Tracing Black Racial and Spatial Politics in South Florida via Memory

Abstract

As far back as the New Deal era, South Florida’s white power brokers wanted African Americans to live in the northwest section of then Dade County and away from the region’s lucrative seaside. Even today, however, people of color, many of Bahamian descent, remain in Miami’s bayside Coconut Grove community, but they do so amid gentrification and wealthy South American neighbors. Such ongoing settlement and the eventual migration of people of African descent to the northwest section of the county by the late 1960s fit into a larger narrative of black self-determination in Florida. This article explores such settlement and migratory patterns and how they fit into a larger black resistance tradition dating back to the nineteenth century.