Black voters at its founding, Overtown's stages, Virginia Key Beach and Little Haiti.
There At The Start
Black workers helped build Miami from its first day. Most of the railroad construction crews who settled near what became downtown were Black Americans, and Black men voted in the 1896 election that incorporated the city, with historians' counts putting them at somewhere between a fifth and nearly half of the voters.
The Bahamas were part of the story too. In 1923 Henry E. Sigismund Reeves, an immigrant from the Bahamas, established the Miami Times, an African American newspaper based in South Florida.
Overtown
After incorporation, Miami set aside a Colored Town for its Black residents. Under the name Overtown it grew into the commercial center of Black life in Miami and South Florida, once called the Little Broadway of the South. The Lyric Theater, completed around 1913, was the focal point of its social life, and when Black stars like Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald played the city but were not allowed to stay where they performed, Overtown's hotels put them up.
In the 1960s interstate highways, I-95 among them, fragmented the neighborhood, and its population fell by nearly 80 percent.
Virginia Key Beach
In May 1945 civil rights activists staged a wade-in at Baker's Haulover, a whites-only beach. The county answered by opening Virginia Key Beach on August 1, 1945, as a park for Black residents only. After Miami-Dade's beaches were desegregated in the early 1960s the park declined and later closed, but a trust brought it back, and it reopened on February 22, 2008.
Black Miami Today
Black Miami is American, Bahamian, Haitian and more. In the 1980s Haitian families made a home in the neighborhood once called Lemon City, now Little Haiti, with its French and Creole street names, restaurants, galleries, music and the Little Haiti Cultural Complex. From Overtown to Little Haiti, Black-owned restaurants, salons, galleries and brands are part of everyday Miami.
Shop Black-owned businesses in Miami on CashBlack.
Photo Credits
The Historic Lyric Theater in Overtown. Photo: Pietro, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons The bathhouse at Virginia Key Beach Park. Photo: Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons