Project maps out 24 points of Broward County Black history

Broward County Transit and the African American Research Library and Cultural Center have created an interactive map showcasing 24 pivotal places in Broward County’s Black history — and the bus routes that can take you there.

Many of the sites represent firsts for the area’s African American community. The Victory Theatre in Fort Lauderdale, for example, opened in the 1940s, hosting greats such as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and B.B. King, and now survives at 541 NW 5th Ave. as the Victory Black Box Theatre.

The map features capsules of history about Dr. James Sistrunk, the first Black doctor to practice in Broward County. He joined with the area’s first Black surgeon, Dr. Von D. Mizell, to start the first hospital to serve the Black community in 1938, at 1409 NW 6th St.

The 15-bed Provident Hospital was demolished but the L.A. Lee YMCA/Mizell Community Center was built on the same site. And now it has a place on the map of Broward County’s Black history.

This history map also has places that left their mark in ways that reverberated across the state, particularly the Fort Lauderdale wade-ins that started 62 years ago on July 4. Visitors can dip a toe into the waters where Black bathers were relegated to cool off and visit the home of the woman who organized the protest that ultimately won them access to all beaches.

Broward County had what was referred to as “the colored beach,” starting in 1954, but there was no road to it — it was accessible only by ferry — and no restrooms. A 1960 federal court order, resulting from an NAACP lawsuit, had given Miami’s Black swimmers the right to go to any public swimming facility. But police did not enforce that, and facility owners continued to discriminate, according to an account of the wade-in protests in the Global Nonviolent Action Database, housed at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

So, Mizell, Dr. Mizell’s protégé Eula Johnson, an unidentified Black adult, and four Black college students put the federal court order to the test on Independence Day 1961 at the beach on Las Olas Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale with a handful of others. They were met with a threatening police force, ax-wielding KKK members and catcalling White beachgoers, according to accounts.

There was no violence, but the city of Fort Lauderdale filed suit against Johnson, Mizell and the NAACP to stop the wade-ins that went on through August, as a marker that now stands at Las Olas attests. On July 11, 1962, the city’s suit was rejected and a turning point in the effort to desegregate public facilities was reached.

Now, Dr. Von D. Mizell – Eula Johnson State Park is on Broward’s Black history map. The barrier island has a bridge and amenities for a typical day at the beach.

The Eula Johnson House, 1100 NW 6th Street, Fort Lauderdale, is on the map and has been made into a museum.

Don Mizell, the nephew of the pioneering Dr. Mizell, who spent years lobbying lawmakers to rename the state park in honor of his uncle, fears much of the area’s Black history of struggle against segregation is about to disappear along with his generation.

He was in a portable classroom in the middle of a field when he was called up to be a part of a new experimental high school in Davie, Nova High School. Mizell, who eventually graduated from Harvard Law School, and a handful of others were the first Black students to walk into a White school in 1963. It was because the Ford Foundation, which was underwriting part of the school’s cost, was pushing for this school of the future to include Black students, he said.

Officially, Broward County history says school desegregation happened by court order in 1971.

“It’s a good start,” Mizell said of the Black history map. “But it’s absolutely not complete.”