Tracing Black Racial and Spatial Politics in South Florida via Memory

In 1972, my family moved to the northwest section of then Dade County, about twenty or so miles north of Miami. Sand dunes and empty fields surrounded our often pastel-painted homes. We were in the boondocks. We also lived in a “second ghetto,” the idea being that after leaving a segregated neighborhood, we had found ourselves in a similar state owing to recent white flight. ¹

But that whites had once lived in this area at all suggests the limits of racial housing politics in South Florida. As far back as the New Deal era, realtors, policy makers, and developers wanted African Americans to live in this section of the county, away from the region’s lucrative seaside. It was only decades after power brokers wanted us there that we were in fact moving to this community, then the unincorporated part of the county called Carol City (now the City of Miami Gardens).

The older tradition of local people of African descent occupying land whites wanted explained our delay. ² Indeed, my family had recently relocated from Coconut Grove, a bayside community just south of Miami’s central business district. There, blacks, many of them of Bahamian descent had lived since Miami was founded in 1896. Some of these people of African descent, among them my Bahamian relatives, continue to live in the Grove, although amid gentrification and a growing number of young white hipsters and wealthy South American neighbors. The ongoing black presence in the Grove alongside such neighbors and our belated move to the northwest section of the county suggest irregular spatial and racial politics across time worth studying for broader implications as working-class Americans, among them African Americans, increasingly leave the place with which they have long been associated: the city. ³

In this article, which serves as a starting point for a new study, I seek to understand the implications of black migration to, through, and away from greater Miami. Initially, I focus on the motivations to move and stay in a particular place for black Bahamian migrants and residents. This population is a logical starting point given the way in which their presence in South Florida disrupted social understandings of power for both black and white Americans in the late nineteenth century and through the early twentieth century. While there had been an earlier presence of enslaved people and runaways, these Bahamians manifest as being part of a first wave of black residents in the region given their visible and deliberate settlement in the area alongside white and black Americans.

Next, I focus on the arrival of other blacks and their subsequent movement through and away from South Florida in three additional waves: the interwar, postwar, and millennial period (the latter stands out owing to the residential shifts following the 1992 Hurricane Andrew and the recent economic recession). That said, this broad and embryonic analysis focuses on the postwar period in particular. In this way, I am following a suggestion made more than a decade ago by Arnold Hirsch and Raymond Mohl, who asked scholars to examine “southern” cities for black housing anomalies. ⁴ Using Chicago as a case study, Hirsch observed that black Southsiders found themselves in ghettoes when moving west to neighborhoods emptying of whites. He understood, as Thomas Sugrue has told us, that black urban crises must be understood in the context of social and political history. ⁵ That said, Hirsch and Mohl, a leading scholar on Miami, both realized that this second ghetto phenomenon did not necessarily happen in southern cities owing to long-term black–white interaction. Even as Jim Crow practices shaped the way blacks and whites encountered one another in public spaces, rural southern communities found blacks and whites living near one another. Sharecropping and scattered settlement often resulted in unique proximal residential dynamics that subsequently spilled over into urbanizing spaces.

Scholarship on the gendered nature of black movement and black participation in urban economies across time is still developing but has been fruitfully explored in several works, among them Tera Hunter’s study on African American domestics’ fight for dignity, higher wages, and self-respect in and outside the homes of elite Atlanta whites during the South’s transition into the modern industrial world. ⁶ Some postbellum black families picked up and delivered freshly laundered clothes to white families whose homes were typically only a walk or wagon or short streetcar ride away. ⁷ This short commute figures into a range of experiences for urban dwellers whose experiences may have varied on the basis of their gender or whether their workplace required overnight stays. Speaking to such a range are the following words from one child nurse: “I see my own children only when they happen to see me on the streets when I am out with the [white] children, or when my children come to the ‘yard.’” ⁸ Despite this woman’s immobility owing to work, in the years surrounding the Civil War, other blacks moved in ways that distressed some white observers, northern and southern ones. As Hunter writes, when one postbellum black woman reportedly told a northern missionary employee working for the Freedmen’s Bureau that she preferred leaving her former master’s plantation where she had food and shelter “to ‘joy my freedom,” that plantation was likely not that far from her new home, however modest. ⁹ The missionary employee, herself a woman, was observing a spatial coup for one black woman whose desire to maximize the possibilities of emancipation was accomplished via how she occupied space.

Not unlike postbellum black women who launched protests in Galveston, Texas, and Jackson, Mississippi, black Atlanta women engaged in large-scale political action to obtain fairer working and living conditions. The act of moving or not moving for people of African descent in the United States has, across time, significance in an urbanizing world. ¹⁰

Because southern, gradually industrializing cities like Atlanta and Miami were less segregated than their northern counterparts, state and local governments had less success than northern officials in disrupting black–white proximity that had been “centuries in the making.” ¹¹ Thus, to tell the story of racial and spatial politics in South Florida is to tell an ongoing saga of spatial triumphs and setbacks dating back to the nineteenth century (Figure 1). Scholars, among them Chanelle Rose, generally agree that Miami’s borderland status contributes to the malleable ways residents understand “blackness,” which contributes to black housing anomalies in the South. ¹² This study seeks further to examine how understandings of “blackness” encounter spatial and racial politics in South Florida since the late nineteenth century.

