On Sunday mornings the singing on Southwest 8th Avenue starts before the doors have finished closing. Our Lady of Perpetual Help is a plain, low building a few blocks off Atlantic Avenue, and for nearly forty years it has been the spiritual centre of the Haitians in Delray Beach: a community that arrived by smugglers’ skiff and second-hand car, took the worst jobs on the Gold Coast, and then quietly bought the streets it prayed on.
The Place
Delray Beach sits on the Atlantic coast of Palm Beach County, immediately north of Boca Raton. It began in 1894 as Linton, a farming colony platted by William Linton, the postmaster of Saginaw, Michigan, who sold plots to northern settlers and then walked away after a hard freeze in 1898 destroyed the crops. The survivors renamed the place Delray in 1901.
Today about 69,000 people live here, and the run of Atlantic Avenue from the ocean to the interstate is one of the most photographed main streets in Florida. East of the railway tracks it is rooftop bars, galleries and valet stands. West of them, for three decades, it has been a Haitian town.
How It Became Haitian
The Sands, before anyone came from Haiti
Delray’s west side was Black and Caribbean long before the first Haitian family unpacked. African American families from northern Florida settled just inland of Linton in a district they called The Sands, after the soil, and Bahamian labourers came for the pineapple fields and then sent for their relatives. That ground is now the West Settlers’ Historic District.
This matters. When Haitians began arriving in the 1970s they did not land in a blank suburb. They landed in an established Black neighbourhood with churches, a school, and, crucially, houses that could be bought.
Arriving by way of the Bahamas
The first Haitians in Delray Beach came in the 1970s, and a striking number did not come directly from Haiti at all. They came through the Bahamas.
Thousands of Haitians had settled in shanty camps outside Marsh Harbour on Abaco, settlements known as Pigeon Peas and Du Mode. When Bahamian authorities began clearing the camps in the 1980s, families paid smugglers for a place on a skiff across the Straits of Florida. Palm Beach County was among the nearest landfalls, and Delray Beach, with its cheap west-side rentals and its existing Black community, was where people stayed. One 1996 account of the crossing counted seventy confirmed drownings since 1980.
Others came north from Miami. By the mid-1980s Little Haiti was crowded and expensive, and families with a foothold there looked sixty miles up the coast for a house they could actually own. Delray Beach became, in one journalist’s phrase, Little Haiti’s little sister.
1986, and a church of their own
Jean-Claude Duvalier fled Haiti in February 1986, and the exodus that followed reached Florida in force. Another mass migration came in the 1990s. Delray Beach, Boynton Beach and Boca Raton absorbed much of Palm Beach County’s share.
By the late 1980s thousands of Haitians lived in Delray Beach with no parish of their own. In 1986 Father Thomas Wenski asked the Scalabrini Fathers for a priest who could serve them. Father Roland Desormeaux arrived in the Palm Beaches in 1987, and that December Our Lady of Perpetual Help opened, described by the Diocese of Palm Beach as the first Catholic church in the United States founded exclusively for the Haitian community.
It is a small building for such a claim. It has never been anything less than the anchor of the neighbourhood.
The 1990s: first the work, then the deeds
The 1990 Census counted 10,492 Haitians in Palm Beach County, and the figure climbed fast through the decade. The work was the work available to people without papers or English: hotel laundries, kitchen lines, floor-scrubbing crews, landscaping, construction, hair braiding, and the vegetable and sugar fields of the county’s western agricultural belt. The Boca Raton Resort and Club alone employed more than five hundred Haitians. Two or three jobs a person was ordinary rather than remarkable.
What Delray’s Haitians did with that money changed the town. They bought houses on blocks that landlords and lenders had written off, often several relatives to a mortgage, and they kept buying. Programmes such as Restore Our Neighborhoods added more than three hundred new homes to the same streets in the 1990s. Corridors notorious for drug dealing a decade earlier became quiet, owner-occupied and strict.
