The Year of Dangerous Days: Riots, Refugees, and Cocaine in Miami 1980 (A Wild Year in Miami's History) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nicholas Griffin is a journalist and author of four novels and three works of nonfiction. His writing has appeared in The Times (London), the Financial Times, and Foreign Policy, among other publications. His book Ping-Pong Diplomacy was shortlisted for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. He lives in Miami with his wife and two children.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

DECEMBER 1979

By 1979, there were several Miamis that barely lapped against one another, let alone integrated. The county itself was a strange beast, twenty-seven different municipalities with their own mayor, many with their own police departments. But Miami wasn’t divided by municipalities; it was separated into tribes.

There was Anglo Miami, which the city’s boosters were still hawking to white America: beaches, real estate, hotels, and entertainment. Tourists dominated the region. Dade had 1.6 million residents but 2.1 million international visitors a year. Anglo Miami was far from monolithic. There were southerners, migrants, and a large Jewish population that ran some of the most important businesses and institutions in Miami Beach.

Across the causeway in Little Havana and up the coast in Hialeah sat Latin Miami, created by the Cubans who’d fled Fidel Castro’s revolution twenty years before. Whenever there was violence south of the border, Latin America coughed up a new pocket of immigrants. Most recently that meant that the Cuban population in Dade was being watered down by Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and Colombians.

Then there was black Miami. It, too, had more divisions than cohesion. There was a strong Bahamian presence, plenty of Jamaicans. Both felt distinct from the African Americans who had moved south from Georgia, and those who were born and bred in Miami. The latest immigrants were only beginning to spill in: a large number of unwelcome Haitians. Arriving on rickety boats, fleeing both political persecution and economic despair, they were docking at a time when not one of Miami’s communities was in the mood to reach out and welcome them.

For all the nuances, if you were black, white, or Latin, you tended to know so little about the other tribes that you regarded them as rigid blocs. Who knew a Jamaican turned his nose up at a Georgia-born black, or that a Puerto Rican couldn’t stand another word from a Cuban, or that a Jew couldn’t walk through the door at the all-white country club at La Gorce? There was enough inequality to go around, but in this one thing, the black community got the most generous helping.

In 1979, if you were black in Dade County, you most likely lived in one of three neighborhoods: Overtown, the Black Grove, or Liberty City. Liberty City was the youngest of the three, dating back to 1937, when President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the first large public housing project in the South. It was Roosevelt’s response to local campaigns for better sanitation. In the ’30s, Liberty City had what most houses in Overtown and the Black Grove did not: running water, modern kitchens, electricity. Overtown remained the center of black life in Miami until the arrival of I-95, the vast stretch of American highway that ran from Maine down the East Coast all the way to Miami. It stomped right through the middle of Miami’s most prominent black neighborhood in 1965, a ravenous millipede with a thousand concrete legs.

Had the 3,000-kilometer highway been halted just 5 kilometers to the north, black Miami might have had a different history. Instead the highway, touted as “slum clearance,” bulldozed through black Miami’s main drags. Gone was much of Overtown’s commercial heart, with its three movie theaters, its public pool, grocery store, and businesses. Goodbye to clubs that had hosted Ella Fitzgerald, to the Sir John Hotel, which had offered their finest suites to black entertainers banned from staying in whites-only Miami Beach. But more important, goodbye to a neighborhood where parents knew which house every child belonged to. Goodbye to the nighttime games of Moonlight Baby, where kids would use the bottle caps of Cola Nibs to mark the edge of their bodies on the pavement. Goodbye to unarmed black patrolmen walking black streets.

Overtown had its own all-black police station, with strict rules. Black officers couldn’t carry a weapon home, since “no one wanted to see a black man with a gun.” They could stop whites in Overtown but had no power of arrest over them. The closest affordable housing for Overtown’s displaced was in and around the Liberty City projects. Block by block it began to turn from white to black, until neighboring white homeowners built a wall to separate themselves from ever-blacker Liberty City. White housewives in colorful plaids and horn-rimmed glasses carried protest signs: “We want this Nigger moved” and “Nigger go to Washington.” Someone detonated a stick of dynamite in an empty apartment leased to blacks. Nothing worked, and by the end of the 1960s the first proud black owners inside Liberty City were joined by many of Overtown’s twenty thousand displaced. As white flight accelerated, house prices declined, local businesses faltered, and unemployment and crime began to rise. By 1968, Liberty City had assumed a new reputation. The CND—the Central-North District—had earned the nickname “Central Negro District” from both the city and the county police departments.

There was still beauty in Liberty City, still sunrises where the light would smart off the sides of pastel-painted houses, and the dew on the grass would glisten, and churches would fill, and the jitney buses would chug patiently, waiting for the elderly to board. Still schoolchildren in white shirts tightening backpacks to their shoulders and catching as much shade as possible on the way to the school gates. There was still beauty, but you had to squint to see it.

Eighty percent of South Florida homes had air-conditioning in 1980, but in stifling hot Liberty City, only one in five homes could afford it. It was a neighborhood without a center, few jobs to offer, seventy-two churches but just six banks, not one of which was black-owned. There were plenty of places to pray for a positive future but few institutions willing to risk investment in one. The fact that a teenager called Arthur McDuffie got out at all was unusual. The fact that he came back, found a good job, earned steadily, and raised a family was rarer still.

Frederica Jones had been Arthur McDuffie’s high school sweetheart at Booker T. Washington, one of Miami’s three segregated schools. They’d met while Frederica was walking home from the local store, where she’d bought a can of peas for her mother. She’d swung her groceries at her side, and McDuffie, who’d been watching her from across the street, fell into step beside her.

After a few moments of banter, McDuffie made a simple declaration. “I like you.” Then he asked for Frederica’s number. That night McDuffie called, and the two talked for an hour. At the end of the conversation McDuffie, two years Frederica’s senior, asked, “Would you go with me?”

“Yes!” she said.

They became inseparable. They were in the Booker T. Washington band together. McDuffie was the baritone horn and Frederica a majorette. She watched McDuffie win the local swim meets. When McDuffie graduated, he joined the Marine Corps, and for the next three years, they communicated through letters. Then, within two months of his honorable discharge, they married. Two children quickly followed. After which came problems, separation, and, in 1978, divorce. McDuffie had...