Abstract
Despite its youth, the City of Miami, along with its outlying areas, has been the subject of a myriad of books and articles addressing many elements of its history, including race. As Jim Crow was sweeping the South in the 1890s, Miami, a tiny village straddling its namesake river, was radically transformed by the entry of Standard Oil cofounder Henry M. Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway. Ironically, though not surprisingly, the African American laborers who were building Miami in its birth year, 1896, and whose vote made possible its entry as a city rather than as a town or village (classifications for smaller entities) were consigned, following incorporation, to a segregated quarter, Colored Town. They were also disfranchised a few years later through the white Democratic Primary, which excluded African Americans from participating in that party’s primaries, the only meaningful contests in the solid Democratic South.
Colored Town, a commonplace name for black enclaves in the South, arose on the proverbial “other side of the (railroad) tracks.”
Colored Town was a cramped quarter whose rising population was confined by law and force to its original boundaries throughout its early decades. The neighborhood was also bereft of necessities and amenities, be they parks, paved streets, hospitals, and even a high school (till 1927), found in other parts of the city. Colored Town was beset by disease and crime, while standing squarely in the sights of a white criminal justice system stacked heavily against its denizens.
Most white Miamians heard or read of it only in a criminal context or during periods of racial unrest, and many were ignorant of a subculture offering the enterprises, institutions, and activities characteristic of many black settlements. For Colored Town included an enterprising business community, a variety of entertainment offerings, and numerous churches. The quarter also contained a rich population mix of Bahamian, Jamaican, and Haitian blacks, along with residents from other parts of Florida and Georgia. 1
Fast forward to the expansive period following World War II. By the 1960s, “Overtown” had replaced Colored Town, as well as the more recent moniker, “Central Negro District,” as the name of the quarter, but the travails and limitations resulting from segregation continued. By then, other segregated black neighborhoods had emerged. Lying five miles Northwest of Colored Town is Liberty City, which received its jump start in 1937 with the opening of the Public Works Administration’s (PWA) Liberty Square, one of America’s first public housing projects. Liberty City grew dramatically in the tumultuous period following World War II when formerly white neighborhoods nearby became black following “white flight” to the suburbs and elsewhere. Southwest of Liberty City stands Brownsville, an unincorporated area that became increasingly black. Even earlier, in 1925, the West Grove, a Bahamian black neighborhood that traces its beginnings to 1889, was brought within the corporate limits of the City of Miami through an annexation election. Together, these neighborhoods pushed the black percentage of Dade Countians beyond 25 percent by the middle decades of the twentieth century.
A buoyant community with broad appeal despite the strictures of Jim Crow Miami, Overtown reached its apex in the 1950s. The U.S. Census for 1960 found more than thirty-four thousand residents in a neighborhood that remained confined to a small footprint.
The 1960s, however, saw a rapid reversal of its fortunes as the construction of I-95 and the massive I-395 cloverleaf displaced thousands of black residents, while urban renewal, coming at the same time, gutted not only another portion of the residential section of Overtown but parts of its business and entertainment areas as well. Later, the entry of Metrorail, a high-speed train that moves through portions of the county, did further damage to that part of the community along its right-of-way. The fifty years following its high-water mark of the late 1950s marked the nadir of Overtown as its population contracted, its business and entertainment districts disappeared, and new investment was nonexistent. 2
In recent years, however, the neighborhood has experienced a resurgence with new investment, both private and public, as well as the salutary impact resulting from the explosive growth and redevelopment of Miami’s center city. Accordingly, many new apartment buildings, along with restaurants and cultural facilities, have appeared. Major retail development is underway.
Adding to the growing corpus of work on Overtown and our understanding of its history are two recent books, N. D. B. Connolly’s A World More Concrete and Chanelle N. Rose’s The Struggle for Black Freedom In Miami. Both authors are young, impressive scholars and university professors whose efforts have provided us with a better understanding of the problems faced by Greater Miami’s black community.
Rose’s The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami moves chronologically through the area’s black history from incorporation through the late 1960s, with a concluding chapter bringing the story to the recent past. The author explains the major epochs, issues, and personalities in this story, from the institution of segregation at the time of incorporation through the appearance of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920s to a determined civil rights movement arising in the wake of World War II to the racial tensions of the 1960s resulting in the Liberty City rebellion of 1968, as the Republican Party was nominating Richard Nixon as their presidential candidate in Miami Beach. Rose’s insights into the roles and personalities of black leaders in the areas of spirituality, political activity, and civil rights efforts are incisive.
