Crossing Overtown

- [Voiceover] This is a story about a town that continues to stand its ground even as trucks filled with sand lay down highways, glass, and concrete walls that swallow up its streets.

The worn hands of a people long ago that tugged and pulled at the hard rutted mangrove roots of this once inhospitable land.

For it would be the tracks they laid bare by which they'd be bound.

An invisible color line that would no sooner close them in before the first train came 'round.

Yet it would be here in the same small village that a spirit of defiance would lead a movement towards justice, a sacred space that would come to me known as Overtown.

(upbeat music) - [Interviewer] Doctor, to what degree is Miami segregated?

- Miami is basically a segregated city.

Negroes are living in all negro communities throughout the county.

- The civilians are a way that the left wingers, I feel, and the communists are things they're using to force integration.

And segregation is an altogether right and biblically true.

- As a patriotic American, whether they will stand as a white man of America or whether they will just follow their hand and do nothing.

- Which incumbent upon every leader to emulate the man who has become a martyr.

- I would like to leave Miami with the knowledge that the whole community, who see this as its number one problem, and assign it top priority on things to do in the near future.

- The people of the community have to stir the conscience.

They have to push and use all of the non-violent techniques.

- They're sure the Black kids don't have the guns.

The cops got all the guns, you can kill them and it's more Black lives on the line.

But what you gotta deal with till you turn to build Miami up and no tourists are gonna sit here.

- Understand, we don't mind dying for our rights.

If you mean asking justice, leave us alone.

(pensive music) - [Voiceover] Almost a half a million cars and trucks pass over this quiet patch of downtown Miami every day.

Oblivious to the historic significance of the village that lies below.

For Delrish Moss, going Overtown now means an opportunity to come back home.

- Well, when I was a kid, there was a movie theater.

This was a field and there was a movie theater just right here where we used to go, I think the price was about $2 for a couple of movies, and that was a big Saturday thing for us.

Bunch of us get together, we'd got $2 'cause we'd be loading boxes and that's how we'd get money for the week.

Yeah, it was just a good time.

There wasn't a lot of entertainment, you know, sandlot football, those kind of things, but the movie theater was a huge bundle of joy for us.

- [Voiceover] Delrish Moss knows these streets.

- Well, catch up with him.

- [Voiceover] It's history as well.

- Well man, good to see you.

- [Voiceover] He would carry the weight of that history to Ferguson, Missouri, becoming the first African American chief of police for a town in need of healing.

And it would mean crossing Overtown to get there.

- Much like Miami in the 1980s, Ferguson was kind of the same thing.

It was a community that had a backstory.

Not the national image, not the things that were being reported about that, but actually real people moving on the ground, living there, trying to make a living, trying to educate the kids, trying to do all the things that we are trying to do.

And they were really in need of resources and healing.

- We're not anti-police, so don't try to get that off.

I got blood members in my family that are police.

We're not talking about them.

- [Delrish] It became kind of the rallying cry for police reform, but also the catalyst for Black Lives Matter movement getting a name.

Although it existed before, it took flight on the heels of Ferguson.

- [Voiceover] Miami is not immune to the racial conflict that has infected the blood of our nation.

The 1980s would represent one of the darkest periods in Miami's history with protests, boycotts, and a tourism economy in shambles.

Hobbled by the demons implanted a century earlier by the social mores of a defeated south.

- Poor in money, rich in history.

Miami's calmer Overtown is one such place.

Echoes of old Miami, old woes and new.

- [Voiceover] Today, Miami has become a mix of vibrantly diverse communities, business centers, and the foremost tourist destination in America.

- Miami, for being a young city, has really been central to some of the major social and cultural issues in America, going back to say the early 1900s, whether it be a resurging Ku Klux Klan, whether it be police violence against Blacks, which continued up until relatively recent times in many ways, desegregation, I think a pretty vibrant civil rights movement, which it really hasn't gotten credit for.

- Why is Overtown important in the history of Miami?

Because without Overtown, that would not have been a Miami.

There wouldn't have been.

There wouldn't have been anybody to build it.

There would not have been anyone to clear the land.

There would not have been people to actually physically put this community on the map had it not been for Black people in Colored Town.

- [Voiceover] The city that would become Miami was born at the time of America's reconstruction.

The nation was witnessing a remarkable phenomenon as Black men received a brief reprieve of authentic representation.

- Once slavery comes to an end here in Florida, May 20th, 1865, with the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in Tallahassee.

Of course, it is a a time of jubilation and expectation, but there are real practical matters of how to remedy the legal code of this nation, which had stripped or really never included Black folks in the construction legally here.

The piece of legislation that was probably the most problematic for whites in Florida was the 15th Amendment, which empowered African-American men to be able to vote, which also meant that they could run for office.

And this is really a pivotal moment in southern history.

- This represents me being a citizen again, being able to have a voice here.

- [Voiceover] As a felon convicted of drug charges, Meade has been waiting for this moment for a long time.

- You know, the very same people who were treating the people who were slaves as less than animals, you know, they were beating them, they were abusing them, they were separating families.

