A historical marker honoring Nellie Ford Poitier — known to most of Pompano Beach simply as Nell — was unveiled on Saturday, September 5, outside the L.C. Poitier Funeral Home at 317 NW 6th Street, the business she helped build seventy years ago.
Her son, Woodrow “Woody” Poitier, attended the ceremony alongside City Commissioner Beverly Perkins, Mayor Rex Hardin, and Deltaire Hillinger, co-executive director of the Florida Civil Rights Museum. “She was a very classy lady — very elegant,” Perkins said. “She carried herself like a queen.”
A teacher, a family business and a sorority chapter
Poitier spent her working life in front of Broward County classrooms, teaching at Pompano Beach Senior High, Blanche Ely High and Charles Drew Elementary across a stretch of decades when the schools she served and the city around them were being forced to change. In 1956 she and her husband, Llewellyn, opened L.C. Poitier Funeral Home, and she became a founding member of the local chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the oldest Black sorority in the country.
Hillinger framed the marker as being about more than one woman. “We hope that people will know that yes, one person can make a difference, but even one family or group of siblings can change the trajectory of their city and state,” she said. That is a fair description of what the Poitier name has meant in northwest Pompano Beach — a teacher, a family business, a sorority chapter, none of it the sort of thing that makes headlines on its own, and all of it the infrastructure a community actually runs on.
Where to find the marker
The marker stands outside L.C. Poitier Funeral Home at 317 NW 6th Street, in the neighborhood where Poitier taught, worked and raised her family. It sits within walking distance of the Ali Cultural Arts Center on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, which occupies the former home of Florence and Frank Ali and programs regularly around local Black history through music, theater and spoken word.
The Blanche Ely House Museum, named for the educator whose name is on the high school where Poitier taught, covers overlapping ground. Both are city-run, both are a short drive from the new marker, and between them they hold most of the context the marker itself has room to gesture at.