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Figure 1.

This map reflects the neighborhoods in which people of African descent have lived in South Florida since the late nineteenth century.

Via ethnography and an assessment of data revealing how people of African descent have moved through space in this region across time, I explore here how my family’s migrations to fit into a larger narrative of black self-determination in the county and the peninsula. ¹³ In using the phrase self-determination, I am building on V. P. Franklin’s conception of African American construction of cultural values in response to “the material conditions under which they lived and which were oppositional to the beliefs and values stressed by the dominant white ruling class.” Actions such as resistance, embracing Christian faith, and education figure into such determination. ¹⁴ I am extending his concept to highlight the ability of people of African descent to stand still or move through space in four waves, making deliberate housing choices in the face of political, structural, and economic injustices from the Jim Crow era through the new millennium. Specifically, I present the migration stories of local “blacks” whose experiences fit into a larger black resistance tradition, although sometimes for reasons not fully clear. My preliminary findings suggest that black self-determination via housing and intracounty migratory patterns do not conform to trends seen elsewhere, especially in northern and Midwestern cities.

Between 2013 and 2015, I conducted thirty-six interviews with people of African descent with residential connections to South Florida. ¹⁵ Some were homeowners. Some were not. Some had college degrees. Others did not. The youngest interviewee was eight. The eldest was 96 years old. What I essentially had was close to a century of shared memory shaped by (1) the degree to which Florida has figured into a Pan-African narrative and (2) the ways in which people in oppressed groups have exercised power simply by moving through space or staying put. The tricky aspects of oral history—especially with relatives—proved minor given the degree to which black self-determination was affirmed with each conversation. ¹⁶ The interviews indeed revealed the pride some participants felt in partaking in the oral history tradition commonly associated with people of African descent. ¹⁷ The stories shared sometimes reinforce a communal sense about black life in South Florida even as they involve complicated discussions about power that must still be carefully negotiated.

In addressing basic questions such as where and how long they lived in a particular neighborhood, whether they moved, what factors influenced their movements, and neighborhood changes along the way, the interviewees almost told a single story about how people of African descent in South Florida achieved some measure of success against racial oppression via varied migratory and housing choices, no matter the oppression they encountered. ¹⁸ Specifically, the memories offered a cartographic resistance narrative of black self-determination. ¹⁹ Via the act of moving to, through, and outside of Miami-Dade County or staying still, people of African descent in this area often placed limits on white domination. ²⁰ Even as some observers have scrutinized our experiences as only difficulties, the memories offered by my interviewees resituate those difficulties in the context of real gains like better paying wages, improved living conditions, and even new homes.

African American self-determination via migration to and settlement in South Florida in the face of injustices fits into a longer narrative of resistance on the peninsula. During the 1830s, Andrew Jackson attempted to rid Florida of the Seminoles. ²¹ Efforts to round them up led to their use of guerilla tactics that would be seen in the Civil War and other conflicts, including the Filipino insurgency against, first, Spain and then the United States, and also the Vietnam War. Accompanied by enslaved people they themselves owned or who were runaways, the Seminoles took cover in the swampy Everglades to avoid capture. ²² The Indians and enslaved people often knew better how to survive a terrain filled with alligators, mosquitoes, and water moccasins than did their pursuers.

In the nearby Bahama Islands, enslaved and runaway Africans found other allies in white English settlers, among them British Loyalists expelled from the United States during the American Revolutionary War. ²³ Following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire as the nineteenth century matured, some British seaman aided people of African descent by liberating slave ships. ²⁴ Following a late-century agricultural slump in their colony, skilled Bahamian fishermen, sailors, and farm workers departed for Florida. Many initially settled in Key West before heading north to or near present-day Miami.

These so-called “Nassau Negroes” were the uppity subjects of the British crown who reveal the complicated nature of blackness across time in this region, troubling even American blacks who would sometimes be indistinguishable from them owing to shared attempts to improve their lives despite their very different pasts. ²⁵ White industrialists from the Midwest and the North and migrating southern blacks alike saw Bahamians as neither docile nor subservient as African Americans as some endeavored to own their own homes while helping white newcomers do the same. Indeed, the Bahamian practice of claiming unused land that was long understood to be part of a family possession as a means of resisting the dominant culture was not unheard of and may have been an attitude carried to the States by Bahamians settling in South Florida, upsetting both white and black Americans. ²⁶

N. D. B. Connolly’s exploration of Jim Crow practices in Miami’s real estate sector reveals tensions even between American blacks and West Indians as the latter settled in Miami at the turn of the century. The tactics used to discredit black Bahamians’ attempts to acquire land in Florida included casting them as voodoo practitioners. ²⁷ Such conflict added to the racial and ethnic complexities of South Florida, and to the economic and cultural complexities of the state that had long been visible.