And to one day wake up, have a slave gonna wake up and hear that those individuals have just as much right as he does, right, was a traumatic experience.

But even more traumatic than that, was actually seeing the recently freed slaves exercise those rights and they exercised those rights by voting, by being more civically engaged.

And you seen during reconstruction era, a flood of former slaves being elected in the office.

- Blacks have never been freer than they were between 1863 and 1878.

In South Carolina, the first state to succeed from the nation, from the Union, there were 120 legislators, 74 Black, and then, you know, senator in Mississippi, two congressmen in Florida, et cetera.

But Blacks owned all the property back those days.

They built schools, and they built hospitals, they built businesses, they built and they owned it.

- Southern legislatures took every step that they could possibly take to prevent Blacks from voting, from becoming politically powerful.

For example, the Grandfather Clause that was passed in several southern states, meaning you cannot vote unless your grandfather voted.

Well, if your grandfather was a slave, you didn't get to vote.

The poll tax, Blacks had to pay a poll.

Everybody paid a poll tax, but the poll tax was a more heavy burden on Blacks who were basically sharecroppers.

Literacy tests where they would ask the Black person how many angels can fit on the head of a pin or how many marbles are in this jar?

And they will simply deny you the right to vote because you couldn't answer these asinine questions.

There were political motives that the North had to maintain power, but also that the south had to prevent Blacks from voting.

And it worked.

In terms of suppressing the Black vote in Florida, it worked until the 1950s.

- Reconstruction, and it is essentially over in 1877 through a compromise following an election, presidential election at that time.

And the south is, I think, smart enough and wily enough to say, "We can't just jump on these people right away because it might bring back the troops.

Who knows what that'll lead to.

Let's wait about 10 years."

And by the late '80s, boy, it's open season on African Americans in the South.

- Chief Moss returned home after three years in Ferguson, now working with students at Florida International University.

A sharp contrast to the realities of growing up on the streets of Overtown.

- I think Ferguson was probably really the biggest challenge.

Now I had a good team to help with that, but at the end of the day, policing in general is about building relationships.

And going to Ferguson, while it was a big challenge for me, the fact that I didn't know anybody when I got there actually was a plus rather than a minus.

I had two negative experiences with Miami police officers and it was out of those experiences that made me decide I wanted to become a police officer because I figured, hey, if that's the best service we got, maybe I need to go do the job and provide better service.

And so that's kind of how I did.

So community was always important.

- [Interviewer] Oh, okay.

- Especially when I became... Hello.

When I became, you know, a police officer, they put me in the neighborhood I lived in.

So I knew everybody.

So it was easy.

Hi.

I think that when we start to look at issues that make things criminal, the lack of resources, poverty, and all those other things, the debate is around policing.

But the truth is that the ailment is a lot larger and policing or the problems with policing are just a symptom of some larger problems with regard to community resource, community education.

I think that when you mire people in poverty, you mire people in poor education, you mire people with lack of resources, people do what they need to do to survive.

People do all manner of things.

And I think you create these situations.

- [Voiceover] Florida offered a temporary sanctuary from the oppressive Black codes of a tumultuous 19th century, yielding new opportunities for former slaves and even Bahamian immigrants seeking their rightful place in the promise of a new America.

- Florida was a basically an unsettled wilderness, particularly South Florida, until the railroad came in in the late 1890s.

And in 1894, 1895, that winter, this great freeze takes place and wipes out the agricultural industry in Florida as far as south as Lake Okeechobee.

Palm trees froze in Palm Beach it got so cold.

Fish froze in the Florida Bay it was so cold.

But South Florida was spared.

And the legend goes that Julia Tuttle, a white woman who owned the property on the Miami River, convinced Flagler to bring his railroad to Miami.

She sent him an orange blossom to convince him that it hadn't frozen in South Florida.

And so Flagler brings the railroad here.

Didn't quite happen that way, but Flagler did see that South Florida was spared this freeze.

And therefore, hotels could be built, the railroad could make a lot of money bringing tourists and then taking produce out.

- Building this town was not easy.

Having to build the go into the coral rock.

They had to use dynamite.

There were many limbs that were lost.

There were lives that were lost because it was the Black laborers who planted the dynamite.

- African Americans really built the foundations of early Miami.

I mean, they dug the trenches for the pipes and they built a lot of the buildings, which were wood frame.

They leveled the ground to build the Royal Palm Motel, including taken down an ancient Indian burial mound.

They did literally the heavy lifting for Miami, there's no doubt about it.

Flagler had hired all along the way, I guess a combination of free Black laborers, like the Black Bahamians, but also convict lease laborers.

- When the Civil War ended, the South was concerned about having lost slave labor.

How do you get people working on these farms for practically nothing?

And one solution was convict leasing where the sheriff of the county would arrest people, mostly Blacks, on minor charges like vagrancy, put them in jail, and then lease them to private business people, farmers.

- These people that you've now arrested can become labor, working in tobacco fields, working in orange groves, working in celery fields, working in turpentine camps, working to pave the roads that are going to facilitate the tourist industry that is going to put Florida on the map.

And so there is a very dangerous intentionality as folks really get really creative in trying to construct a legal code that will achieve the same aim.

- Certainly Flagler tapped into that.

He had hundreds of workers extending that railroad from West Palm Beach through the Piney Woods of Fort Lauderdale, all the way down to the Miami River.

And, you know, took a large workforce and these tended to be pretty heavily Black laborers.

There were white laborers also, but Black laborers in particular.

- 1896 is a very important year in America legally because 1896 is the same year that Plessy versus Ferguson was handed down by the United States Supreme Court saying that we could have separate but equal.

They really meant separate but unequal.

And so in 1896, when Miami began the process of incorporation as a city, either they began to count heads and there weren't enough.

- The railroad ordered its Black men who worked for it to come to this incorporation meeting and vote for incorporation.

- In order to incorporate as a city under Florida code, you had to have at least 300 registered voters.

And Flagler understood that, his advisors understood that.

And they registered probably on the north side of 160 workers, Black Bahamian workers.

Bahamians had a huge role in early Miami history.

And this is a great example of it.

- As far back as the incorporation, there were whites who did not want the Flagler system to be in charge.

They had enough whites, but the whites who would have made the majority did not want the Flagler system.

So they just didn't vote.

At that meeting, the Black men and the white men all gathered in the same room.

The clerk of the court at the time must have said, "Everybody whose last name starts with A come to the table," because all of the A's went and gave their names.

And next to their name is not an X, but their race.

- The sad thing about that is you might think that this was some sort of act of empowerment, having Black men incorporate the city of Miami, helped to incorporate the city of Miami, it had nothing to do with Black empowerment.

It had to do with using Black men, Black voters, for the benefit of the railroad to get a city here.

And once the Black vote was used for that purpose, it was dismissed.

(train horn blares) - So, you know, Miami from the outset wanted to be, when it's on the road to become an incorporated entity, which was a huge jump from where it had been in 1895, you had Black and white workers building Miami and there wasn't any built environment to live in in the spring of 1896.

And so they lived in tents side-by-side to the best of our knowledge.

As the population grew, as the city incorporated, now you wanna solidify segregation.

See, segregation begins to set in Jim Crow in a big way, probably the late 1880s.

And boy, it just really catches fire in the 1890s and thereafter.

One of the early things was that African Americans would live in a subscribed part of town.

It would be on the other side of the railroad tracks, west of the railroad tracks.

- If you lived in Miami in the new city, once it was incorporated, if you were a Black person, you had to live in Colored Town.

And that was the northwest quadrant of the town.

In fact, the Flagler system, as it came down the the state, the east coast of the state, established Black communities in the northwest quadrants of these new towns.

Therefore, if you go to Palm Beach now, West Palm Beach, not Palm West Palm Beach, the Black community is in the northwest quadrant.

Fort Lauderdale, Blacks live in the northwest quadrant.

Same thing in Miami.

That's where you had to live.

You had to be there after dark.

You couldn't leave Colored Town without a pass signed by a white person or by the police.

You couldn't own land outside of Colored Town.

So the railroad had a fixed interest in having Blacks physically separated from the white community.

So these segregated Black communities, like in Palm Beach, West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami were set up that way to keep Black people close enough to downtown to walk to work, but far enough away so that tourists wouldn't see them.

It was as restrictive as the apartheid rules in South Africa were later on.

- Camp Miami, which was a Spanish American war training camp for 7,000 plus people in a town, maybe a little more than 1,000 people in 1898, in the summer of '89.

Summers aren't fun here to begin with.

You can imagine the tensions.

The camp, almost abuts the railroad tracks.

And just on the west side would be Colored Town.

There were a couple homicides involving white enlistees.

Again, these folks came from Texas, Alabama, and Louisiana.

And they raised cane in the Black community and nobody was ever hauled in for it.

See that's the thing, there was a lack of accountability for crimes perpetrated by white people in groups against Black people.

- [Voiceover] An unrestrained police department working out of city hall would mete out justice under the customs of southern law, aided and abetted by a white populace accustomed to the abusive practice of lynching throughout the south.

- When we look at the landscape of lynching violence in the United States, we typically think about places like Mississippi, Alabama, as just being these really terrible and terribly racist and violent places to live.

In that assumption is the belief that Florida is somehow exceptional in this case.

But the reality is, when we break down lynching violence as Black people living in any of these states, what is the likelihood that you would be lynched?

Florida comes out on top.

- My Aunt Roberta, for instance, who was born in 1904, when I asked her about early atrocities that happened and she said she remembers the lynchings where the courthouse now stands, that they would come and they would tell them, go around to the homes and tell the people to bring the children.

- It was like a picnic.

You know, people bring their food, their music, and stuff and they'd be taking pictures as like, you know, like this was grotesque.

- There were people in the north and the federal government who would ask Southerners, you know, "Why do you persist in something that is clearly illegal?

It's illegal practice, it's contrary to law.

Why do you allow it to go on?"

