For a time during the early to mid 1980s, the city had the highest rate of AIDS infection per capita (37 cases in a population of roughly 19,000) in the United States.

[citation needed] In 2010, the Palm Beach County sheriff's office estimated that half of the young men in Belle Glade between the ages of 18 and 25 had felony convictions.

The culture is named for the Belle Glade site, which was excavated in the mid-1930s as part of a Civil Works Administration project.

In 1921 the Florida legislature established an agricultural research station at Belle Glade to study methods of growing crops on reclaimed Everglades land.

[18] In 1926 the Florida East Coast Railway extended its system to Belle Glade, which helped the town's development.

According to figures compiled by the Florida Department of Health, the storm killed 611 people in Belle Glade alone, and a total of over 1,800 statewide.

Whiteside and MacLeod's theory turned out to be incorrect, but subsequent research conducted in Belle Glade shaped scientific knowledge about the transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, through heterosexual sex.

Belle Glade received national attention when a 1960 CBS television documentary, Harvest of Shame, graphically depicted the local migrant farmerworkers' daily existence and working conditions.

The "loading ramp," as it's called, is a bleak, empty lot, surrounded by some small buildings with bars on the windows and a boarded up storefront.

As of 2000, speakers of English as a first language accounted for 61.03% of all residents, while Spanish as a mother tongue consisted of 26.87%, Haitian Creole comprised 11.00%, and French made up 1.07% of the population.

In CBS Reports' 1960 program Harvest of Shame, Belle Glade plays a prominent role as a source of migrant agricultural labor.

The final scenes of the crime novel Pretty Little Things by Jilliane Hoffman take place in a sugarcane plantation near Belle Glade.

The psychedelic pop band of Montreal released a track titled, "Belle Glade Missionaries" on their 2013 album, Lousy with Sylvianbriar.

In Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, characters Janie and Tea Cake join other African American migrant workers in picking beans in Belle Glade.