the migrants live and work,” The New York Times wrote in an editorial.

Shame began in Belle Glade and followed migrant workers on their trek to fields and orchards across the country.

Relying heavily on interviews with workers and their children, it focused attention on low wages, poor housing and grueling work that kept migrant families locked in a poverty cycle that contrasted sharply with the prosperity of their employers.

Shame was saluted by advocates for change and denounced by farmers and their lobbyists. U.S. Sen. Spessard Holland of Florida called it inaccurate and unfair.

Edward R. Murrow showed the life of people who work in what he called “the sweatshop of the soil.”

He concluded, “The people you have seen have the strength to harvest your fruit and vegetables. They do not have the strength to influence legislation. Maybe we do.”

It was unusual for television to make such a direct appeal to the viewer.

“It was editorializing, but Murrow felt strongly about it,” Fred Friendly, the executive producer, said (in 1990; he died in 1998). “Not to have done it would have been an abdication of responsibility, and we were proud that we did it.”

Shame tells a broader story than that of the migrant farmworker of 1960, Friendly, said; it is really about all the disenfranchised in America.

“It was the first program about the homeless,” he said.

Jerome King of South Bay, shown here in a still from the video, appeared in the 1960 documentary Harvest of Shame by Edward R. Murrow. (Palm Beach Post file photo)

King, still living western Palm Beach County, talked to The Palm Beach Post in 2003 (Palm Beach Post file photo)

Murrow in 1954 (Palm Beach Post file photo)

Readers: Our Nov. 11 column said only two people with Florida connections ever made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Former colleague Tom Dubocq wrote to remind us of Christopher Wilder, who we missed because we were looking for mentions of Florida. Wilder, a builder and race car driver from Boynton Beach wanted in the murders of his fiancée and another woman, went on the list April 5, 1984, during an 8,000-mile cross-country trek in which he allegedly kidnapped 12 women and killed nine of them. On Friday, April 13, 1984, he fatally shot himself after wrestling over a gun with a New Hampshire state police officer. He was 8 miles from the Canadian border.

Tags: African Americans, agriculture, television