The professions followed the property. Robert Victome, a dentist, opened Delray Dental Associates in September 1995. Grocers, barbers, tax preparers, remittance agents and bakeries filled the storefronts along West Atlantic Avenue and Congress Avenue, most trading in Creole first and English second.
Creole in the classroom
Village Academy opened on Southwest 12th Avenue in 2000, the first new public school built in a predominantly Black Delray Beach neighbourhood in more than twenty-five years. The bolder experiment came a year later. In August 2001 the Toussaint L’Ouverture High School for Arts and Social Justice opened downtown, founded by Diane Allerdyce, a poetry therapist, and Joseph Bernadel, a Haitian-born United States Army major. It was a tuition-free charter school named for the general who led Haiti’s revolution, and it existed for one very specific student: the teenager who had arrived at sixteen, was years behind grade level, spoke no English, and would otherwise have been quietly lost.
Roughly two thirds of its students were recent arrivals from Haiti, and lessons ran in Creole and English at once. It graduated hundreds of young people who were, on paper, already written off, and it closed in 2022 after twenty-one years. The language did not leave with it. The School District of Palm Beach County runs a Department of Multicultural Education that includes Haitian and Haitian American Studies, and three of the district’s dual-language immersion programmes are taught in Haitian Creole.
A seat at the table
Mack Bernard was born in Port-au-Prince in 1976 and graduated from Atlantic High School in Delray Beach before Florida State University and a law degree from the University of Florida. He became the first Haitian-American elected to the Delray Beach City Commission, serving as deputy vice mayor in 2008, then represented the area in the Florida House from 2009 to 2012. In 2016 he won a seat on the Palm Beach County Commission, the first Haitian-American to hold one, and later served as county mayor.
A community that had come ashore in the dark thirty years earlier now had its own name on the ballot.
The Landmarks
Our Lady of Perpetual Help Mission, 510 Southwest 8th Avenue. Opened in December 1987 as the first Catholic church in the country dedicated exclusively to Haitians, it now runs more than twenty ministries and lay groups. Mass in Haitian Creole is the fixed point of the week here, and the car park on a Sunday is a census of the neighbourhood.
Toussaint L’Ouverture High School for Arts and Social Justice, 95 Northeast 1st Avenue. The charter school that taught newly arrived Haitian teenagers in Creole and English from 2001 until 2022. Named for the man who made Haiti, it treated arriving late in life as a starting condition rather than a verdict.
Haitian American Community Council, 600 North Congress Avenue. Three decades of unglamorous work: immigration paperwork, naturalisation applications, English classes, translation, and standing between a frightened family and a form they cannot read. Its long-serving director, Daniella Henry, has been the community’s public voice for most of that time.
Leogane Market, 601 West Atlantic Avenue. A Haitian grocery on the western stretch of Delray’s famous street, named for Léogâne, the coastal town west of Port-au-Prince that sent a large share of Delray’s families. The name on the awning is a map of where the customers are from.
A&E Caribbean Cafe and Bakery, 2200 Lake Ida Road. Steam trays of griot, fried turkey, goat, rice and beans, and the patties and sweet breads Haitian bakeries run on. A lunch counter for people working shifts, which is to say it is busy at hours no restaurant on the beach is open.
Milagro Center, 695 Auburn Avenue. Founded in 1997 to bring arts education, tutoring and mentoring to children in Delray’s low-income neighbourhoods, it has served generations of Haitian and African American families in the blocks around it. For children whose parents work two jobs, the hours after school happen here.
Village Academy, Southwest 12th Avenue. Opened in 2000 in the heart of west Delray Beach and grown from an elementary into the county’s only K-12 public school. Its intake tracks the neighbourhood exactly, which means Creole is a first language in a large share of its classrooms.
Where They Came From
Delray’s Haitians are not a random sample of Haiti. The strongest threads run back to three places: Port-de-Paix on the north-western coast, Léogâne west of Port-au-Prince, and the rice-growing Artibonite.
