New Hope A.M.E. Church | 153 Years of Worshipping in Buckhead
New Hope African Methodist Episcopal Church is a modest wood-framed building on Arden Road surrounded by exclusive single-family residences. On its main façade, the church features a central front-gabled entrance portico that leads to the sanctuary. Meanwhile, a tower topped with a simple steeple and four small decorative urns stands to one side of the entryway. The church’s prominent granite foundation envelops a daylight basement.
The New Hope congregation has owned the property on Arden Road since 1872, when James H. Smith, a white Buckhead farmer, willed three acres of his property for use as a church and school for “colored persons.” The congregation subsequently built a tabernacle on the property, which stood until 1965. The property’s original church building was built sometime prior to 1900.
Many of the original members of the New Hope congregation were recently emancipated slaves. During the late 19th century, they continued to work as farm laborers and servants for white families in the area. Most church members lived in small African American neighborhoods in the vicinity.
In 1927, the original church building on the property burned down. The current building’s basement was built the following year, while the new sanctuary was not completed until 1936. New Hope African Methodist Episcopal Church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009, along with the cemetery located across the road.
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Malaga Island | Maine’s Uprooted Community
Malaga Island is a 41-acre island at the mouth of the New Meadows River in Casco Bay, Maine, a mixed-race community that occupied the island’s north end from the mid-1800s to 1912 when the state forcibly removed them. It is now an uninhabited reserve owned and managed by the Maine Coast Heritage Trust.
Most of the families that lived on Malaga had ancestral roots in Maine dating back 150 years or more and moved in and out of island fishing communities for almost two centuries before settling on Malaga after the Civil War. Some of Malaga’s residents had previously lived on nearby islands, such as Bear, Yarmouth and Sheep Islands.
Benjamin Darling, an African man from the West Indies who may or may not have been enslaved, arrived in Maine in the late 18th century with Captain Darling to help establish saltworks in the town of Phippsburg. Legend has it that in 1794, he was given his freedom and money to buy Horse Island after saving the Captain’s life during a shipwreck. (Horse Island, known now as Harbor Island, is located about a half mile southeast of Malaga Island). His descendants later settled on various owned and unowned islands in eastern Casco Bay and were among the first to reside on Malaga. Some have suggested that Malaga’s name may derive from the wreck of Captain Darling’s brig, which was loaded with timber from Malaga, Spain.
On July 11, 1911, Governor Frederick Plaisted and a group of state officials landed on Malaga Island to meet its residents and inspect their homes. The Governor lauded Malaga’s new school—whose students serenaded him with a hymn—and later reported to The Brunswick Record that “the people cannot be forced to leave their poor homes.”
Yet shortly after the Governor and his entourage toured the island, the state announced that the heirs of Eli Perry owned Malaga Island (although later research found no deed confirming their ownership). Within three weeks of the Governor’s visit, the Perrys issued eviction orders to the “Malagaites” (a term then thought of as a slur) who had inhabited the island for more than a half-century, demanding they vacate the island by July 1, 1912.
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Emmitt Smith | From the Super Bowl to Successful Commercial Real Estate Advisor
Emmitt Smith, CCIM, is Chairman of his namesake company, E Smith Advisors, a partnership with Newmark. Smith used his 14 years of experience as a licensed real estate professional and industry knowledge earned through his CCIM certification to create a premier real estate solutions and services provider that is bringing a new level of integrity, innovation and insight to the commercial real estate industry. As chairman, his role includes new business and client relationship development, overall company vision execution and service strategy development.
In partnership with Newmark, E Smith Advisors is part of a global network with operations in more than 400 offices worldwide, offering clients a wide array of commercial real estate services, with customized solutions that maximize returns for investors, tenants and landlords. The firm offers an integrated service platform to a diverse portfolio of clients and, as a minority-owned business, offers an inclusive company culture. Both E Smith Advisors and Newmark excel at creating customized real estate solutions that take the intricate, unique needs of each client into account. This shared methodology makes the two firms perfect partners.
