By Eminent Domain:

Race and Capital in the Building of an American South Florida"

 

NDB Connolly

The University of Michigan

 

Dissertation Prospectus

 

 

With an eye on the decades immediately preceding and following World War II, I examine the cultural roots and consequences of land policy in South Florida, paying special attention to the role of race in the formation of the region's neighborhoods and cities.  My research suggests that, contrary to popular scholarly opinion on twentieth century urban development, uses of eminent domain and other urban planning initiatives emerged less from a top-down imposition of government policy and more from grassroots negotiations occurring between three drastically unequal parties: a white business class looking to ensure Miami's appeal to tourists and investors, a middle-class black elite focused on dismantling racial segregation, and a white poor- and working class seeking to protect their property values from the constant threat of black residential "invasion." With concerns about race ever informing their respective positions, these overlapping interests struggled over the enforcement of housing policy, the placement of new roads and highways, and execution of urban renewal.  And, in their pursuits of "American" rights and "American" profits from the 1930s into the 1960s, each group contributed to the making of an American South Florida, a region literally built neighborhood by neighborhood from "Caribbean" and "Southern" fragments.

 

Chapter 1

Nazis, Negroes y negros:

Race, War and the End of the Anglo Playground

This chapter describes how racial segregation in Miami evolved from its first legal iteration in 1913 to the broad, culturally complex version that civic elites fashioned in the years immediately following World War II. The war emergency spurred tens of thousands of workers, tourists, and soldiers to migrate to South Florida from the North, rural South and the islands of the Caribbean, with many Negro troops and dark-skinned Latin Americans gaining access to what was formerly a "Whites Only" beachfront. In light of these migrations, growth politicians and entrepreneurs adjusted the rules of Jim Crow to ensure postwar prosperity, widening the privileges of whiteness to include non-Anglo, "whites" and scores of Latin American investors. At the same time, working and middle-class whites practiced new forms of racial surveillance and intimidation to protect the integrity of their threatened race benefits. By the end of the 1940s, the class line gave way where the color line would not, and an imperial playground that had been reserved only for the wealthiest of Progressive-Era whites became a year-round destination for whites from across the Americas.

 

Chapter 2

Fruit Trees and Family Trees, Clotheslines and Bloodlines:

Nation- and Neighborhood-making in South Florida's "Colored" Caribbean

This chapter shows how pursuits of black civil and voting rights during the 1930s and '40s influenced ever-changing definitions of black property rights during the early-New Deal Era. Within the borders of their Jim Crowed neighborhoods, black tenants and property owners from America and the Caribbean espoused a notion of collective ownership – a "Colored" property politics – that facilitated Negroes gaining control over important state functions within their own communities. Establishing their own police force, an all-Negro court, and a score of black-run social and civic institutions, Greater Miami's blacks use a combination of entrepreneurship and state powers to turn the derogatory term "Colored" into a marker of pride. This politic, however, did not allow a diverse group of blacks to paper over deep class and cultural schisms completely. Nor did it allow South Florida's Colored communities to approach any semblance of economic or infrastructural parity with white neighborhoods. And as entrepreneurs and Negro homeowners fought to open new neighborhoods to middle-class blacks, once expansive ideas of collective "Colored" ownership gradually narrowed to privilege the property rights of black deed-holders and the civil rights of American Negroes.

 

Chapter 3

Old and New South Violence:

Explosions, Eminent Domain, and Other Reponses to the Negro Housing Problem

Focusing on whites' repeated attempts to curtail blacks' residential expansion, this chapter explores three case studies: Railroad Shop's Colored Addition (1947), the St. Alban's neighborhood of Coconut Grove (1949), and Carver Village (1951). The Railroad Shop case addresses working-class white homeowners who convinced the Miami City Commission to employ eminent domain against a neighboring community of blacks homeowners. St. Albans likewise provides a case of the state using eminent domain against black Miamians, but in this instance, white and blacks both advocate for eminent domain as a means of preempting real estate developers who intend to build new Negro slums. The final episode – Carver Village – discusses how these same developers, having been rebuffed by a coalition of poor black tenants and wealthy white homeowners, open a racially integrated housing project in a poor white community. Unable to gain the desired response from their political representatives, these poor whites use a series of dynamite attacks in a failed attempt to frighten blacks from the neighborhood. This violent episode, which elicits considerable negative publicity for Miami in the national press, threatens the entire tourist season of 1952 and teaches white elites that eminent domain may well be the most peaceful and effective means of dealing with poor whites and black population growth.

 

Chapter 4

Building The Moral Metropolis

This is the first of three chapters to explore how urban renewal became part of the civil rights movement in South Florida. It discusses urban white liberals who, in their blending of federal slum clearance funds and the race relations program of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, fashioned a non-violent state response to black population growth. Concerned about the negative affect that interracial vice, urban poverty and increasingly publicized civil rights politics would have on Florida's "progressive" reputation, racial moderates used urban planning to fashion growth liberalism and civil rights liberalism into a single moral and economic program, or what I call a "Sunbelt" approach to the Negro problem. In Miami, this Sunbelt race politic ultimately became the "Magic City Center Plan," a metropolitan development initiative designed to the implicit end of maintaining peaceful residential segregation, renewing the slum-riddled face of Miami, and preparing the Negro morally for the piecemeal and partial dissolution of the color line.

 

Chapter 5

White Paternalism and the Profit Motive:

The Case of Luther Brooks

Through the personage of Luther Brooks, this chapter describes the greatest enemies of Miami's Sunbelt race approach – the owners of Negro-occupied rental housing. As one of Greater Miami's most powerful advocates for property rights in the face of eminent domain, Brooks, a white property manager, profited mightily Jim Crow's "Colored Only" housing market. And, for over two decades, he and his black and white clients helped prevent the condemnation of Miami's Central Negro District, using a combination of lobbying in the State Capitol; Cold War, free market rhetoric; and an everyday politic of white paternalism. It was the continued resistance of Brooks and other tenement profiteers – and their somewhat surprising popularity among working- and middle-class blacks – that prompted Sunbelt boosters and housing reformers to cast slum housing as an Old South relic and urban renewal as a civil rights issue. White flight from the city, massive federal spending in slum clearance and highway building, and the rapidly decreasing profitability of degenerating black slums would all force Brooks to relinquish his foothold in Miami's downtown, but only after new opportunities of black-occupied rental housing opened up in the city's downwardly mobile, racially transitioning suburbs.

 

Chapter 6

Faust's Freeway:

Urban Renewal and the Bargain over Black Miami

This final chapter describes how black suburbanites sought to make good on the economic promises of the Sunbelt by shifting black Miami's residential and economic center from the downtown ghetto to the suburbs of Brownsville and Liberty City. With most evoking their rights as American citizens, these blacks supported interstate building and the resulting slum clearance as the perfect marriage of economic growth and racial justice. But, in their capacity as property owners, they bitterly opposed whites forcing public housing for the displaced black poor into their barely-middle-class neighborhoods. As white planners used the freeway and government-backed housing to draw the color line anew, Liberty City and Brownsville became, in essence, suburban slums. However, without the existence Jim Crow to encourage a sense of collective black ownership or even the highly problematic politics of white paternalism, these communities have suffered decades of divestment, so absolute, in fact, that many Miamians old enough to remember find themselves today pining for the "good old days."