If there is a central theme to her work, it is that Miami’s heavy reliance on tourism as a major engine of its economy has prompted boosters, public officials, journalists, and others, from the city’s beginnings onward, to mask its negative elements. In the process, these elites established a “tourist progressive mystique” (p. 26) that obscured the city’s deep racial divide by promoting its natural assets. Further, this prevailing perception of Miami’s moderation in terms of racial behavior, in contrast to other parts of the South, had a “totalizing effect” (p. 242) that not only obscured but also perpetuated deep-seated economic and social problems confronting blacks. Rose returns to this theme at other critical times in the city’s history.
For Rose, a professor of history at Rowan University, these façades of Miami’s moderate racial ethos held till Ku Klux Klan–inspired terrorism in the 1950s, amid a period of intense civil rights activity, marked a turning point “because it shattered the city’s perceived racially moderate climate and tourist image” (p. 94). Still ahead were periods of rioting and other racial disturbances.
The author’s account of the civil rights movement in Miami is compelling. Her description of the origins of Virginia Key Beach, the area’s first black beach, is illuminating, as is her account of the early appearance of black policemen, initially referred to as “patrolmen,” who were vested with limited powers.
Rose profiles the clergy of Overtown and the West Grove, explaining the power they wielded within the community and the civil rights movement. The Rev. Edward Graham was the powerful leader of Historic Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church, who, upon assuming leadership of the church, immediately brought militancy to his pastorate. Graham was a party to many of the major civil rights initiatives of the 1950s and 1960s. Even more impressive, perhaps, was the leadership provided by Canon Theodore Gibson of the West Grove’s Christ Episcopal Church, who led a cleanup of his underserved community, often in conjunction with Elizabeth Virrick, a white woman deeply devoted to improving conditions for African American residents of Coconut Grove and elsewhere. Gibson later led the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and stood up to a state senate committee and its shameful witch-hunt of “subversives.”
When Rose reaches for historical context beyond the confines of her immediate subject, she sometimes strays into erroneous accounts of the history of Miami and even the nation. John Marshall, for example, was not chief justice, or even a member, of the Warren Supreme Court, although John Marshall Harlan II was on that court (as was Thurgood Marshall). Prominent Miami business and civic leader Jack Gordon was not, as the author asserts, a U.S. Senator from Florida. This study also contains numerous factual errors on Miami’s history, leadership, and neighborhoods. Better fact-checking of the author’s manuscript—ideally by someone versed in the history of Miami—as it was being prepared for publication could have eliminated this problem.
N.B. T. Connolly’s A World More Concrete pursues a different approach in coming to grips with the city and area’s sordid racial history. Like Rose, Connolly, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, views his subject through the prism of real estate, positing that whoever controls the real estate in a community controls its most important elements. Connolly’s conclusions will ruffle many feathers, but they will also stand tall since his sources are sound, his arguments logical.
Connolly asserts that many of the elites of black Miami were landlords (along with the many whites invested in the black community) and that there was “black on black predation” (p. 13) through rent and slum housing. The ranks of landlords included powerful ministers, elected officials, and civil rights leaders. Connolly even foists the characterization of “slumlord” on the revered Athalie Range, a black icon in the middle and latter decades of the 1900s, a rare African American business woman who was a funeral director, civil rights leader, and the first of her race to serve on the Miami City Commission. Later, Range became the first black since Reconstruction to head a state agency, the Department of Community Affairs.
Connolly takes his argument further, suggesting that white and black landlords in early Miami often collaborated in real estate projects, while sharing a viewpoint of African American tenants as lazy, dirty, impressionable, and in need of landlord benevolence and philanthropy. Further, these elites routinely, and heavily, exploited tenants. Part of being black, Connolly observes, meant paying more than 50 percent of one’s household income on shelter.
The onslaught against housing for those who were dispossessed in black neighborhoods throughout America also took place throughout the history of Overtown, and it was driven by the evolving mindsets of elites inside and outside of these communities. In the 1930s and 1940s, as the federal government entered the realm of public housing, white and black landlords, Connolly explains, teamed up to stop large public housing projects, believing they would stand in direct competition with property owners, while driving down prices. The author noted that the Liberty Square public housing was built far away from Colored Town.
Additional troubles for the tortuous issue of housing in black communities resulted from administrators of the New Deal’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) who made it almost impossible for African Americans to secure federal mortgage insurance, ensuring the continued necessity and profitability of black-occupied rental property. Thus, in 1940, 92 percent of Colored Town’s population consisted of renters.
And one white man, Luther Brooks, a principal in the Bonded Collection Agency, renamed Bonded Rental Agency, for more than forty years, managed thousands of rental apartments, many without electricity and indoor plumbing and infested with vermin. Brooks was property manager for blacks as well as white property owners, whom he gifted with “‘full-service’ management packages, or a kind of Negro rental franchise, perfect for white absentee landlords . . . seeking minimal entanglements and maximum profits” (p. 166). He managed, for instance, the Colored Town properties of the Rev. John Culmer, the revered pastor of the powerful St. Agnes Episcopal Church. Connolly argues that “Before the age of forty . . . Brooks became one of the most important figures in South Florida’s housing industry and one of the most successful property managers in the whole United States” (p. 75).
For Connolly, the right to citizenship meant, as before, the right to hold property and to be able to pass it safely from one generation to the next. But this seemingly inherent right became increasingly more challenging in post–World War II America with “the expanded powers of the . . . state” (p. 164). Nowhere was the white disregard for black properties they set their sights on more evident than with the fate, in 1947, of the Railroad Shop’s Colored Addition subdivision, a black neighborhood a few miles Northwest of Colored Town that traced its beginnings to the early 1900s. Eminent domain was evoked to expel, in one day, thirty-five families from their homes amid a driving rain. Soon after, fifty additional families were evicted. These actions were taken to pave the way for a new junior high school, municipal park, and fire station for whites.
Because of its location on the northern edges of downtown Miami, Colored Town was viewed from its early days as a future white preserve. But downtown’s decline by the 1960s and thereafter weakened initiatives in that direction. Instead, in postwar Miami, landlords with holdings in Colored Town seized on the Housing Act of 1949, which, as elsewhere in the South, prompted whites to employ the new powers of slum clearance to raze black homes and replace them with “Whites Only” developments. In Overtown, however, the experience was different. Without the need for land for an expanding downtown, landlords, instead, replaced shotgun houses with concrete apartment housing, the oppressive “concrete monsters.” Until then, shotgun houses, that had dotted the landscape of Overtown since its infancy, had comprised nearly 80 percent of the community’s housing stock.
In the meantime, housing shortages and conditions worsened in mid-century Miami. The intransigence of white homeowners over the location of proposed public housing sites, and strong lobbying efforts by landlords at the municipal and state levels, prevented the construction of government housing anywhere in vast, sprawling Dade County between 1940 and 1954. And even when the creation of public housing finally got underway in the early 1960s, continued landlord “intransigence . . . ensured that fewer than eight hundred of a promised fifteen hundred public housing units had been built . . .” (p. 262).
In the 1960s, expressways and urban renewal programs helped dissolve the last of the wood frame and tarpaper shacks (shotgun houses) that had dotted the landscape of Overtown since its infancy. Yet, as Connolly writes, because of landlord power, redevelopment replaced them, as already noted, with concrete tenements, which were more profitable as rental properties and which became the sad symbols of a community largely displaced by public and even private construction programs directed at it.
By the late 1960s, Overtown was a shell of its former self. Connolly notes that the construction of I-95 through that historic neighborhood led to the expulsion of 8,500 households and encouraged the flight of thousands more as eighty-seven acres of highway interchanges ran through the community. For the author, the Central Negro District, a name he employs often when referencing Overtown, “became a rough combination of vacant lots and concrete buildings . . . with only a few shotgun shacks . . .” (p. 282). This once proud community had been brought to its knees through internal and external factors that bedeviled other segregated neighborhoods in the South and elsewhere. The next half century saw a further deterioration in its fortunes. Only today is it regaining some of what it lost. Nobody has told this story better than N.D.B. Connolly in A World More Concrete.