Miami Beach: Black-owned hotel ends boycott, begins hope

The boycott that eventually brought Peebles to South Florida cost Miami-Dade County about $50 million. It began when city officials snubbed African leader Nelson Mandela and refused to meet with him during his 1990 visit to South Florida. Cuban-American and Jewish leaders were offended by Mandela's support of Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat.

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. -- Developer R. Donahue Peebles' first foray into the hotel business was fraught with symbolism and great expectations before the first shovel hit the dirt.

The former Washington resident, who built his business developing commercial office space, swooped into Miami Beach in 1996, bought a dilapidated hotel and won a municipal bid to build another in an adjacent oceanfront lot.

The venture was at the center of a settlement between activists, city officials and lodging executives ending a three-year black tourism boycott of South Florida. It cast Peebles as the nation's first African-American to develop and own a major convention-resort hotel.

After a two-year delay, the 422-room, $84 million Royal Palm Crowne Plaza Resort, opened last week.

"It's a unique opportunity -- I have to really kind of right a wrong," said Peebles, president and chief executive officer of Miami-based Peebles Atlantic Development Corp.

"The symbolism behind it was important, so my responsibility was to make this hotel meet the expectations that the African-American community as a whole had for it."

The hotel, managed by Six Continents Hotels, is committed to hiring minorities for half of its staff and at least a quarter of senior management. Its management-level staff is nearly 100 percent African-American, Peebles said.

"What we want to do is to have the best and brightest, and hopefully get to a point where no one will pay attention whether it's minority-owned or not minority-owned," Peebles said.

Andy Ingraham, head of the National Association of Black Hotel Owners and Developers, said that nationally, black workers hold between 30 percent and 35 percent of the hotel industry's entry level jobs, while there are fewer than 60 black executives in the country's 30,000 full-service hotels.

He said 36 of the country's 80,000 limited- and full-service hotels are black-owned, along with about 40 smaller inns.

The construction of a black-owned and operated hotel was central to the settlement to end the boycott. The city of Miami Beach made Peebles a $10 million construction loan.

The yellow, white and gray resort was built on the property of two Art Deco hotels, the old Royal Palm and the Shorecrest, which were restored to their original appearance. Peebles preserved the facades of the Shorecrest and the original building of the Royal Palm, then added two towers and a smaller building with rooms overlooking one of two pools.

"By having two hotels side by side, it gave us tremendous efficiencies of operations," said Peebles.

The hotel will be able to draw a good chunk of the black tourism market, worth $36 billion last year, according to industry watchers.

It is sold out for Memorial Day weekend, booked the Black Film Festival in June and an NAACP conference next year, marketing director Velton Showell said.

Peebles said the Royal Palm will target the high-end vacation and business traveler markets as well as executive meetings and weddings.

Peebles said he expects it will take at least five years for the hotel to become profitable.

When I was in High School, , my best friends was Haitian. He used to hate being called african american. Even better, he was a dem (god knows why, he had every conservative viewpoint known to man, inlcuding being pro-life). He used to refer to the fact that americans were arrogant, by calling everyone who is black african american. He went out of his way to state that he was not african american, he was either haitian american or carribian american or just american or he'd be happy just being called black. I don't know why this country feels the need to call anyone who is black african american. A lot of black people really do hate the term.

Its management-level staff is nearly 100 percent African-American, Peebles said.

Hmmmm. Any chance of getting bit by the quota-police?

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