The defense that you would hear most often is that we have to protect white women.

(old timey music) - [Voiceover] Folks say that business and pleasure don't mix, but in Miami, that's not necessarily so.

- It was widely believed that if you didn't, you know, threaten to kill or actually kill Black people, Black men, that they would wantingly rape white women throughout the south.

And that's something that was just a part of this, you know, psychology in the white southern mind.

Completely fabricated.

I think it was Ida B.

Wells who most famously, in her investigative journalism, discovered that in the cases that she was researching, that in less than 25% of the cases was there an accusation of rape or attempted rape.

- We had sort of like an early version of what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis way back in the mid 1920s in Miami when a man named Harry Kier who was working in a hotel in downtown Miami, allegedly got fresh with a white woman there and was not only hauled in as a prisoner, but he was killed as a result of this.

- Harry Kier was a bell hop at the El Commodore Hotel in downtown Miami.

The police was called because a white woman in the hotel complained that Kier had approached her daughter to tell her that a man wanted to have a date with her, presumably a white man.

She calls the police, the police come, and the hotel manager tells the police officer, "Don't kill him here."

And they take Harry Kier to the police department.

Police chief Leslie Quigg tells him to take him to 20th Street and do what you normally do, which is beat the person up and send him on his way.

And as it turned out, they killed the boy.

And eventually this came out, one of the officers confessed that they'd done this.

And the chief of police, Leslie Quigg, in Miami in 1928 I think the year was, was tried for first degree murder of a Black man.

Of course the trial was a parody of justice, it was a joke, he got acquitted.

But the point is, policing had disintegrated so bad in Miami that even the all white grand jury, Dade County grand jury, was calling out the police department for the abuses that were being laid upon Black people.

- And again, it usually centered around, you know, a Black male and a white woman.

And oftentimes, it was just based really on the testimony of the white woman.

I mean there weren't eyewitnesses and the Black male usually denied the charges that he was becoming aggressive toward her, whether it was verbally, physically, or both.

- We found out in the grand jury report that was issued in that year, the Miami Police Department had a homemade electric chair in the basement of the police department.

And if you were questioned, they would put you in that chair, connect electrodes to your body, sometimes to the genitals areas, and question you.

Now mind you, most of the people who were being arrested, 90% of the people being arrested were, Black people.

And they did this even to Black women .

And would ask you a question and if you didn't answer the right way, they'd shock you.

The grand jury found this out in 1928 and issued a scathing report about policing in Miami in the 1920s because of so many abuses that had happened.

- [Voiceover] The impoverished living conditions of Colored Town deteriorated quickly after the hurricane of 1926 leading some church leaders such as John Kolmer to advocate for substantive changes in the overall health of the community, conditions that still persist even as displacement continues to threaten the future of Overtown.

- So this is one of the original houses of Overtown and the fact that it's still standing is a testament to kind of resilience, but, you know, Overtown was vastly different than the rest of the community.

It was poor, there was no indoor plumbing.

You know, that kind of came thanks to to Clyde Killens and others.

But so much has happened.

You've seen vacant lots where there were apartment buildings, there were houses.

There's just been tremendous change.

The fact that people lived here and other people came in and collected rent was kind of a death knell for people even being able to stay because one of the things that was gonna happen is they were gonna sell it off and they were gonna displace people who lived here.

And that has been, you know, just kind of proof positive that the people who lived here were resilient.

And it's 'cause Overtown is more than just a location, it's kind of a place in the heart.

It still resides within us.

(triumphant music) - Ku Klux Klan was found in Tennessee in the late 1860s, of all places, Pulaski, Tennessee, which is such an ethnic name, it's Poland.

And yet you've got this white nationalist terrorist group founded there.

The Klan lost a lot of its maybe reason for being and it really went into a decline by the, certainly by the early 1900s, and then it was resuscitated up in Stone Mountain, George, about 1915, D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation in 1915 put this real positive glow on the Ku Klux Klan.

And that as well as the fact that America was increasingly becoming a nation of immigrants, and this led to the regeneration of the Ku Klux Klan, which marched into Miami in 1921, fully robed from head to toe, announcing their arrival in Miami.

- The Ku Klux Klan would ride through Overtown on horseback in full regalia.

My people saw it.

The community was terrorized.

And Uncle Sammy, who was born in 1900, he said that they were in the house, all the lights were out, the Ku Klux Klan riding on horseback.

The dog barked hearing the hoofs, I guess.

The clan rode up on the porch of the house and shot in the house through the window and killed the dog.

My uncle was right next to the dog.

This was the only dog he ever had.

And it was just by a miracle that he was not shot or killed.

And after that, he never wanted, he never had an animal.

'Cause I asked him one day, "Why don't you ever have a dog?"

He said, "Oh no."

And that's when he told me the story.

Evidently the washer women who worked for the Klansmen would let the word be known, they're riding tonight, and they would pass the word through the community.

And so that meant that everybody should shut down, have dinner early, everything shut down.

- Ku Klux Klan was very pro-police.

And police, you know, doing their duties.

