Tales From the Hampton House

Enid Curtis Pinkney ’67 knew that Miami’s Hampton House motel needed to be preserved, not only because of its elegant facade but because it held many stories of Black life in the Miami of the 1960s.

As a longtime resident of Brownsville, the pioneering residential community located about eight miles northwest of Miami, Enid Curtis Pinkney was more than familiar with the multistory motel where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. mobilized voter registration volunteers and where Cassius Clay (before he became the great Muhammad Ali) took a rest in one of its rooms after beating Sonny Liston for the heavyweight boxing title.

Pinkney herself visited the motel in her youth, enjoying Black celebrity-watching on its premises and in its famed jazz lounge in a segregated Miami.

Over the years, however, the Hampton House motel had become a shadow of its former self. Its once-elegant stature was all but a faded memory.

As Pinkney passed the structure at 4240 NW 27th Avenue on her way to meetings, all the retired educator and historic preservationist could see was its crumbling facade and the heaps of trash, drug addicts, and vagrants now sleeping where Black life once flourished.

The Moore interview was part of an oral history lesson Hersh was conducting for students at Turner Tech High School to teach them about interview techniques. During the interview, the civil rights leader, who was known as A.D. Moore, mentioned the iconic motel and the fact that he heard Martin Luther King Jr. give his famous “I Have a Dream” speech there three years before he delivered it on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington.

“That just made me sit straight up,” Hersh says about Moore’s recollection.

Wanting to know more, Hersh located the motel and visited it. What she saw wasn’t the legendary structure that Moore had discussed with reverence, but the derelict building that Pinkney passed almost daily. After further research, she learned that the motel had been owned and operated by a Jewish family, who not only allowed the CORE meetings to take place on its premises but had made a promotional film advertising the Hampton House among Black middle-class travelers and convention organizers.

“There was everybody in there. There was Althea Gibson; there was Jackie Robinson spinning around on the stool in the cafe waving to the camera. There was Martin Luther King giving a press conference,” Hersh says about the footage. “Just everybody was in there, and it really showed how it had been such an important epicenter, really, of Black culture.”

Soon Hersh was on the phone with the Dade Heritage Trust, the historic preservation group that has been at the forefront of protecting local landmarks. The person on the other line said, “You have to talk to Enid Pinkney.”

Hersh did even better. She went to meet Pinkney and members of her committee. She carried with her the Hampton House promotional film and the interview with Moore, along with a strong desire to save one of the last vestiges of African-American history in Miami-Dade.

Pinkney was sold. However, neither her committee nor the Trust had money, and Pinkney soon learned that the building was slated for demolition because it was considered an unsafe structure. That’s when she turned to one of her earliest allies, whom she honored at the Hampton House’s 2015 opening: Luis Penelas Jr.

Penelas, who died in 2006 of pancreatic cancer before the Hampton House’s partial restoration was complete, was the older brother of then-Miami-Dade County Mayor Alex Penelas. 

“I went to him, and I told him, ‘Listen, you’ve got to talk to your brother,’” Pinkney says, recalling the conversation with Luis Penelas. “I said, ‘You know, they’re gonna tear the Hampton House down. The Hampton House is a historic place .… It’s a historic building to Black people; it’s the last from the days of segregation that we used to go to. It would be just tearing down the last vestiges of our history.”

Luis Penelas initially was reluctant to approach his brother and told Pinkney, “Just because he’s the mayor, he can’t tell people what to do.”

Pinkney persisted. After all, this is the same woman who, as president of the Booker T. Washington Senior High in Overtown, chased boxer Joe Louis all over town for a promised check to help the band get new uniforms. Luis Penelas then offered up a suggestion.

“He said, ‘What you need to do is have a press conference, a big press conference, saying, Save the Hampton House,’” Pinkney recalls on a recent Saturday at her home in Brownsville.

Wanting to make sure that the plan would work, the older Penelas asked Pinkney, “Can you get a big crowd?”

“I said, ‘Well, I could probably get a crowd.’ He said, ‘OK. If you could get the crowd, I’ll get the food and the band.’ He said, ‘But it’s going to be a Cuban band.’ So I said, ‘Well, if you could get the food and the band, I don’t care if it’s a Cuban band.’"

The press conference, which took place in front of the Hampton House with a sign that said, “Save the Hampton House,” was a huge hit. Penelas came, and so did County Commissioner Barbara Carey-Shuler. 

Pinkney still remembers the words of the mayor that day. “He said if we can spend $26 billion to preserve the Circle, then we could spend some money to preserve the Hampton House.” The Circle is an archaeological find that was a ceremonial site for the Tequesta Indians near the mouth of the Miami River that Luis had persuaded his brother to help preserve.