Although admitted as a state in 1845, aside from the panhandle, Florida saw little such commercial activity before the Civil War, and thus, the state never fit squarely into a region where planters, like ones in, say, Brazil, found a similar solution to their labor problem: enslaved Africans. ²⁸ But black Bahamians’ knowledge of how to grow food where coral rock existed was a boon to whites wishing to develop the lower end of the peninsula in the twentieth century. ²⁹ Following the building of Henry Flagler’s railroad during the last two decades of the nineteenth century through the opening decades of the nineteenth century using black labor and Miami’s incorporation, the city grew. ³⁰ And Bahamians made up more than half of the local black population at the time of the city’s founding. ³¹ In fact, because of their presence, South Florida had the largest West Indian population outside of New York. ³² During the first half of the twentieth century, the area was transformed from a tropical wilderness to an urban paradise with people of African descent present an integral part of the landscape. ³³

From the earliest days of settlement, blacks, Bahamian among them, lived in South Florida. ³⁴ Among them was Ebenezer Woodbury Franklin Stirrup, a Bahamian man of mixed race who arrived in the late 1880s. ³⁵ In keeping with an established pattern, Stirrup initially lived in Key West. After working first as a pineapple cutter and, subsequently, as chauffeur and a farm worker, he amassed enough money to purchase several plots of land. ³⁶ Stirrup gradually moved north toward Miami, specifically to the Coconut Grove community in Miami. Although he lost money during the Great Depression, he still owned land on which he built houses for rent or sale to arriving Bahamians. ³⁷ The house he built for his own family in 1897 in the Grove still stands, serving as a reminder of black self-determination across time that was visible by the middle of twentieth century via the activism of Father Theodore R. Gibson, a native Miamian of Bahamian descent and president of Miami’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who helped desegregate area beaches during the city’s initial golden years as a tourist destination (Figure 4). ³⁸

Despite such gains, inequalities persisted, especially on the housing front as people of African descent often found themselves living in congested communities owing to racial exclusion. ³⁹ Civil disturbances in black neighborhoods as the century matured reflected black anger. Such anger, alongside economic decline, contributed to the city being labeled a “paradise lost” by the early 1980s. ⁴⁰ The arrival of Cuban and Haitian refugees furthered destabilized the region drawing national attention, much of it unwanted. ⁴¹ Yet the aging people of African descent and their descendants continued to call the area home. Among them was the second wave of migrants who arrived during the years immediately surrounding the First World War through the Second World War.

My great aunt Marjorie Woods, or Aunt Marge, was the daughter of such second wave migrants. Born in Miami in 1917, Aunt Marge briefly lived with relatives in Eight Mile Rock, a Bahamian township named for the eight miles of rock that ran along its seashore. She was soon reunited with her parents, natives of the Bahamas, who had settled in South Florida. Aunt Marge recalled the tensions between black Bahamians and blacks southerners. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, most southern blacks were from Georgia and “didn’t like the ‘Nassaus.’ That’s what they used to call us, not ‘Bahamians,’” she said. ⁴²

This division between early black Bahamians and African Americans in the area came in and out of view as both groups acquired some measure of political power. To meet the state’s minimum population requirement to incorporate Miami in 1896, local whites invited black workers, Bahamian or not, to become registered voters to boost the numbers in the once-desolate area. ⁴³ The right to vote was fleeting. There were other oppressions. Owing to unjust employment practices that relegated local blacks to the lowest-paying jobs, Aunt Marge earned a living primarily as a domestic worker, or “day worker.” One worked for a “day,” and hoped to work for another and another. To supplement the irregular arrival of meager paychecks, she took on several other menial jobs. ⁴⁴ Today, her living room reveals her awareness of progress. President Barack Obama, whom she calls “my baby,” is pictured prominently on a wall rug. ⁴⁵

Another second-wave settler is Coconut Grove resident Mary Lane, a native of Fernandina Beach, a coastal town in Nassau County, Florida, near the Georgia line. ⁴⁶ Like Aunt Marge’s parents, Lane’s family was among the people of African descent who made a decision to come to South Florida. Unlike late nineteenth century–arriving Bahamian farmers and fishermen, the first wave, they arrived in the first half of the twentieth century.

