‘A city that basically screwed them’: West Palm Beach leaders stunned by old, racist city plans

Andrew Marra, Palm Beach Post

Sun, March 16, 2025

West Palm Beach city planning proposals from 1923 reveal the city's intention to segregate and underserve the city's historic Black neighborhoods. The documents were shown during a presentation by the Quantum Foundation at a March 10 city commission meeting.

WEST PALM BEACH — No one in the City Hall meeting room, surely, was under any illusions about their city’s segregated past, about the ways its historic Black neighborhoods had been forced for decades to subsist cut off and underserved.

But a presentation at a city commission meeting this week brought the hazy bigotries of decades past into vivid focus for the gathered leaders.

An overhead projector was displaying the yellowed paper of an old city document from 1923 on Monday, March 10. It was a West Palm Beach planning proposal, and it had a solution for what it called the “problem” of providing for the “negro population.”

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