Leon and Jewel Collins Museum of African American History and Culture

At 307 Blake Avenue in Cocoa’s Diamond Square neighborhood stands a building with a layered history spanning more than a century. Constructed in 1924, the building originally housed Monroe High School, the first school in the Cocoa community built to serve African American students. After the school closed in 1954, the City of Cocoa converted the building into a community center and renamed it in honor of Harry T. Moore, the Brevard County educator and NAACP organizer who, along with his wife Harriette, was killed in a 1951 bombing that remains one of the earliest assassinations of the modern civil rights movement.

Decades later, the Harry T. Moore Center building was renovated to house a dedicated museum honoring two other pioneering figures in Cocoa’s African American community, Leon and Jewel Collins. The museum was dedicated in 2017 following restoration of the historic structure, with additional renovation work completed over the following years to prepare the exhibit spaces. The museum tells the story of the Collins family alongside the broader history of Cocoa’s African American community, Monroe High School, and the civil rights era in Brevard County, and the site is recognized as a stop on Florida’s Black Heritage Trail, a statewide program administered by the Florida Department of State that marks locations significant to African American history.

The building sits within Cocoa’s Diamond Square community, a historically Black neighborhood a short distance from the shops and restaurants of Historic Cocoa Village, and it is owned and operated by the City of Cocoa. As of this verification, the museum is listed on the city’s own facility directory as not yet open to the public on a regular walk in basis, so visitors interested in touring the exhibits are encouraged to call ahead to the City of Cocoa to confirm current access, group tour availability, and any scheduled open hours before making a special trip.

Even with limited regular public hours, the museum and the building that houses it remain an important part of Cocoa’s historical landscape, preserving the memory of Monroe High School’s students and educators alongside the legacy of the Collins family and the broader African American experience in Brevard County. The Harry T. Moore Center building itself, sometimes referred to as the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Center, connects this site to a figure of national civil rights significance, since a post office in Cocoa was separately named in the Moores’ honor in 2013.

Together, the building’s layered names, from Monroe High School to the Harry T. Moore Center to today’s Collins Museum, trace nearly a century of change in how Cocoa has remembered and honored its African American residents. Visitors researching Brevard County’s civil rights history or genealogy connected to Cocoa’s historically Black neighborhoods will find this site a meaningful, if currently limited access, stop, and it stands alongside the Porcher House and the Library of Florida History as one of the city’s most historically layered municipally owned buildings.