MIAMI: I-95 DISPLACEMENTS
The destruction of Overtown in the 1960s due to I-95 and “urban renewal” led to a mass displacement of tens of thousands of Black Miamians from the central city to the surrounding suburbs, with some notable examples highlighted in this animation. As NDB Connolly discusses in “A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida”:
“The destruction of Overtown serves as an especially compelling parable on racial injustice. It is akin to “Watts” or, more recently, “Katrina.” It provides a metonym for neighborhoods lost and white supremacy in action. When Interstate 95 opened its southernmost leg in 1968, the highway had caused the direct expulsion of 8,500 households from Miami’s Central Negro District [aka Overtown], and encouraged the flight of thousands more. “You couldn’t fight it,” recalled Maude Newbold, a former Overtown resident, in a 1997 interview. The highway “destroyed the cultural, the spiritual, the educational concept of the entire community. We lost our neighbors. We lost our friends. We lost our relatives. It was like death...it destroyed us.”
However, while most in Overtown were of course against the destruction of the neighborhood, Connolly notes that it would be a mistake to say that community opposition was absolute. Despite its economic and commercial success, due to redlining and various Jim Crow housing policies (which, among other practices, specifically limited the ability of black property owners to perform even basic maintenance on their buildings), the neighborhood’s housing conditions had deteriorated considerably over the years compared to the surrounding white neighborhoods. These same policies also produced overcrowding, as official segregation meant Overtown was virtually the only option available for non-white residents (with profiteering landlords regularly dividing and subdividing existing units). The physical deterioration of the neighborhood, caused by Jim Crow policy, led the neighborhood itself to become a symbol of Jim Crow for some.
Connolly continues, “What’s largely forgotten are the deplorable housing conditions [of Overtown], or more pointedly, the conditions that made slum clearance, urban renewal, and land expropriation of one kind or another seem, for many, like acts of civil rights reform during the years of these programs’ actual implementation. For most residents of the Negro ghettos during the actual 1950s and 60s, slum clearance and urban renewal programs promised to help the collective social predicament...Bearing witness to postwar prosperity that seemed so readily available to white Americans [in the suburbs], many African Americans around the country believed condemnations of run-down Jim Crow housing would, at minimum, launch otherwise contained black folk into the suburbs—the same suburbs now largely considered ghettos.”
Connolly’s last point—that many of the suburbs black people moved to after the destruction of Overtown are now themselves considered ghettos—evinces the ultimate failure of the promise of the urban renewal program in Miami. On paper, renewal had offered—whether in good faith or not—that in exchange for Overtown, black residents could find a better life in the suburbs or in new public housing projects. In reality, far fewer units of public housing were built than units destroyed (from Connolly: “across the country roughly 400,000 residential units were demolished under urban renewal by 1 July 1967...fewer than 11,000 low-rent public housing units were built on those sites”), and white flight from the suburbs to which black people moved (to suburbs farther north in Broward and Palm Beach counties) led to municipal disinvestment and deterioration in the now black suburbs much the same way it had in the center city.
For this reason, Connolly “posits that narratives about Overtown’s demise have little at all to do with the Central Negro District. They are about Brownsville, which in 2011 was called by one local paper “Miami’s Most Blighted Neighborhood." Jeremiads about Overtown are actually about unfailing poverty in Liberty City and Richmond Heights, or how the “war on drugs” decimated Bunche Park and Opa-Locka. They are not about the collapse of the city, but about the failure of the suburbs...Miami’s black suburbs, without exception, experienced a rapid decline in the 1970s, as Miami-Dade suffered the continuance of white flight,” and as the city continued to refuse to properly invest in these communities (with many lacking sidewalks and sewer connections well into the 90s).