Palm Beach's Black service workers
African Americans have shaped the landscape, economy, and culture of Palm Beach and the surrounding county since the late nineteenth century, arriving first as laborers recruited to build the region's railroads and hotels, then settling into service roles that sustained the wealthy resort community while living in segregated enclaves with few legal protections and limited economic mobility. Their story encompasses forced labor, deliberate community formation, persistent poverty in agricultural sectors, and the gradual emergence of civic leadership that transformed Palm Beach County's political and cultural identity.
Early Recruitment and the Convict Lease System
The foundation of Palm Beach's built environment was laid in substantial part by African American workers, many of whom arrived under circumstances that offered them little or no choice. In the 1880s and 1890s, industrialist Henry Flagler, who developed the Florida East Coast Railway and a chain of luxury hotels along Florida's Atlantic coast, leased African American convict labor from the state of Florida.[1] This practice, common among white industrialists across the American South during the post-Reconstruction era, allowed private employers to obtain labor from the state penal system at minimal cost. Convict laborers had no ability to refuse assignments, negotiate wages, or leave worksites, making the system functionally continuous with the antebellum slavery it nominally replaced.
Beyond convict labor, Flagler and other developers also drew free African American workers to Palm Beach through recruitment campaigns. During the 1890s, advertisements and word-of-mouth spread throughout Black communities in Florida and neighboring states, promising work building the East Coast Railway and the resort infrastructure that would define the region for generations.[2] Workers arrived in Palm Beach by ferry, crossing from what would become West Palm Beach on the mainland to the barrier island where Flagler's hotels and estates were under construction. These workers cleared palmetto scrub, laid rail lines, erected luxury accommodations, and staffed the kitchens, laundries, and service departments of the hotels that made Palm Beach a destination for America's wealthiest families.
The Styx: Palm Beach's First Black Neighborhood
As the workforce grew, African American workers needed somewhere to live. Because Florida's rigid Jim Crow laws and social customs prohibited Black residents from living alongside white residents, the workers established a segregated settlement on the Palm Beach island itself. This community came to be known as the Styx, named after the river of the underworld in Greek mythology — a name that may have reflected both the difficult living conditions and the sardonic humor with which residents navigated their circumstances.[3]
The Styx represented the earliest organized African American community on the Palm Beach island, and it developed the institutional and social structures typical of Black settlements of the era: churches, informal mutual aid networks, and community bonds forged through shared work and shared exclusion from the broader civic life of the resort town. The community was geographically close to the hotels and estates its residents served but was kept entirely apart from the social world of those establishments, except in the context of labor.
The Styx did not survive into the modern era as a physical place. As Palm Beach's property values rose and white landowners and developers sought to consolidate control over the island's real estate, the Black community was displaced. Workers and their families were pushed across the water to the mainland communities that would eventually consolidate into West Palm Beach and surrounding areas, continuing to commute back to Palm Beach to fill service roles that the resort economy depended upon.
Service Work and the Resort Economy
Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African American workers formed the backbone of Palm Beach's service economy. They worked as hotel porters, waiters, cooks, chambermaids, laundresses, groundskeepers, and chauffeurs — occupations that were essential to the functioning of the luxury establishments Flagler and subsequent developers built along the island. The racial division of labor was sharp and deliberate: white guests were served by Black workers, and those workers were systematically excluded from the social and economic benefits that accumulated to white residents and business owners.
This pattern was not unique to Palm Beach. Across the American South and in resort communities throughout the country, African Americans occupied the lowest rungs of the service economy, providing labor that generated enormous wealth for others while receiving wages that kept them in poverty. In Palm Beach, the proximity of extreme wealth and extreme deprivation was perhaps more visible than in most places, as workers crossed from modest mainland neighborhoods to serve guests whose seasonal visits represented expenditures many workers could not approach in a lifetime.
The dependency worked in both directions: the resort economy could not have functioned without Black labor, yet the workers who made it possible were denied the political rights, property ownership opportunities, and social recognition that would have translated their economic contribution into community power. This tension persisted across generations and defined much of the social geography of Palm Beach County throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
Agricultural Labor in Palm Beach County
Beyond the resort economy on the barrier island, Palm Beach County's interior — particularly the area around Belle Glade near Lake Okeechobee — developed into one of Florida's most productive agricultural zones. Sugar cane, vegetables, and other crops required large amounts of seasonal labor, and African Americans made up a significant portion of the farm workforce in the county.
