A trailblazer, civil rights activist, educator, historian and Black pioneer
By Kristen Hernandez
Pompano Beach, FL – When Lydia Wilson stood before the podium in the Ali Cultural Arts Center courtyard, she appeared poised and steady. She held her back straight, shoulders out and her head up, just like her mother, Hazel K. Armbrister, taught her. But when she tried to speak, her voice cracked. Like an incoming tide, tears overwhelmed Wilson before she could gather her composure.
“My mom was the best mom I could ask for,” Wilson said through teary eyes on July 10, as the City of Pompano Beach named the courtyard at the Ali Cultural Arts Center after Wilson’s mother – a powerful community matriarch, leader, and friend to many.
The Hazel K. Armbrister Courtyard includes a sculpted bust that captures her likeness, down to her strand of pearls. Now, Armbrister is a part of the building she fought to save from imminent demolition.
“She stood in front of a bulldozer in the 2000’s,” said Gwen Clarke-Reed, former friend and retired Florida State Representative. “And she refused to let them go any further. My memory of her was trying to save this building, to have it remain for the community.”
Armbrister believed that saving the building could offer a beacon of hope to the northwest Pompano Beach community. “That building is more than just a broken-down place. It carries so much rich history, and I want little girls and women from our community to know who Florence Ali was and what she accomplished, right here in Pompano Beach during a time of segregation when there were little to no women business owners,” she told the Westside-Gazette before her death in March 2021.
Family members and local community leaders were also present, including ceremony organizer and Armbrister’s sister, Reverend Marguerite Kelley Luster. The courtyard dedication drew residents and political leaders like Lamar Fisher, Broward County Mayor; Rex Hardin, Pompano Beach Mayor; and Beverly Perkins, Pompano Beach District 4 City Commissioner.
Armbrister’s accomplishments run deeper than saving the Ali Cultural Arts Center from its demise. In the 1960’s, Pompano Beach was deeply segregated, and the northwest was mostly farmland. The Black community was forced to pick produce and restricted from doing many activities, including going to the beach.
Access to the beautiful beaches in Pompano was for white people only.
Long time Pompano Beach resident, Jerome McDougle, remembered when he’d have to take the hot and miserable hours-long journey, along with Armbrister, to the Colored Beach in Davie.
“To get there, we’d have to make our way to the Everglades and then board a ferry,” McDougle said. “Then, we walked to an overgrown strip of sand with no bathrooms or anything nearby, and that was our beach.”
Fed up with the city’s failed promises to provide infrastructure for beach accessibility and integrate South Florida beaches, Armbrister helped to organize one of several ‘wade-ins’ on the shores of Pompano Beach in 1961. The historical protests helped pave the road for Pompano Beach to become integrated.
It was this story, and the stories of other Black residents, that Armbrister was determined to preserve when she started Rock Road Restoration Historical Group.
“Mom was a guardian of history,” said Wilson, in a post-ceremony interview with Villij News. “She was also a guardian of people’s lives. After she passed, I found hundreds of obituary clippings of residents in the northwest neighborhood. She saved them all.”
Armbrister was a philanthropist at heart and had a deep passion for her community.
“Ms. Hazel wanted to ensure that the stories of Black residents that came before were not washed away by the tides of time,” said Willie Brown, co-founder of Rock Road Restoration Historical Group.
He added: “She was a rock in times of change. She was steadfast, unmovable. Rocks are solid and hold things together. Rocks create damage. Her legacy is more than a monument. Like a rock on a road… let it set the foundation for us all to come together… to build the roads that bridge communities… and be those rocks that connect this city.”
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