When she was a baby, Lane’s parents moved to Coral Gables, a product of an area real estate boom before the Great Depression. Incorporated in 1925, the Gables is just west of the Grove and thus west of downtown Miami. Owing to the need for black domestic workers and laborers, whites in the Gables sectioned off a portion of their municipality’s east side to house such workers, calling it Golden Gate. ⁴⁷ The two words announced not only the area’s upmarket surroundings, but also its exclusion as blacks were in a particular neighborhood, although not so far away that they could not walk to work. ⁴⁸ Following her marriage, in the midst of her career as a school teacher, Mary Lane left Golden Gate in 1958 for the Grove, where she and her husband built a house on Florida Avenue. Indeed, as late as 1958, a black couple could buy land in Coconut Grove and build a house there despite the plans drawn up two decades earlier to move this population to the northwest section of the county. She continues to live there.

The third wave of black migrants to Florida—those arriving largely from the south following the war and the mechanization of the farming—included my relatives from the South. Realizing the degree to which food tells the story of one’s ancestral ties, I often say that my family in South Florida emerges as a “Caribbean-southern stew.” In fact, my maternal grandparents were sharecroppers whose departure for urban spaces like Miami—not just northern cities like Detroit and Chicago—led to the reordering of America. There is irony in how such African Americans’ rural past was recognizable, even marketable. ⁴⁹ When asked why she left the Mississippi Delta’s cotton fields in the late 1950s, my grandmother Lillie Mae Earvin said, “Because I could make a better living here than I could in Mississippi (Figure 2).” ⁵⁰ Rather than head north and west as did some five million rural blacks between 1940 and 1970, she and my grandfather joined thousands of them who moved instead farther south to or near southern cities, like Atlanta, Houston, and Miami, capturing the warmth of other suns. ⁵¹

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Figure 2.

Louella “Lou” Halbert (left), my great grandmother; Estella Andrews, my mother; and Lillie Earvin, my grandmother, are all natives of Mississippi. Photographer unknown.

My grandparents initially settled in the farming community of Homestead, a rural town south of Miami, but not as far south as Key West. There, they picked “pole beans, tomatoes, whatever.” ⁵² As was true of Stirrup, the turn-of-the-century Bahamian settler, they eventually moved farther north, to Miami, where she worked as a domestic, but eventually found financial independence in the late 1970s after becoming known as “Bahama Mama” on the local festival circuit. She learned how to prepare Bahamian salad and fritters made with conch, a local shellfish. When she spoke, the southern accent, not a Bahamian one, was heard, disarming many.

She was not unlike many other Americans who as early as the 1920 were aware of the financial benefits of living in an urban space. ⁵³ However, rural-to-urban migration seemed to have especially profound consequences for southern blacks who maximized the possibilities of leaving behind “colored only” signs and lynched bodies. During this migratory moment, they, like other immigrants, white and black, often sent for other relatives, enabling them to improve their lives, too (Figure 3). ⁵⁴ My grandparents sent for my great grandmother Louella who brought with her my mother and aunt, both then just children.

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Figure 3.

Lillie Earvin (left) celebrates the bachelor’s degree her daughter Estella Andrews received from then Florida Memorial College in the early 1980s, about forty years after their migration from Mississippi. Photographer unknown.

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Figure 4.

Myself (right) in the arms of my mother Estella Andrews and beside my brother and father, the late Garcia Andrews, as we visited Miami’s desegregated Crandon Park Beach in 1967. Photographer unknown.

Upon her arrival in South Florida, Lou, as my great grandmother was called, managed the Sugar Shack on Grand Avenue, a major east–west artery of Coconut Grove. This dwelling was hardly a shack, but a three-story conch house so named because it was made of local wood and sat on posts to permit the air to flow underneath, cooling the interior as was the case of houses constructed by white Bahamians, who were known for their consumption of conch. ⁵⁵

After my birth in 1967, Lou babysat with me in the Sugar Shack while my then-married mother completed general education courses at night school. Lou and I often shared a daybed in her efficiency apartment, which took up the entire top floor of the boarding house. The sheer position of her living space, the top floor, announced a real achievement. She was the boarding house manager in a mostly male space. Moreover, she had migrated to South Florida to improve her own condition and that of our family during mid-twentieth-century racial upheaval.

I can still see the ragged poster of Dr. King beside Robert Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr. that was Scotch-taped above a mantle in her apartment. The conspicuous positioning of this poster brought memories of Aunt Marge’s Obama paraphernalia. Although one woman was born in Miami with Bahamian heritage and the other in Mississippi, both homes featured imagery that unveiled the complexities of black advances: an African American Civil Rights leader, a white president and his brother, an African American minister, and a president of mixed race. ⁵⁶

I wish I had asked for that poster before Lou died in 1993. I did ask for one of the Avon doll cologne bottles that sat on her dresser. In 1970, this series of dolls received inspiration from the “It’s A Small World” Disney ride that made linkages between multinational global capital and family fun. It seemed to signify inclusiveness as one of the manufactured dolls in the series was clearly of African descent. My great grandmother strangely did not have that black doll. She did have two others: one that looked Asian and another that had blonde hair and was presumably European. ⁵⁷ I have a blonde-haired one. It had a purple dress that is now gray.

