Black entrepreneurship in historic WPB
Black entrepreneurship in West Palm Beach has roots stretching back more than a century, shaped by the constraints of segregation, the ingenuity of community builders, and the determination of individuals who established lasting commercial and cultural institutions in the face of systemic exclusion. From the contractors who constructed homes in the Freshwater District during the land-boom era to the shoe repair owner who kept his shop running for decades, the history of Black business in West Palm Beach reflects broader national patterns of self-reliance and economic resilience, while remaining distinctly tied to the geography, politics, and demographics of Palm Beach County.
Historical Foundations
The story of Black entrepreneurship in West Palm Beach begins in earnest during the early twentieth century, when African American residents were legally and socially excluded from most mainstream economic institutions. Despite these barriers, a class of skilled tradespeople and business owners developed enterprises that served the Black community and, in some cases, extended their reach beyond it.
According to records maintained by Palm Beach County History Online, the 1920s marked a formative period for African American commercial and residential life in the city. During that decade, the most affluent African Americans of West Palm Beach lived in the Freshwater District, a neighborhood whose homes were built by local African American contractors.[1] This detail is historically significant: the contractors who built those homes were not simply laborers operating on the margins of the construction industry, but entrepreneurs who controlled the planning and execution of residential projects for a community that could not rely on white-owned firms to serve its interests equitably. Their work shaped the physical landscape of Black West Palm Beach at a time when land ownership and home construction represented among the most concrete forms of wealth accumulation available to African Americans in the South.
The Freshwater District, as a result, became a locus of Black middle-class and professional life, housing doctors, merchants, and skilled workers whose economic footprint was modest by the standards of Palm Beach's wealthiest residents but substantial relative to the conditions African Americans faced in the broader Jim Crow era. The builders who constructed those homes helped establish a neighborhood that would become a lasting point of reference in the city's Black history.
Macon Burrows and the Symbolic Power of Small Business
Among the individual entrepreneurs whose stories have been preserved by local historians, Macon Burrows stands as a notable example of sustained Black commercial presence in West Palm Beach. Burrows operated Lena's Shoe Repair beginning in the 1920s, a business that the Historical Society of Palm Beach County has cited as a symbol of Black entrepreneurship in the region.[2]
Shoe repair shops occupied an important niche in early twentieth-century urban economies. They required relatively low startup capital compared to manufacturing or retail ventures, but demanded skilled craftsmanship and a reliable client base. For a Black business owner in a segregated city, maintaining such a shop across multiple decades required not only technical skill but also the ability to navigate complex social and economic conditions — cultivating customer loyalty, managing relationships with suppliers, and sustaining operations through economic downturns, including the collapse of the Florida land boom in the late 1920s and the Great Depression that followed.
The longevity of Lena's Shoe Repair is itself historically meaningful. Many small businesses, regardless of the owner's background, do not survive more than a few years. That Burrows maintained his shop through the turbulent decades following the 1920s speaks to the kind of persistent commercial acumen that is often overlooked in broader narratives of Black economic history, which tend to focus either on large-scale institutional achievements or on the devastation wrought by racist violence and policy. The shoe repair shop represents a quieter but equally important strand of that history: the daily, accumulative work of building and sustaining a business within a community that depended on it.
Nine Icons and the Breadth of Black Contribution
The Palm Beach Post has formally recognized the breadth of Black historical contributions to Palm Beach County, publishing a feature highlighting nine historical figures whose lives and work redefined the county's history.[3] While the specific individuals featured in that account span a range of fields including civic leadership, education, and professional life, the recognition itself reflects the growing effort by local media and historical organizations to document and contextualize Black achievement in a county long associated in the public imagination primarily with the wealth of its white residents and the luxury estates of Palm Beach Island.
This kind of institutional acknowledgment matters for historical completeness. For much of the twentieth century, the economic and cultural contributions of Black residents in Palm Beach County were systematically excluded from the official narratives of local prosperity. The land-boom era, for instance, is frequently narrated in terms of real estate speculation, wealthy northern investors, and the architects and developers who shaped the Mediterranean Revival aesthetic of Palm Beach. Less commonly discussed are the Black contractors who built homes in communities like the Freshwater District, or the business owners who kept commercial life functioning in segregated neighborhoods.
