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First Major Black Hotel in Miami
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NATIONAL NEWS
NNPA
Royal Palm Crowne Plaza
Special to the NNPA)—The Royal Palm Crowne Plaza, a 422-room, $84 million resort on Miami
Beach, opened Wednesday, May 22, as the first major Black-owned hotel.
The project of developer R. Donahue Peebles has been the subject of great controversy and
expectations since plans were unveiled in 1996. The hotel, managed by Six Continents Hotels, is
devoted to hiring minorities for half of its staff and at least a quarter of senior management.
Management-level staff is nearly 100 percent minority.
Andy Ingraham, head of the National Association of Black Hotel Owners and Developers, told
reporters 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.
Thirty-six of the country’s 80,000 limited- and full-service hotels are Black-owned, along with about 40 smaller inns, Ingraham said.
“Mr. Peebles being the first has set the stage,” Ingraham told reporters. “Many African-Americans are
looking and saying this is something that we can do.”
Suites in the hotel range from $209 to $659 dollars a night, depending on the season.
“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,” said Peebles, president and CEO of Peebles Atlantic Development Corp in Miami.
The hotel is sold out for Memorial Day weekend, booked the Black Film Festival in June and an
NAACP’s conference next year.
Peebles entered the hotel business during a three-year boycott of Miami-Dade County that cost the area about $50 million. It began after Nelson Mandela was turned away by city officials when he
visited Miami in 1990. Mandela had supported Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro, which angered area
Cuban and Jewish communities.
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