It was years before I made my political and social linkages between my experiences as a woman of African descent, that blonde-haired “Small World” doll, and the park that Walt Disney opened in 1971 in Orlando, four hours north of our home. Disney World, like Disneyland, which had opened sixteen years earlier in California, reflected important ideas concerning about what it meant to be American that largely did not include my black family. ⁵⁸ Such ideas also did not include black women like a self-determined Lou who still manipulated space around her as had other black women, among them the Atlanta washerwomen that historian Tera Hunter, another Miami native, studied.

Lou daily walked east to “the Village,” a nearby white neighborhood in the Grove that is closer to the bay. There, she picked through discarded clothes of wealthy white women in a church thrift store. On the way back west, she often bought mustard greens, her favorite, from a market on the black side of our community.

From time to time, she would lock up her apartment and grab my hand. We walked downstairs to ride a city bus to the Woolworth’s in downtown Miami. We sat anywhere we wanted on that bus and sat at that lunch counter “just because.” There, we shared a single hamburger, which signified more than the Avon doll associated with a troubling theme park.

Her quiet politics as revealed most in that ragged poster and migration to South Florida reflected the politics of other blacks who lived in the Grove. Generally speaking, although people of African descent have lived in many parts of the county like the Grove, on the basis of these interviews, they appear to have increasingly settled farther north and often in more congested conditions by mid-twentieth century. For example, by the 1920s, a considerable number of people of African descent lived in Overtown, once known as “Central Negro District." ⁵⁹ Throughout the 1920s, more than 20 percent of Miami’s African American population resided there. By the 1940s and 1950s, many of them were increasingly pushed farther north especially following eminent domain claims to appropriate black neighborhoods for the construction of highways and public housing. ⁶⁰

Mary Ellen Sands, another third-wave migrant, is part of the cohort of black Americans who settled north of earlier arrivals like Coconut Grove residents Aunt Marge and Mary Lane. Reflecting, again, the black self-determination under review, the sort that found older relatives, male or female, leaving alone to stay with kin before sending for others, Sands left Madison County, Florida, first, for Overtown and then Liberty City in 1938 when she was just four years old. ⁶¹ There, her mother worked as a maid while her father opened a billiard parlor. Her mother’s brother also moved south and eventually opened a jitney company. His financial success enabled him to send her to Florida A&M University where she earned a teaching degree.

Miami Herald columnist Bea Hines recalls moving from Palatka, Florida, in 1944. At the time, her mother was leaving an abusive marriage with Hines and her brother in tow. They lived in Overtown before briefly relocating to Texas following her mother’s remarriage to a second husband. They moved back to Liberty City in 1949. At the time, there were still alligators in that community. “It’s a wonder my brother didn’t get eaten,” said Hines whose family moved back to Overtown before returning to Liberty City in 1952. She graduated from high school in 1956 and eventually purchased a home in present-day Miami Gardens. ⁶²

Hines’s northerly migration makes an interesting counterpoint to aging blacks in the Grove like Aunt Marge, who is adamant that she will live in no place “other than Coconut Grove.” ⁶³ “We are standing our ground,” says fellow Grove resident Mary Lane. What they are pointing to is how the Grove is gentrifying—or acquiring white residents who are increasingly settling on the west side, typically settled by blacks. This gentrification occurs as younger blacks who desire to own homes are compelled to relocate to other neighborhoods. In fact, their homeownership serves as further proof of black self-determination given the historic hurdles erected to prevent such ownership. That said, black presence and homeownership in the Grove dwindles as area real estate prices rise. ⁶⁴

The demand for housing, especially by wealthy South American immigrants who prefer Miami’s urban setting, has contributed to the $236,900 median sale price for a single-family home in greater Miami. ⁶⁵ Telling of the degree to which homeownership is becoming out of reach, Coconut Grove has one of the area’s highest gaps between rising home prices and the number of people who can afford them. In 1988, my cousin Theo Cunningham, also a native of Golden Gate, and her husband wanted to buy a house. Doing so in Coconut Grove where they lived was out of the question. “[T]he property was . . . expensive,” my cousin said. They moved a few miles north to Allapattah, a then mostly African American neighborhood near Liberty City. ⁶⁶ There, they raised three children whom they subsequently put through college.

Foreshadowing this gentrifying Grove were the experiences of another cousin, Pamela Brown. An urban renewal initiative resulted in the demolition of the apartment she shared with her family in the Grove during the 1960s and most of the 1970s. ⁶⁷ At age seven, in 1974, Pam, now a postal carrier, moved with her family a few miles south to South Miami. There, she lived for twenty years before returning to the Grove, then relocating even farther south to Richmond Heights where she lived prior to her recent move to Cutler Bay following a divorce. ⁶⁸ “When I left Coconut Grove as an adult . . ., the Anglos were moving in,” she said. “We could not afford to live in Coconut Grove anymore. Prices went up, houses were between 400 to half a million dollars.”