Black Networking and Economic Strategy
The challenges faced by Black entrepreneurs in West Palm Beach and across the country are not purely historical. A broader national context for understanding Black business strategy is provided by reporting on African American professional networking, which has long served as a deliberate economic tool rather than simply a social activity. As documented by The New York Times in coverage of Black business networking, Black professionals have defended such networking as a way for African Americans to prove they can succeed on their own merits in a predominantly white business world.[4]
This framing is particularly relevant to the West Palm Beach context, where Black entrepreneurs have historically operated in a county whose most prominent economic institutions — real estate, finance, hospitality, and luxury retail — have been dominated by white ownership. Networking among Black business owners, professionals, and community leaders has historically served multiple functions simultaneously: generating referrals and client relationships, pooling knowledge about navigating discriminatory systems, and creating the social infrastructure that allows for collective economic advancement.
The Freshwater District contractors of the 1920s were, in a sense, engaged in exactly this kind of networked economic activity — building for a community that trusted them, operating within a social ecosystem that sustained their businesses, and producing physical infrastructure that served Black residents who had limited access to the broader housing market. The continuity between that historical moment and contemporary discussions of Black professional networking underscores the degree to which the fundamental challenges facing Black entrepreneurs have remained consistent even as the legal landscape has changed.
Wealth, Property, and the Modern Landscape
The contemporary Palm Beach County area has become a global concentration point for extreme wealth, a dynamic that creates both opportunities and challenges for Black entrepreneurs and residents. The New York Times has reported on Palm Beach as having reached unprecedented levels of concentrated wealth, with properties identified by the names or occupations of their ultra-high-net-worth owners.[5]
Within this landscape, the presence of Black wealth at the highest levels has become more visible. Robert F. Smith, a billionaire private-equity executive identified as the richest Black person in the United States, purchased a pair of properties in North Palm Beach, Florida, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.[6] Smith's presence in the Palm Beach County real estate market, even in a residential rather than commercial capacity, reflects the degree to which the region has become a destination for the highest tier of American wealth across racial lines — a notable shift from the demographic composition of Palm Beach County's elite in earlier eras.
The contrast between Smith's North Palm Beach property acquisitions and the modest but significant shoe repair shop operated by Macon Burrows nearly a century earlier illustrates the enormous range of Black entrepreneurial and economic experience associated with the Palm Beach County region. These are not disconnected data points but part of a single, evolving story about the relationship between Black economic agency and a geography historically structured to limit it.
Recognition Events and Contemporary Visibility
The Palm Beach area has also become a venue for events recognizing the intersection of business, diversity, and economic leadership. The Tennessean reported on a BlackRidge-hosted gala at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, described as a black-tie evening that brought together global leaders, entrepreneurs, and participants focused on advancing American prosperity.[7] Such events, while focused in part on Hispanic entrepreneurship, reflect the broader trend of the Palm Beach area hosting gatherings where minority business communities seek visibility and strategic connection within one of the wealthiest zip codes in the United States.
Legacy and Ongoing Context
The arc of Black entrepreneurship in West Palm Beach and Palm Beach County does not follow a simple linear trajectory from exclusion to inclusion. It is instead a layered history in which African American business owners created institutions and communities under conditions designed to constrain them, sustained those institutions through decades of economic turbulence and legal discrimination, and gradually — and unevenly — gained access to broader economic participation as civil rights legislation reshaped the legal framework of American commerce.
The contractors of the Freshwater District, Macon Burrows at his shoe repair counter, the nine historical figures recognized by the Palm Beach Post, and the contemporary presence of figures like Robert F. Smith in the regional real estate market all belong to this single, complex history. Each represents a different scale, era, and mode of Black economic participation in a county whose identity has long been defined by wealth that was largely built on the exclusion of the very community whose entrepreneurial contributions are now being documented and honored.
Local historical organizations, regional newspapers, and national outlets have all begun to give greater attention to these contributions in recent years, reflecting both the growing public interest in a more complete account of American economic history and the specific efforts of institutions like the Historical Society of Palm Beach County to preserve and publicize records that might otherwise be lost.