Liberia, Hollywood's Historically Black Neighborhood, Turns 100

If you take a walk along Hollywood Beach, or drove through the city, you will see people of all backgrounds.

However, 100 years ago, that wasn’t the case for Black residents. If a Black resident wanted to live in Hollywood, there was only one option, a neighborhood called Liberia.

This year, as Liberia reaches one century in existence NBC 6 looks back on the history and changes its experienced.

“There’s several famous homes,” said 75-year-old Earl Garnett Beneby, “This particular one is where James Brown,  the Godfather of Soul, launched his career.”

Pointing to homes and reflecting on the memories, Beneby walked back through the same streets he grew up in, where he said he was surrounded by a thriving Black community.

The neighborhood, however, has gone through a lot of changes. Beneby said he lived in Liberia for 50 years, and this year the neighborhood turns 100.

One century ago, the city of Hollywood was still just a dream for developer Joseph Young.

“It attracted a certain group of people,” said Beneby, “ They were doing road building, paving roads and clearing properties.”

That included Black families in a time of segregation who needed a place to live. According to a 1923 Hollywood Reporter article, that’s why a northwest section of land was sectioned off, west of US-1.

“All the Black communities, are located, west of the railroad tracks,” said Beneby.

It was a community made up mostly of people from the Bahamas and the Southern United States, by 1925 when Hollywood became an incorporated city the neighborhood got its name from a city inspector.

“He said. ‘you know I look at that place and it reminds me of Liberia, a country I’ve travelled to in Liberia’,” said Beneby, “and that’s how it stook.

Other than it being a century old, it also is home to a building important to Broward’s Black History: Attucks Middle School. The Middle School, formerly known as Attucks High School, was named after Crispus Attucks, the first Black American to die in the US Revolution. It once housed every grade and was one of the only 3 high schools for Black students in Broward County.

“When people look at Black history in Broward County they’re quick to identify with Sistrunk  and Pompano, ” said Emmanuel George, a historian at the historically Black  Old Dillard Highschool Museum, “Attucks is a missing piece because its normally forgotten about.”

He says it was one of the “big three,” Blanche Ely High School in Pompano Beach, Attucks in Liberia and Dillard in Fort Lauderdale.

“In 1968, when desegregation was mandated Attucks was forced to downgrade into what is now Attucks Middle School,” said George. “It was a big community nucleus and Attucks was the center for that. There were a lot of businesses in the Liberia community when Dillard was there.”

When Attucks High School disappeared, so did businesses and the neighborhood’s prominence.

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