And that included putting constraints on that Black community, keeping them within the community, not letting them get away with crimes, and things of that nature.

That was very much the Klan.

They did show up at the funeral of a white policeman in the Woodlawn Park Cemetery and they showed up, you know, in full uniform.

That was 1925.

- What's interesting about this is this is a police officer who died in the line of duty and he was a member of both the Klan and the police department.

And so when you get to his actual funeral, when you look at the casket sitting here with the police officer laying in state, there's a Klansman on either side of his body.

Not only was it a part of society, but it was also kind of a leg up to being the police department, same horses, same dogs.

- Some people are still afraid and intimidated by the things that happened in the early days.

They were part of the structure.

They wore hoods at night and uniforms in the day.

It was a very, very difficult place to live.

- When Miami began hiring police officers, they brought them in from Georgia and from rural areas of other parts of Florida.

No training, gave them a badge, billy club, a gun, and sent them to Colored Town with very few restrictions on what they could do.

The police could do almost anything they wanted to you.

Back in the day, in the 1920s and so, '30s, a Black person in Overtown could be sitting on your front porch on a Monday morning and the police would ride up and say, "What are you doing here?

What's your perfect..." "But I live here."

"Where do you work?"

And they would arrest you on your own porch for vagrancy because you couldn't tell them or wouldn't tell them where you worked.

It was such an abusive system, but it made a lot of Black people very fearful of the police.

You see the police coming, run, hide.

They're coming to arrest you for no reason.

That kind of thinking, going back to those days when Blacks were being hunted by the police to serve illegal purposes, convict leasing, and other things made people very afraid of the police, very wary of the police.

And we still have that as an endemic part of our problem in the Black community today.

- The Negro Uplift Association as far back as 1919, right after the end of World War I, were asking for Black policemen.

And the rationale was that white policemen aren't very prudent the way they treat a lot of Black suspects.

You know, we need some Black patrolmen for our area.

And eventually in 1944, we get the first five Black patrolmen.

(big band music) - [Voiceover] 1944 would see the implementation of an all Black police force in order to provide Overtown with local patrolmen familiar with the area.

While not given full authority, these patrolmen would bring some semblance of peace to the community.

- When the first five came on in 1944, this was a call to see more representation, less lives being snuffed out.

Blacks were not seeing justice, they weren't seeing courtrooms, they were disappearing.

This was another way to see some form of justice.

- This is the only colored court in the history of America, anywhere in America, not Alabama, not Mississippi, not South Carolina, Miami, Florida.

- To see this building is to know that there is hope for justice for all.

We are fortunate to have three pioneers.

Chief Dickson, he became the first Black to go to the academy, the first to actually become our first Black police chief.

- He set up pictures.

Represent.

- You have Lieutenant Archie McKay.

He retired from the force when it was still an act of precinct.

- So your hat over here.

- Yeah, that hat caused quite a bit of a controversy.

My staff bought me that hat for Christmas.

- [Delrish] Oh, okay, okay.

- And then my whole life is in those badges there.

That's a piece of me each time.

That's something else and... - When they advertised that they were hiring negro patrolman and my buddy saw this and he said, he called me Squash.

He said, "Squash, let's go down and apply to the patrolman."

I said, "Man, I don't wanna be no patrolman, you know?"

But I didn't know what it all entailed.

- [Delrish] Right, right.

- I thought when we came in, they were going to train us.

The only thing they gave me was saying, "Go to the property bureau, pick up your gun and your badge."

I couldn't take the uniform home till they signed a lock of it.

Somebody's locker who's on that wall there.

I worked in this department, I think about 25 years.

My children never saw me in uniform.

- Wow.

- When the first five was hired, the Overtown community and the Liberty City community and the Coconut Grove community totaled 44,000 Black people.

When we talk about a lack of equipment, a lack of car, no cars, no training, being put on the street without the full authority of a police officer, that's why we had to call a white police officer to make an arrest on a white person.

- They weren't given cars right away, right?

They patrolled on bikes.

They had to stay within the railroad tracks, within the boundaries.

So they were not allowed to patrol downtown areas.

They had to stay in the colored areas.

So imagine riding a bike and having to put your suspect on a bike, but also think about the trust that these Black officers were able to, you know, support in their community by inviting, you know, the suspects to jump in the car with them or to get on the handlebars and ride them into this one precinct.

What trust is that saying?

- Because of the relationship with the Black officers and the Black community, we were able to move into the position of a police officer and police some 44,000 people who resided in Overtown, in Liberty City, without a big fight every time.

- This police department, this courthouse, there was a need for it.

Why was there a need?

- They were petitioning the cities for police officers.

And when they got police officers, they had no police filling the work out of.

And so they come up with the idea of building a precinct.

When the city decided that they were going to do this, it appeased the people who were begging for it, that is Black leaders who were talking to the city.

So when I got to put on a uniform, it gave me a sense of pride and I put it on a badge 'cause then I had some authority.

They gave me a gun.

And I'm an old man, I'm waiting now, right?

I'm ready to go ahead.

But I didn't ever lose the pride that I had for the progress that we were making.

