Miami: A Young but Turbulent History
Racial unrest
By the late 1960s, more than 100,000 Jews had relocated to Miami Beach from the northeast, an influx second in size only to the near 500,000 Cubans who had settled in a working class neighborhood west of downtown, known today as Little Havana.
Miami had become a curious mix of rural whites, native blacks, Jewish transplants and Cuban exiles, a recipe that created an underlying tension for several decades. And its police department, which had remained stoutly southern in attitude, was overwhelmingly white, despite patrolling a city that was almost one-third black.
Adding to the tension was the decision to construct Interstate 95 through the heart of Overtown, which wiped out the neighborhood’s main business district and cultural center, marking the end of what had been known as “Little Broadway.” Population dropped from 40,000 to 10,000.
The late 1960s was a time when civil unrest around the globe was strife, a period in which the civil rights movement was sweeping across the South. But to the blacks living in Miami, who were losing low-income jobs to the Cuban immigrants, it seemed as if the civil rights movement had stopped short of the Miami border.
In 1968, as the nation’s spotlight shone on Miami Beach for the Republican National Convention, Miami blacks staged a rally in the hopes it would generate national attention. The rally began in Liberty City, a black community north of Overtown. And it turned violent when a group of youths threw rocks at a car driven by a white man with the bumper sticker “George Wallace for president” on his car. Wallace was the Alabama Governor running for president who supported segregation.
The man ended up crashing his car and a group of black youths began chasing him. He ended up getting pulled inside a bar by a group of black men who protected him. His car was overturned and set on fire.
That incident attracted the attention of Florida Governor Claude Kirk, who was at the convention when the riot broke out. He met with the blacks, listened to their grievances and agreed to meet with them the following morning to come up with a solution. But he never showed up, which lead to more rocks and bottles being thrown.
Police ended up firing into a crowd of demonstrators, killing two people. Officers killed two more people before the riot ended five days after it started. An investigation found no wrongdoing on behalf of police.
By the time Nixon resigned, the Cuban anti-militant groups in Miami had become more violent, assassinating six people between 1973 and 1976 for voicing moderate opinions about U.S. relations with Cuba. They were also responsible for a car bomb that blew off the legs of Emilio Milian, a popular news director for WQBA – “La Cubanisima” – who dared condemn the exile violence on the radio.
Once the Cubans had earned the reputation of being the most violent ethnic group in Miami, in came the Colombian cocaine cowboys, who started a gang war reminiscent of 1930s Chicago, but with better weapons. In 1979, after several gangland slayings in Miami, Colombian drug traffickers entered a liquor store in Dadeland Mall and emptied their machine guns, killing two rival gang members as well as two liquor store employees. The Colombians began earning a reputation of leaving no witness behind, regardless of their involvement in the drug trade.