Pompano Beach’s first school for African American students was a two-room wooden building that was destroyed in the 1926 Great Miami hurricane, after which classes were held in the Psalters Temple AME Church until a new schoolhouse could be built on this site. In 1927, leaders in the Pompano Beach African American community and local families raised approximately $15,500 to construct a new Pompano Colored School, and the Julius Rosenwald Foundation, which worked with Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute to expand educational opportunities for African American children across the South, supplied matching funds. Completed in 1928, the new two-story concrete block and stucco building included an assembly hall, a library, a separate principal’s office, and six classrooms. It was the second of four Rosenwald Schools in Broward County and one of 5,295 schools built by the Rosenwald Foundation from 1913 to 1932. Blanche General Ely, who had led the previous school, served as principal. The school offered grades one through six and later expanded to tenth grade, with a school year that ran from September to December, paused for harvest season, and resumed in May and June, when students attended classes Monday through Saturday to make up lost time. Ely advocated for a high school in Pompano Beach because older students often had to travel out of town for classes; Blanche Ely High School, named for her, opened in 1952, and she became its principal. In 1954 the school was renamed Coleman Elementary School in honor of the Reverend James Emanuel Coleman, pastor of Pompano’s Mount Calvary Missionary Baptist Church. After the integration of Florida’s public schools in the 1960s, enrollment declined, and the school closed in 1969. The Broward County School District demolished the building in 1972. The school provided quality education for the community and reflected the extraordinary achievements of Pompano Beach’s early African American community.