I aspired to be a social worker, right?

And I treated it as doing social work.

- One of the biggest issues around the country they're talking about is the fact that police have lost the relationship with communities.

And that makes it difficult.

- [Chief Dickson] True.

- You're right.

The Black community and the police officers did not really want to integrate and go to the white station.

- Right.

- Because the Black community for once had felt a little relief from just being policed by a white police department.

- The tension between Black and white grow because A: the police, white police, are thugs in the Black community.

And B: the Black community is contained within a small area and yet its population is growing very quickly.

And white Miami didn't want to see that area of Colored Town expand.

And so you begin to see in some situations, Black residents moving beyond the circumscribed borders of Colored Town, as it was called.

And now they're adjacent to white settlements.

And by the outside of the 1920s, there's bombings on the part of white groups and white residents against homes that are there.

And that's what leads the creation of unofficial color line that, you know, you guys are contained in this area and we don't wanna see you outside of this area.

And the police would uphold that.

So the police were like the guardians of that white order.

(pensive music) - From the very beginning, there was an interest in the white community in limiting where Black people could live and setting a color line for restricting Black residential areas.

That was one in Coconut Grove, which was established of the wall actually in Coconut Grove to separate the Black grove from the white grove.

This was put in during the Second World War to separate this expanding Black Coconut Grove community.

In Liberty City, a wall was put in when the Liberty Square Housing project was built in the 1930s, this wall was built, still stands today.

You had a growing Black population in Dade County and in Miami.

Overtown became very crowded very quickly.

And there was a press to move out of Overtown with white landlords and white property owners promoting this to make money by renting properties to Blacks.

But the basic attitude among whites in Miami was restrict to where Blacks could live, set up a color line, legally set up a color line, that would make it impossible for Blacks or illegal for Blacks to move into certain areas.

(upbeat music) - Despite discrimination against African Americans in Miami and the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, Colored Town, in many ways, despite discrimination, thrived.

I don't mean it was an affluent community, but I mean it was a together community, it was a productive community.

And that meant that you had a main street, you had a lot of mom-and-pop businesses, you had organizations.

That downtown core in Colored Town was really active.

- I think it's safe to say that Overtown Colored Town next to Harlem back in the '20s and '30s was one of the most wonderful places to go to be for Black culture.

- The heyday of Overtown was Overtown's Harlem Renaissance.

This Miami was seen as a playground for Blacks.

Thurgood Marshall, even as late as the '50s, would come and stay at the Mary Elizabeth Hotel.

Langston Hughes, he was at Mount Zion Baptist Church.

You could see Nat King Cole walking across the street.

Billie Holiday was in Overtown as well as Brownsville at Georgette's Tea Room.

And that's really where I met Clyde Killens, who was the entertainment promoter of Overtown.

(jazzy music) - The problem was that Black entertainers and visitors, even famous athletes, could not stay in white hotels on Miami Beach, or in the city of Miami, so they had to stay in Colored Town.

One of the concerns of whites has always been knowing where Black people were and making sure that they were not someplace that they were not supposed to be, that is in a white area where they were not supposed to be.

So there were communities, including in Miami, Miami Beach, and others, where these restrictions were enforced by requiring Black seven ID card.

So even though you were Cab Calloway or Joe Lewis or Jackie Robinson, if you came to Miami to perform or to visit, you couldn't stay in the white community, you had to stay in Colored Town.

If you were a foreigner, you could stay in a hotel on Miami Beach if you were a dark-skinned person, even an African.

That's why they put that hotel at Miami International Airport, so that Black dignitaries flying through Miami would have a place during the segregation era where they could stay in a hotel in Miami, because they weren't allowed generally to stay in hotels outside of the airport.

There were some Black entertainers who refused to respect the segregation laws in Miami.

Lena Horne was one.

She refused to perform before a segregated audience.

Made national news doing that.

Marian Anderson was another, opera singer, Black opera singer, who refused to perform at the Dade County Auditorium unless the audience was integrated.

So we had some people who pushed back on this, particularly getting into the '40s and '50s.

This is not to detract from the heyday of Color Town when you had such energy and such power in that community.

And it drew so many people, not just Blacks, but whites as well, into that community that you just have to say, that was a wonderful time for Colored Town.

Even though the squalor, the poverty, and all of that was not that far away, it was a time when culture and music and good times thrived in Black Miami.

- The South no longer says never, but it says later.

And this is at least progress.

Now, there is, within the south, the border south, of the south of compliance, we have what we would think of as the south of resistance, the hardcore south, which would include states like Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and to a degree, the state of Georgia.

And then there is a middle South, which is not moving all out in compliance and yet is not resisting.

And I would think that Florida falls in this category along with Texas and Tennessee and probably North Carolina are leading this group.

- When the civil rights era dawned, Miami was in a particularly advantageous position because so many Black veterans in particular have settled here and so many white people who were northerners were settling in Miami in the late '40s and early '50s.

So Miami was more open to integration, well to desegregation, than say Jacksonville or Orlando or Tampa because of the makeup of the white community and because of the change in demographics in the Black community.