One cousin moved north and the other south, settling in different parts of the region in keeping with earlier black migratory patterns. She joins a longer narrative of people who were able to make such moves in spite of the aims of whites described by Mohl, among them, realtors, developers, public officials, and white residents who wished we lived in certain areas, especially in the once agricultural northwest section of present-day Miami-Dade County. ⁶⁹ As people of African descent in South Florida moved in varying directions, often remaining in touch with relatives who could not or did not relocate, few move east toward the seaside. ⁷⁰ Doing so requires a larger financial outlay than most African Americans, especially younger ones, were able to afford. Although arriving in Miami during the Jim Crow period, older blacks, among them rural communities throughout the South, had arrived early enough to acquire land that is presently unaffordable for many people no matter than racial background. The experiences of several people who manifest as being part of the third wave bear out this dynamic. Among them is Hester M. Bland, native of Pineville, South Carolina. Bland arrived in Miami in 1950. ⁷¹ She followed her husband, Thomas, a longshoreman, also from South Carolina. They initially lived in a rooming house on Eighth Street between Second and Third Avenue in Overtown before moving to their own apartment on Sixteenth Street near Fourth Avenue again in Overtown. Bland and her husband eventually moved into a government project in Liberty City before purchasing a house on Northwest Fifty-ninth Street in that community.

“We saved and saved,” said Bland, who earned a nursing degree. No bank would loan them the money to finance the purchase. They instead received a balloon mortgage from a Jewish businessman. ⁷² Although their creditor was in it for his own gain, he nonetheless loaned them the money, something that no gentile or bank would do. Another Jewish man, a lawyer tipped them off to the fine print spelling out the terms of the balloon mortgage in their contract. Following his advice, they set aside money every month so that when the bill came due, they could pay it in full much to the surprise, if not the chagrin, of the man who lent them the money who had hoped to have had a tidy rental income when they failed to pay the balance due. ⁷³

The Blands’ ability to own several homes is a testimony of their self-determination that was shared with other aging blacks, including some who owing to failing health later departed the region to reside with relatives. Such is the case of Edward Braynon Jr., a retired dentist who lives in an Atlanta-assisted living facility near his son and grandson. ⁷⁴

Braynon, who traces half of his ancestry to the Bahamas, was born in Miami’s Railroad Shop Colored Addition neighborhood, a once wooded area between Northwest Twelfth Avenue and Seventeenth Avenue, from forty-sixth to fiftieth Streets. Braynon’s father eventually opened a grocery store in Overtown. His family relocated to Liberty City. These were the days when, generally speaking, blacks were “rigidly segregated,” according to Braynon. ⁷⁵

After studying first at Fisk and then at Howard University and serving two years in the army, he returned to Miami in 1956. He married and purchased a home in Liberty City. There, he maintained his practice, although he eventually relocated his home in 1971 to North Miami Beach’s Highland Oaks community. At the time, this neighborhood was “predominantly white.” He recalls feeling “very comfortable” there.

Braynon’s relocation to North Miami was an exception in this study. Most blacks moving to north Dade County settled farther west like my family in 1972. This was also true of Winfred McKendrick who arrived in Florida at the age of seventeen after the Second World War. ⁷⁶ He had been earning just $9 a week in Albany, Georgia. His wife had come ahead and lived briefly with her aunt on Service Road near Opa-Locka.

McKendrick and his wife eventually put three children through college, partly from the “good money” McKendrick eventually made parking airplanes at remote sites for Eastern Airlines after they started hiring African Americans.

[President Lyndon] Johnson opened the things up, trying to [help] the poor people. Pan Am and Eastern [offered] good, good employment. The system didn’t want to see blacks succeeding to the point of feeling good about themselves [and] being economically sound, [but] when the Civil Rights thing came, Eastern and Pan Am said if you can pass the test, you get the job. And that’s all we wanted back in the day. ⁷⁷

McKendrick and his wife purchased their house in Carol City for $14,000 in 1964. “When we moved in all this was a white area and I used to have to kind of watch my back . . . because there wasn’t but about three blacks in the whole neighborhood,” said McKendrick. ⁷⁸

His experiences show the degree to which public policies framed and enabled black self-determination via migration received boost from public policy changes designed to improve the conditions at home and work. Clyde Pettaway’s life bears witness to this fact, too. A native Tarboro, North Carolina, Pettaway was recruited to teach at then Florida Memorial College in North Dade. ⁷⁹ At the time, he was getting a master’s degree through the National Teacher Corps, a federal initiative begun in 1965 to provide low-income urban children with qualified instructors. ⁸⁰ “There was just a high demand for blacks with some degree of education and I happened to fit that mold,” says Pettaway who purchased a home in Carol City. “I was just getting my masters through the National Teacher Corp.” ⁸¹ At this time, he said that Miami’s blacks “really thought [they] could own a home. We wanted something we could call ours. Most blacks came out here moved into the home and many of them have been here 30 or 40 years in the same home.” ⁸²