The conditions faced by these farm workers were severe. The Census of 1960 recorded that the average yearly income of male farm laborers in Palm Beach County was $1,348 — less than half the already-low national average for comparable work.[4] Farm laborers in the Belle Glade area faced not only poverty wages but also seasonal instability, inadequate housing, limited access to medical care, and exposure to pesticides and other agricultural hazards. The communities that grew up around the agricultural zones were among the most economically disadvantaged in the state of Florida, a condition that persisted well beyond mid-century.
The situation of farm workers in Palm Beach County was part of a broader pattern of agricultural labor exploitation in Florida that drew national attention at various points in the twentieth century. The low wages documented in 1960 reflected decades of legal and political structures — including the exclusion of agricultural workers from many New Deal labor protections — that kept farm laborers outside the safety net available to industrial workers.
Icons and Civic Leaders of Palm Beach County
Despite the systemic barriers they faced, African Americans in Palm Beach County produced a remarkable range of civic leaders, educators, and community figures whose contributions shaped the county's development. Among those recognized in the historical record are Fannie James, born in 1845 and living until 1915, and Mildred "Millie" Gildersleeve, born in 1860, both of whom are identified among the figures who helped define Black history in the region.[5] Their lives spanned the transition from the immediate post-Civil War period through the early decades of the twentieth century, a time when the legal and social structures of the Jim Crow South were being consolidated and when Black community institutions were of critical importance for survival and advancement.
The Historical Society of Palm Beach County has documented a range of civic organizations and leadership structures that emerged from within the Black community, including the Palm Beach County Caucus, which provided a formal vehicle for political engagement and advocacy within the county's governance structures.[6] These organizations reflected the determination of Black residents to participate in civic life even when formal political power was denied to them by disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and social intimidation.
Modern Era: Continuity and Change
The legacies of the labor patterns established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have not disappeared from Palm Beach County. Service work, agricultural labor, and the racial stratification of the regional economy have persisted in modified forms into the twenty-first century, even as formal legal segregation ended and political representation for Black residents improved substantially.
Verdenia Baker, who served as Palm Beach County Administrator, represented a significant milestone in the county's civic history, occupying a senior administrative position that would have been entirely inaccessible to Black residents for most of the county's existence.[7] Her tenure illustrated the distance the county had traveled from the era of convict leasing and the Styx, while also demonstrating that the county's approximately 6,000 county employees and the broader community remained connected to national conversations about race, justice, and the legacy of systemic inequality.
Labor organizing has also been a feature of the modern era in Palm Beach County. Wage protests and labor actions — including demonstrations at major retail employers in nearby Boynton Beach — have drawn attention to the continuing economic vulnerabilities of service and retail workers, many of whom are Black or Latino.[8] These actions connected workers in the Palm Beach County area to broader national movements for wage equity and labor rights.
Concerns about the exploitation of vulnerable workers in the region have not been limited to adult laborers. Reports of migrant children working in dangerous conditions, including in factories producing goods distributed through national supply chains, have placed Florida and Palm Beach County within a broader national debate about child labor enforcement and immigration policy.[9] These contemporary issues carry echoes of the convict labor system and the agricultural poverty that defined earlier periods of Palm Beach County's labor history.
Historical Significance
The history of Black service workers in Palm Beach is inseparable from the history of the resort itself. The luxury infrastructure that made Palm Beach a destination for generations of wealthy Americans was built by African American laborers, maintained by African American service workers, and set within an economy that systematically denied those workers the economic and political benefits their labor helped to generate. Understanding this history is essential to a complete account of how Palm Beach and West Palm Beach developed, how their economies functioned, and how the racial geography of South Florida was established and maintained across more than a century.
The displacement of the Styx, the poverty of the Belle Glade farm workers, the emergence of civic organizations and political leaders, and the continuing struggles of service and agricultural workers in the modern era form a continuous thread in Palm Beach County's history — one that runs from Flagler's construction camps in the 1890s to the present day.