Before joining forces with Newmark to form E Smith Advisors, Smith served as Chairman of E Smith Legacy Holdings, a position he holds today. E Smith Legacy Holdings combines domain knowledge and experienced professionals to create, finance and execute unique real estate solutions for a diverse client portfolio.
As a visionary and servant-leader, Smith recognized the need to expand services to meet clients’ ever-changing and unique requirements. Today, the firm offers an integrated service platform that includes everything from real estate development and construction to brokerage and finance.
Prior to his career in commercial real estate, Smith enjoyed an illustrious career as a running back in the National Football League with the Dallas Cowboys and Arizona Cardinals, earning such accolades as the NFL’s All-Time Leading Rusher, Super Bowl XXVIII MVP and induction to the NFL Hall of Fame. Smith graduated from the University of Florida and played football for the Florida Gators, and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2006.
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Quintin E. Primo III | From Failure to $14B
Quintin E. Primo III is the Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Capri Capital Partners, LLC, one of the largest minority-owned real estate investment management firms in the United States and has executed $14 billion in real estate transactions.
Quintin E. Primo III was born March 14, 1955, in Rochester, New York. His mother, Winnifred Primo, and late father, Episcopal Bishop Quintin E. Primo, Jr., were raised in the South, having ancestral roots in the Caribbean. Primo attended Lincoln Elementary in Rochester, New York, Friends School in Wilmington, Delaware and Miller Junior High School in Detroit, Michigan. At Cass Technical High School in Detroit, Primo excelled as a musician. During this time, Primo’s father was appointed Bishop of the Episcopal Church, and the family moved to Chicago’s Homewood-Flossmoor area, where Primo graduated from Homewood-Flossmoor High School in 1973. He then attended Indiana University, where he earned a B.S. degree in finance and graduated with honors. In 1977, he enrolled in Harvard Business School, receiving his M.B.A. in 1979.
That same year, Primo started his career at Citicorp Real Estate, specializing in real estate lending. In 1988, he fulfilled a lifelong dream and opened his own investment banking business, Quintin Primo and Company. After several years, the company folded, and Primo teamed up with friend and colleague Daryl Carter in 1992 to form CAPRI Capital Management. Today, CAPRI manages $7 billion in assets.
Primo serves on the board of the Chicago Sinfonietta, the Chicago Community Trust, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Advisory Board, University of Chicago Hospitals, the Real Estate Council and the Primo Women and Children Center. He lives in the Chicago area with his wife, Diane, and their children, Francesca and Quintin IV. Primo is writing a book about his father in the Episcopal Church entitled The Making of a Black Bishop.
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Manhattan Beach | Black Beach Returned to its’ Owners 100 Years Later
A beachfront property that was taken away from a Black family in California will be returned after nearly a century. The couple bought the land in Manhattan Beach in 1912 and ran a lodge, cafe and dance hall that provided local Black families a way to enjoy their weekends on the coast during a time of strict racial segregation. Locals referred to the area as Bruce’s Beach and other Black families were drawn to move there as well. However, the property was seized in the 1920s by the Manhattan Beach City Council through eminent domain — the right of a government to expropriate private property for public use.
But in the 1920s, the Manhattan Beach city council used eminent domain to take the land from the Bruces, purportedly for use as a park. Yet the land lay unused for years until it was transferred to the state in 1948.
When that failed to drive the Bruces out, Manhattan Beach seized the property using eminent domain in 1924, claiming the land was needed for a park. The city paid just $14,125 for the land, well short of what the Bruces were asking. No park was ever built at the location, and ownership of the land was transferred to the state in 1948 and then the county in 1995. Surrounded by houses that sell for $7 million and up, the land has been valued at approximately $75 million.
In recent years, the story surrounding Bruce’s Beach and its seizure has become a focal point of discussions about reparations in California. The decision to return the land to the Bruce family has been met with some resistance in Manhattan Beach but has also been celebrated as a significant step forward in the fight to return land stolen from people of color.