Pettaway’s arrival in South Florida in 1970 was connected to liberal employment initiatives and gains associated with Civil Rights initiatives. His case was not unique. Rhonda Culver of Memphis says that her family came to South Florida in 1968 after her father was offered a federal drug enforcement agent position. ⁸³ After a short stay in a hotel near Miami International Airport, her family eventually moved to Carol City, a block away from our home. Via federal laws, our families were disrupting once homogeneous communities. Culver said,

One of my best, dearest friends just told me yesterday that her family moved to that area from Liberty City in 1967 . . . and she said the neighborhood was . . . pretty much all white. I said, “You’re kidding!” She said, “Yeah, talk about white flight.”I said, “When I got there in ’68, there were no white people around, none.” I said, “It happened that quickly?” And she said it happened that fast.

Roslyn Shelby Williams, another neighbor, recalls of her arrival to Carol City in the 1960s from Paducah, Kentucky. ⁸⁴ This area, which now draws traffic because of a nearby sports stadium, “was quiet” back then. “[We lived] across from a big field we would cross to get to the corner store,” Williams said. ⁸⁵

As had been true in Aunt Marge’s day when the “Nassaus” clashed with black southerners, there was intraracial conflict. Culver, who was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, said that the students in her fourth-grade class at North County Elementary teased her. “That was kind of rough because I was the new girl and I talked funny.”

Many people nowadays appear to “talk funny” in our beloved Carol City, also affectionately called the Bahas (which has no meaning that I can recall but may be a twist on our location in the boondocks). But they appear to talk funny for different reasons, most related to the settlement of Hispanic immigrants alongside of fourth wave of black residents, who are new arrivals to South Florida or longtime residents who have moved at least once and even several times. Some such homeowners have watched their neighborhoods change after Hurricane Andrew and the 2008 economic recession. Both events contributed to (1) many people, among them working-class newcomers of varying national and racial backgrounds, relocating throughout and outside South Florida and (2) a rise in the number of rental property. Such phenomena were witnessed firsthand by my sister Tisha Pierre, who purchased a home in Carol City/Miami Gardens late last century. ⁸⁶ My sister said her neighborhood consisted mostly of middle-class African American residents until the 2008 recession. During this recession, many homeowners became private landlords to low-income residents receiving private subsidies via the Section 8 federal designation that dates back to the New Deal era. Many of the new residents are either former African American residents of inner-city public housing demolished early this century or Caribbean and/or Hispanic descent immigrants or their descendants. ⁸⁷

Crime reports happened alongside of such racial residential change. ⁸⁸ “There was a shootout one night,” said Hines about her Miami Gardens neighborhood. ⁸⁹

[W]e don’t get the quality of the neighbors we used to have. I was sitting up in the living room watching television, and I hear, “Pow-pow-pow-pow-pow.” It was close to the Fourth of July, so I thought it was fire crackers, [but] I looked out and there were police all up and down the street. ⁹⁰

“There are African Americans, but also Jamaicans, Bahamians, and Trinidadians [in the area],” said my sister, who rented out her home and relocated south to Cutler Bay to live closer to her husband’s job and stepson’s school. ⁹¹ The racial makeup of her old neighborhoods is quite different from Cutler Bay which is “mostly Hispanic [and they tend] to be more like Mexican descent, because [they are employed in the] farming industry around here, whereas if you start going a little bit more north, it’s like Cuban, maybe Dominican.” ⁹²

My sister is homing in on how no matter where in South Florida people of African descent live these days, even ones who leave the county altogether, they increasingly live in multicultural communities, a fact borne out by Census data. In 1960, about 78 percent of African Americans residing in then Dade County lived in segregated communities. Thirty years later, just 44 percent of them lived in such environments. ⁹³ Meanwhile, the county’s population increased 10 percent from a little more than two million in 2000 to almost 2.5 million at the end of the decade owing largely to Spanish-speaking arrivals, who, by 2010, made up 65 percent of Miami-Dade County’s population. While Hispanics moved into communities in which residents of African descent did not generally live, they also moved into historically black communities with declining black populations. The most telling statistic is as follows: fewer Hispanics moved to Carol City—the neighborhood to which my parents moved us in 1972 than to any other historically black community in Miami-Dade—but there were fifty thousand more of them there in 2010 than in 2000. ⁹⁴

These newer Spanish-speaking immigrants come from places as varied as Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, among other places in Central and South America. They seem different for reasons still unclear from earlier newcomers from the Caribbean Basin, especially middle-class and elite Cubans who arrived after Fidel Castro’s revolution. ⁹⁵ These Cubans generally settled in neighborhoods such as Miami’s Little Havana community and Hialeah, avoiding black neighborhoods. More recent Spanish-speaking migrants move into starter homes in black neighborhoods, including those from which whites fled a generation earlier. ⁹⁶