The first active training for civil rights workers in nonviolence happened in Miami in the 1940s.

The first civil rights demonstration, the first active confrontation about civil rights demonstrators happened in Miami in 1945 to get Virginia Key Beach open for Blacks.

So before that there was a civil rights movement in North Carolina or any other place, there were actions in Miami in terms of training people and preparing people to contest racial discrimination.

- Of course the church is really important in the Black community, then as well as today.

And they're beginning to move in that direction.

They're gonna be the seed beds for this civil rights movement, which begins in the 1940s in Miami earlier than many other places.

There's an effort to desegregate, for example, the city park swimming pools that are being built after the war to desegregate them as early as the late 1940s.

Or there's the swim in at Haulover Beach in late May, early June of 1945 as a push for a Black beach.

African-American did not have their own beach.

And again, you'll find that a lot of the clerical leaders are parts of these civil rights activities.

- These were men from the church, clergy, at Haulover Beach.

Gibson and Judge Ellie Thomas was the one that they called and asked to stand on the side and they asked him to call the sheriff.

The clergy went in fully dressed and waited for the sheriff to call and do something about.

They wanted to be arrested.

Sheriff would not arrest them.

Sometime during that week, the city fathers got together and had a meeting and decided that they would give Virginia Key Beach to the Black people.

- We had a vanguard of Black leaders in Miami early on who were pushing for things that were not being done in other parts of the south.

In part because of the change in demographics in Miami, both in the white and the Black community, going into the civil rights era.

(train horn blares) - [Voiceover] The fight to break the firm hold of the city's color line by the colored Board of Trade and church leaders decades earlier, would eventually lead to the integration of schools, beginning with Orchard Villa Elementary, a process that would not be completed until the 1980s.

Yet these sure small steps quickly attracted national organizations that sought Miami's potential as an early proving ground for nonviolent demonstrations.

A light was finally beginning to shine through the indelible shadows of the past.

- The act of Civil rights would manifest itself in, as I mentioned before, an attempted desegregate city parks, pools, which didn't take.

Desegregating the lunch counter, McCoy's, which did take in '59, desegregating the lunch counter at Burdines in '60, that did take, allowing Americans try on clothes at Burdines in '60, that did take, desegregated lunch counter at Woolworths, and this was in the heart of downtown Miami, at five and dime, as these other places were.

- Dr. Brown, what do you hope to accomplish by this demonstration?

- We hope to eliminate racial discrimination in all public accommodations here in the city of Miami.

- So slowly but surely, you're beginning to see these civil rights gains of Miami.

This area is often overlooked for what I think was its immersion in terms of the Black community and many white progressives in civil rights activities.

This was a very important civil rights area and it saw a lot of victories in the civil rights movement that we often gloss over.

You know, we think about Greensboro, the students up there in 1960 desegregating the lunch counters.

That happened in '59 in McCrory's here, a year ahead of the student activity up there in North Carolina.

So it's a really important period, but at the same time, the seeds of what's gonna be the derailment of Overtown are being planted by the construction of an expressway that runs through a lot of the community in the '60s, the clover leaf 395 that displaces thousands of people in the '60s, urban renewal, that knocks down a lot of buildings in Overtown in the '60s.

By the end of the '60s, you've gone from a flourishing community despite discrimination and segregation at the end of the '50s, to something that's really out there in 1969.

It's just become a no man's land for a lot of people.

- Well, in the late 1950s, mid 1950s, the decision had to be made about bringing I-95 into downtown Miami.

There were two choices, one was to bring the interstate down the old railroad track, which was now not being used that much, open space, would not have displaced that many people.

That was one choice, the one the Black community preferred incidentally.

The other choice was to bring the interstate down along 7th Avenue, much further to the west.

- When the plan was unveiled, it was coming through a major portion of Overtown.

And to make it even worse, it wasn't just the north-south parts of the expressway, but the clover leaf was placed in Overtown, 395, that will take you over to Miami Beach from different points, that was right there.

And that did the most destruction through eminent domain.

Thousands of people lost the places they had been living in.

- It destroyed the community completely.

The businesses in the area of Overtown were destroyed.

It was a ghost town.

That was the beginning of the gentrification.

- It's kinda ironic to see another large project like this coming through because it's reminiscent of the 1960s when I-95 came through and basically ripped through the heart of what was a community, eliminating a large part of it and displacing a lot of people.

So you wonder how many people now are gonna be displaced in the name of progress.

- When you talk about the history of Miami, when you talk about the history of policing, especially with regard to adding Black people to the equation, there's no path in the story of Miami that doesn't come through Overtown.

He had the McDuffie riots.

Overtown was one of the places that was impacted.

When the Neville Johnson incident happened, we were right outside.

Neville was actually a friend.

- [Chief Dickson] Yeah?

- Yeah, him and his brother, Alfonso, we all grew up together.

Alfonso and I went to high school together, so.

- [Interviewee] He wasn't in a gang.

- He was running, man.

- He caught completely by surprise.