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Biddy Mason | LA’s First Black Real Estate Mogul was a Woman
Biddy Mason was a Los Angeles real estate mogul before the term was even invented. Mason was born into slavery in the year 1818 in Georgia. By the time she died in 1891, she’d amassed a fortune of $300,000 (many millions today) and owned a great deal of property in what is now the heart of Los Angeles. Mason’s improbable life journey is one that few know, but we all most certainly should.
Mormonism, ironically, had as much to do with Mason’s success as anything else. By the time Mason was a young adult, she was owned by a Mormon family in Mississippi, the Smiths. Like many other Mormons, the Smiths ventured to the “promised land” of Salt Lake City. Mr. Smith later joined other Mormons and migrated to Southern California. Although the new California constitution technically made provisions for freedom, Mason and her children were essentially still, for all practical purposes, enslaved. It was when Smith attempted to take Mason and her children back to Texas, however, that other parties got involved. Her case for freedom eventually made its way to the courts, where she was ultimately declared free in January of 1856.
Now free, Mason was able to pursue business and other ventures. She had developed her skills as a midwife and nurse while enslaved, primarily caring for her captor’s sickly wife. As a free woman, she worked as a nurse and midwife, delivering hundreds of babies. Even as a successful career woman, however, she was careful always to keep handy the papers that granted her freedom — California wasn’t as free as some would like to imagine. By 1866, Mason had saved enough to buy her first property, which was kept in her family until the Great Depression. In the years following, Mason would buy and sell many properties. She was a prominent woman of business and also a noted philanthropist in Los Angeles.
Mason was one of the wealthiest women in Los Angeles when she died. Most of her properties were given to her grandson, Robert, who would go on to become the wealthiest Black man in Los Angeles County. Biddy Mason is yet another example of the mysterious strength, genius and perseverance of Black women, against all odds. Black moguls aren’t new — Biddy Mason is just a reminder that we’ve been building empires.
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Lelia I. Francis | First Black REALTOR® in Ohio and Second in the Nation
Lelia I. Francis ran against C. J. McLin Jr. for the 88th district of the Ohio House of Representatives. Francis tried to get McLin to debate her. When all else failed, she went to his office with a hammer ‘to nail his voting record to his door.’ McLin came outside for a sidewalk debate.
Francis was born in Salt Lick, Kentucky. Lelia I. Francis was a graduate of Kentucky State University and taught in rural schools in Kentucky before moving to Ohio.
Francis and her husband, Charles, moved to Dayton in 1943. Four years later, she became the first black REALTOR® in the state of Ohio and second in the nation. She was a real estate broker for more than 50 years. She also helped establish the Unity Bank and an African American mortgage company.
In 1967, she was arrested in a demonstration to get the Rike-Kumler Department Store in Downtown Dayton to hire blacks.
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Norma Merrick Sklarek | The Rosa Parks of Architecture
Sklarek was a woman of firsts: She was the first Black woman to become a licensed architect in both New York (1954) and California (1962). She was the first Black woman director of architecture at Gruen Associates in Los Angeles. In 1966, she was the first woman to be elected Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. She was also the first Black woman to become a member of the AIA in 1959 and its first Black female fellow in 1980.
Having been educated at Columbia University, Sklarek built her career on leading large commercial and civic projects like the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, The California Mart, San Bernardino City Hall, the Mall of America, the embassy of the United States in Tokyo and Terminal One station at Los Angeles International Airport. In 1985, she became the first Black woman architect to form her own architectural firm: Siegel, Sklarek, Diamond. At the time, this was the largest woman-owned and mostly woman-staffed architectural firm. Among Sklarek’s designs are the City Hall in San Bernardino, the Fox Plaza in San Francisco, Terminal One at the Los Angeles International Airport and the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. From 1989 to 1992, Sklarek was a principal at The Jerde Partnership.
There she was in charge of project management and review of the functional and technological aspects of projects. After she semi-retired, Norma Sklarek served as chair of the AIA National Ethics Council. She conducted classes for the architectural building design and site licensing exams and was a guest lecturer. Norma Merrick Sklarek died in 2012; Howard University offers the Norma Merrick Sklarek Architectural Scholarship Award in her honor.
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