The region’s multiculturalism is seen in and outside of Miami-Dade and not only because of Spanish-speaking residents. The experiences of Haitian-born novelist and Miami resident Edwidge Danticat, another fourth-wave resident, suggest as much. She moved to South Florida in 2002 from Brooklyn. Danticat and her husband briefly lived in a present-day multicultural community near Ives Dairy Road in North Miami Beach. Because they did not like the cookie-cutter architecture in their subdivision, Danticat and her husband relocated south. She now lives in the Buena Vista/Little Haiti community of Miami. ⁹⁷ That neighborhood, like much of the city, is now gentrifying. “There are eight families on my block. Five of them are Haitian families. One is a young white couple. There is a young Hispanic couple,” Danticat said. Similarly, my cousin Theo in Allapattah said that she has “Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Guatemalans, Haitians, and [black] Americans—almost six or seven different nationalities on this one strip.” ⁹⁸

This multicultural aspect of black residential life is seen not only in Miami-Dade County but also farther north in adjacent Broward County. Pamela Bryant began her life in Liberty City, specifically at “1721 NW 75 Street. My mom made me learn that.” ⁹⁹ Her family moved to Carol City in 1976, and there, she lived until she got married in 1988. After moving twice within the north end of the county, Bryant now lives in Lauderhill, a Broward County city six and half miles northwest of Ft. Lauderdale. It is also known as “Jamaica Hill “because that’s all that’s here,” Bryant chuckled. ¹⁰⁰

Although she and other interviewees never said as much, the nationality of their neighbors is sometimes hidden by their being physically undistinguishable from African Americans. A new neighbor has to open his or her mouth for black residents to realize that his or her neighbor is Hispanic. The ramifications of this ethnic and racial identity quandary are profound given the earliest Hispanic immigrants to avoid “black” neighborhoods. ¹⁰¹ Such settlement occurred amid nuanced understanding of “blackness” that existed alongside the American black–white binary. ¹⁰²

My mother has mentioned the growing number of Spanish-speaking neighbors. Hispanics are settling near her in the Carol City/Miami Gardens neighborhood. Such residents now lived in Liberty City, Overtown, Coconut Grove, South Miami and other historically black South Florida neighborhoods. As they do, they have been compelled to find a “common humanity” as city dwellers have done since arriving non-British immigrants changed the makeup of antebellum American cities like Cincinnati, New Orleans, and New York. ¹⁰³

These complicated residential encounters have long been in view. Certainly, such encounters had an impact on my educational experiences and childhood friendships. In 2015, I reunited with many old neighbors and friends at my thirtieth high school reunion. Weeks before the reunion gathering, one of them, of Dominican descent, contacted me. “Hey Mama!” began her email. Her greeting was familiar to me even though I left South Florida for a new job in 1992. I had even heard variations on this practice among them “Hey Mamacita” since my childhood. Intellectual and cultural historian Thomas Bender has gestured toward how physical proximity enables such greetings and the beginning of community dating back to the antebellum period. ¹⁰⁴

How much such understanding will continue in the coming years as the United States experiences more population shifts is hard to know. In Miami, a third of people of African descent today are foreign born, and half of those are from the Caribbean. ¹⁰⁵ Multicultural communities will likely increase here and increase elsewhere as immigrants are more dispersed throughout the country than they were in 1970. ¹⁰⁶ A Pew Research Center study projected that Asians will be the largest immigrant group at 36 percent, with Hispanics trailing at 34 percent by 2065. ¹⁰⁶ Meanwhile, the black share of the U.S. population is expected to hold steady at 11 percent since 1965 unlike the white share of the population which has fallen to 62 percent. These numbers point to this country soon having no racial or ethnic majority. How this shift translates into lived experience residentially in and outside of South Florida remains to be seen. Will our definitions of the ghetto change? Will migratory patterns be less easy to see as people self-identify less by race? What this bodes for the financial power of African Americans will be determined by many factors but most especially the ownership of real estate property and a long history of black self-determination. Perhaps it will be the kind of black self-determination seen in the Blands, the couple from South Carolina who arrived in the third wave of migrants after the Second World War. They retired in 1989 and relocated to the sea in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, three and a half hours north of Miami. According to Hester Bland, purchasing property in this part of Florida was the best way for them to get beachfront property. ¹⁰⁷ Despite the determination of others who manifest in distinct waves, the Blands are the exception, especially as greater Miami gentrifies.

“Businesses and whites with businesses are taking . . . land,” said Pettaway, now a retired educator and administrator for the James E. Scott Association, which managed public housing tracts that were demolished early this century, “[and] blacks are . . . still asking the same question they asked when they were set free from slavery: ‘Where am I to go?’”