Charlotte Gilmore Durante was elected in 1978 as the first African American woman City Commissioner in Delray Beach, a city in Palm Beach County, Florida. She served until 1982. In 2010, she was arrested on charges of defrauding Haitian immigrants out of 1.8 million dollars in a Ponzi scheme, in order to purchase a permanent location for the Museum of Lifestyle & Fashion History, which her daughter ran. Convicted on a portion of the original charges in 2013, she completed her sentence in 2016.