Port-de-Paix and the Nord-Ouest face the Bahamas across open water, and they supplied the sailing routes to Abaco that eventually delivered families to the Florida coast. Léogâne and the Artibonite sent farming families whose experience found immediate, if brutally paid, work in Palm Beach County’s fields.
After that, chain migration did what it always does. One cousin with a spare room becomes four households on the same block, then a church, then a grocery selling the right cassava bread, then a whole quarter of a small Florida city. The same mechanism built the Haitian community in Mattapan, Boston, and the Guatemalan community in Jupiter up the same county.
Delray Beach Today
The numbers have always been contested. The 2000 Census recorded about 6,300 Haitians in Delray Beach; local officials argued at the time that the true figure was nearer 10,000, and county demographic work has since put the city’s Haitian-born population at roughly 8,000, easily its largest immigrant group. Undercounting a population that includes people without status is the norm. What is not disputed is that Delray Beach has one of the densest Haitian communities per head anywhere in the United States.
The pressure now is not immigration. It is rent. Atlantic Avenue has become a tale of two streets: rooftop dining and luxury flats east of the tracks, and west of them small Black and Haitian-owned businesses whose owners watch the redevelopment maps with justified suspicion. The Community Redevelopment Agency buys land in the north-west and south-west for affordable housing, and it also underwrites the growth that raises the prices.
Meanwhile the culture has stopped asking permission. Haitian Flag Day on 18 May brings out the bicolour along West Atlantic. Creole is spoken at the pharmacy counter, in the clinic and at the school gate. This is a stretch of coast where an Israeli family in nearby Boca Raton, a Russian household in Sunny Isles Beach and a hotel housekeeper from Port-de-Paix are all part of the same county, and only one of those groups built its foothold house by house, on a labourer’s wage, in a neighbourhood nobody else wanted.
You can read Delray Beach as a beach town with a good restaurant strip. That is the postcard. The other version, written on Southwest 8th Avenue and in the deeds at the county courthouse, is the more interesting story.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Haitians live in Delray Beach, Florida?
The 2000 Census counted about 6,300, though officials believed the true figure was nearer 10,000, and county estimates have since put the Haitian-born population at roughly 8,000 in a city of about 69,000. The Haitians in Delray Beach are the city’s largest immigrant group and one of the highest Haitian concentrations per head in the United States.
When did Haitians first settle in Delray Beach?
The first arrivals came in the 1970s, and the community grew sharply after the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986 and again during the migrations of the 1990s. Many arrived indirectly, via Haitian settlements in the Bahamas rather than straight from Haiti.
Why did Haitians settle in Delray Beach rather than Miami?
Palm Beach County was one of the closest landfalls for boats leaving Abaco, and Delray Beach already had a Black and Caribbean neighbourhood west of the railway with houses within reach of a working wage. Families priced out of Miami’s Little Haiti moved north for the same reason.
Where in Haiti do Delray Beach’s Haitian families come from?
The dominant origins are Port-de-Paix and the Nord-Ouest, Léogâne on the coast west of Port-au-Prince, and the Artibonite valley. Léogâne’s presence is literal: there is a grocery named for it on West Atlantic Avenue.
What is Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Delray Beach?
It is a Catholic mission at 510 Southwest 8th Avenue that opened in December 1987 and is described as the first Catholic church in the United States founded exclusively for the Haitian community. It remains the central institution for the Haitians in Delray Beach, with Mass in Haitian Creole and more than twenty ministries.
Is Haitian Creole taught in Delray Beach schools?
Yes. The School District of Palm Beach County runs a Department of Multicultural Education covering Haitian and Haitian American Studies, and three of its dual-language immersion programmes are taught in Haitian Creole alongside English. From 2001 to 2022, Toussaint L’Ouverture High School taught newly arrived Haitian teenagers in both languages.
If your family’s story passed through Delray Beach, or any of the places Haitians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Port-de-Paix and Léogâne to a house bought block by block west of Atlantic Avenue, to wherever you are now.