After the event, Penelas and Carey-Shuler shelved the demolition. Pinkney and her growing group of supporters then moved to have the motel declared a historic site by the Miami Dade Historic Preservation Board. Soon, the county agreed to buy the Hampton House for $450,000.

“After that, they said, ‘What are you going to do with it?’” Pinkney recalls. “Then they said, ‘Do you all have any money to restore it?’ We said, ‘No, we don’t have any money to do anything.’ They said, ‘Well, y’all are going to have to figure out how you’re going to restore it.’”

And thus began Pinkney’s arduous rescue mission to restore the Hampton House.

She soon learned there was a General Obligation Bond coming up on the Nov. 2, 2004, ballot, and someone suggested she apply for some of the funding. But there was just one problem: Pinkney knew nothing about filling out a bond application.

After reading the application, it became clear to the 1967 Barry University graduate with a Master of Science in guidance and counseling that she not only needed a plan but an architect. She reached out to Richard Heisenbottle, who was then president of the Trust, and asked if he could help. It required him to visit the Hampton House.

“The day he came out, he came in his GQ suit, and the place was filthy,” says Pinkney. “I mean it was terrible because of the drug needles and the people who were staying there. It was a mess.”

As Heisenbottle stepped out of his Mercedes Benz, Pinkney apologized and told the architect, “You know, I should have told you that this place was a mess.”

Unbothered, Heisenbottle proceeded to walk around and gather the information he needed to fill out the application, free of charge. After the application was turned in, it was accepted and funded for $4.7 million in the county’s General Obligation Bond.

This required Pinkney to do another first: travel around the county convincing people to vote for the General Obligation Bond program. One of the handicaps was that the Miami Times, the community’s Black newspaper, had opposed the bond because promises from a previous initiative had not been kept.

“They were saying that if Black people vote for it again, they were going to do the same thing. They were going to betray Black people,” she says. “I was telling them that I believed that they were going to do the right thing this time, not knowing whether they were going to do it or not.”

The county did hold up its end of the bargain. But as government bureaucracies go, things do not always happen as planned—or on time. The number of years it took for the contract to go out for bid meant that prices had gone up and that contractors had backed out after saying they could restore the site for the $4.7 million.

There were times, she says, as a white person, that she felt “the country wasn’t taking this as seriously because it was a Black project. I really felt that the time was long and dragged out, and you know, it was just frustrating.”

“She is, and has been, the driving force,” Hersh says about Pinkney. “And it wouldn’t have gotten accomplished without her. She had the reputation in the community; she had the goodwill of a lot of people who really respected her.”

The partial restoration means that some of the rooms of the Hampton House are still not completed. But Pinkney, who is still searching for funds, says that it’s OK for now because “at least we are operating.”

Still, people with “power, money, and influence,” should step up and say that “it’s time now to complete the Hampton House,” she adds. “You know, we’ve been hanging on this for far too long. And we need people. We need leadership that will look out for the Black community.”

Enid Curtis Pinkney was born in Overtown on Oct. 15, 1931. Both of her parents were originally from the Bahamas; her mother, Lenora Clark Curtis, was from Exuma and worked as a maid. Her father, Henry Curtis, was a minister who worked as a gardener after migrating to Miami in 1910 from Port Howe, Cat Island, in the Bahamas. Both of her parents worked for a white family on Miami Beach, where her younger brother was born but, because of segregation, couldn’t have the Pine Island address listed on his birth certificate.

Her parents’ employer was only in Miami during the winter, and her parents were required to live on the premises. That meant that her grandmother, Melvina Clark, and her aunt, Beulah Clark, had to move into the family home in Overtown to care for Pinkney while she attended Dunbar Elementary School. 

She credits her courage to her father, who taught her to stand up for what she believed in through his own display of courage “and fortitude for justice.”

“I’ve always felt that if my father could stand up— and he has less education than I had, and they sacrificed all they had for me to get an education and to know my rights—then I should stand up,” she says. “That has become a part of me.”

After graduating from an all-Black Booker T. Washington Senior High in 1949, Pinkney went on to the private Talladega College in Alabama, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1953. She returned to Miami and began her teaching career at Dorsey Junior High. She also worked as a counselor at Edison Senior High.

Pinkney earned her master’s at Barry University while she was substitute teaching at her alma mater, Booker T. Later, she became an assistant principal at South Miami Middle School until her retirement in 1991. Retirement gave her the time to devote her energies to her passion, preserving history.

There’s not a whole lot of enthusiasm among our own people for the preservation of our history,” says Pinkney, who has started the Curtis Foundation, named in honor of her parents, to further her desires to preserve history. “So, it’s a struggle with the few people who want to do the preservation, and they don’t have money.”

At 90, Pinkney, who celebrated her birthday last year at the Hampton House, says her hopes and desires have not changed. They existed before the Save the Hampton House campaign. “I’m interested in preserving the Black community,” she says.

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