BOCA RATON, Fla. — Boca Raton’s Pearl City neighborhood is seeing a resurgence of interest. In 2002, Boca’s city council designated it a historic district but people who live there say that’s not enough. On Friday, a growing coalition of community leaders and residents began the process to reach a national designation.
In 1915, Will Demery built a home on Lot 13 of what would become the Pearl City neighborhood in Boca Raton. In fact, Doris Marie Hester was born on the property.
“We were the first Black family in Pearl City. It existed before the City of Boca Raton,” said Hester.
Her grandfather was part of a migrating group of Black’s from Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and the Bahamas who moved to the region for a better life in agriculture.
“It was not easy. They earned about 17-cents a day,” Hester said.
And she worries these Black contributions to the region aren’t talked about enough.
“Why are we still fighting this fight,” Hester said.
That’s the reason she returned from Washington, D.C. with her husband Lawrence and built a brand new home on Lot 13. And she hasn’t returned quietly.
“If you don’t know where you came from you don’t know where you’re going to,” Hester said.
In August, she assumed a position on the Boca Raton Historical Society board. And she’s working closely with the Historic Preservation Board to make the neighborhood a national historic district within the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
”There’s a lot of development pressure,” said Charles Graves, Boca Raton Historic Preservation board member. “Can you take your $300,000 and cash out — or do you want to save this for your next generation.”
Graves is the former city planning director for a half-dozen cities to include Atlanta, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. And he’s part of a growing alliance actively working to make the national designation happen. It would provide historic tax credits to property owners and grant opportunities for families that need them.
”There are grants from the federal government, from the state government, and from the city government,” Graves said.
On Friday, Graves, Hester and members of Developing Interracial Social Change (DISC) went door-to-door informing the public about the application process and the benefits. The application will be submitted to the state of Florida in early 2021. And results won’t be completed until the end of that year.
On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Jan. 18, a virtual town hall will be held to further engage the public on the application process and the surveys that need to be collected. To learn more, click here.
