Historic Sistrunk: The Oldest Black Community
Near Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Northwest of downtown lies the historic Sistrunk neighborhood, the oldest African American community in Fort Lauderdale. It grew up more than a century ago as settlers arrived from Georgia, South Carolina, and the Bahamas, many of them railroad laborers who built shanties along the tracks before the town was even incorporated. The main thoroughfare, and the neighborhood itself, carry the name of Doctor James Franklin Sistrunk.
Born in eighteen ninety one in Midway, Florida, Sistrunk graduated from Meharry Medical College in Nashville in nineteen nineteen and came to Fort Lauderdale in the spring of nineteen twenty two. He became the first African American physician in Broward County. For Black residents locked out of the white hospitals, his arrival was a matter of life and death.
In nineteen thirty eight he helped establish Provident Hospital, the county's first hospital open to African Americans. Over more than forty years of practice, Doctor Sistrunk was estimated to have delivered more than five thousand babies, an entire generation of the community brought into the world by one man's hands. He died in nineteen sixty six and is buried in Fort Lauderdale.
The boulevard named for him remains the spine of Black heritage and culture in this city.