- What does Overtown teach us?

How does it inform the conversations that we're having today and what has Overtown meant to Miami?

- To me, Miami has always been a progressive city.

And I just feel that the progress that we made, we're slipping, gradually losing it.

Even politicians going back with this voting situation.

- I know where Archie's coming from.

The police departments across the country I believe are gonna get better.

We'll have to have faith that law enforcement and the Black community will one day be able to get along.

But believe me, all the way back, there's always been a problem with law enforcement and the Black community.

Almost every riot that this country has had, has happened because of what a white police officer did to a Black citizen.

I would say that Overtown has done more for the city of Miami and Dade County than Dade County and the city of Miami has done for Overtown at the present time.

- One of the reasons I became a police officer is because I was negatively impacted by two Miami police officers.

One called me a nigger and another one just pushed me up against the wall and started searching my pockets and never said anything to me and then left.

I remembered how those things made me feel.

And you couple that with the conversation that I had with you in the future and it was like an kind of an affirmation of what I was already thinking in terms of when I came there.

So when I got to Ferguson, I went from saying protect and serve to serve and protect, because we serve and we protect, we police at the pleasure of the people.

Only police chiefs know uniquely that you can be taking care of every serious crime in the world.

And then you get to a community meeting and all they're at, "Chief, they're speeding.

Chief, I'm talking about speeding.

We're talking about all these things."

And they said- - Gotta cut you off, but you are only as good, a police department is only as good as the community it serves thinks it is.

- Exactly.

- No matter what they're actually accomplishing.

- [Delrish] Exactly.

- That's what you're saying.

- Exactly.

- That's very true.

- Exactly.

Like I said to both of you earlier, I cut my teeth here and I used the power of the examples that you gave me to take there.

I owe it to you guys.

(pensive music) - [Voiceover] The unique reforms of America's only Black precinct and courthouse cannot be understated, nor are the contributions of three generations of police leadership.

Their legacy is one that continues to resonate in communities across this nation.

And even under the threat of a new era of transformation, the people of Overtown remain steadfast and defiant, understanding their innate responsibility to maintain the legacy of Miami's original founding community.

- I think Miami is really central to a lot of the major racial, social, cultural issues of this country.

And we can look at different periods and different specific examples to buttress that claim.

It's cutting edge in that respect.

And it's most, so to some degree, troubling because we know the police 100 years ago were in some cases brutal toward African Americans and other cases just very tough toward them.

And we've seen instances decades later where that repeats itself, but on a much larger scale and screen.

- A lot of it comes down to knowing your community and community policing reflects that when you live and have vested interests in that community.

- Community starts with ownership of your land.

That is critical.

You look at 246 years out without being able to pass down your property, 246 years of not being able to learn to read and write.

Now it's the time to continue to work to make America live up to the great ideals.

Not that the ideals in America are as good as any in the world, but we've gotta make them real, equal justice for all.

We gotta make it real, equal opportunity for all.

We gotta make it real.

- We have to continue to examine our own psychology as individuals and our individual racial biases.

We have to then move one step further out and think about the society that we have created.

And then beyond that, as a society, the laws that we enact that have the tendencies to perpetuate racial inequality and social injustice, it is the society that we have is a direct reflection of our values.

- We are descendants of slaves.

We have been through any physical punishment you could ever imagine, but we are a resilient people.

And maybe, just maybe, it's that color of the skin that some people hate so much that has helped to keep us up and moving and resilient.

- If you go all the way back to when it was illegal to teach a slave to read or write and how that translated over the generations to limitations in Black education, you put all those elements together, restrictions on Black education, restrictions on where Blacks could live, restrictions on where Blacks could work, and over time, a big debt comes to be paid.

And we're looking at that right now where we have cities that are teaming with people who are unable to find work in this information age, who have limited options in terms of how they get out of their circumstances.

That didn't just happen.

These kinds of things go back.

All the way back to the first presence of Blacks in this country and in Florida, from the very first invitation of slaves under Florida.

- You know, I think Overtown is an example for the nation because Overtown did have poverty, it did have a lack of resources, it did have a lack of a proper education, and all those things.

And one of the things that we do in error is we take examples who got out and we hold them up to say that the rest of the community could do this.

I don't think that's helpful.

It's no more helpful than saying that, you know, as the ship sank, some were able to swim.

And so it should have been the example to all those who drowned.

I think one of the things that happens is we forget that we have to look back and kind of make sure that we are helping these communities, because we always think that we move to a gated community, we move away from the poverty and suddenly we're safe.

I always talk about social metastasisism.

Cancer always attacks the weakest part of the body, but it's a matter of time before those things start to move and have an effect on everything.

And I think that's the way we need to look at this.

Not holding up these examples of Delrish Moss got out of Overtown and he did well, but many others didn't.

Delrish Moss was the one who was lucky enough to swim, not necessarily because I was more resilient, not necessarily, you know, some things are luck, but when you're in a bad, bad situation, you're dealt a bad hand.

Luck is harder to come by.

(ominous music) (jazzy music) (children shouting) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)