Miami: A Young but Turbulent History
The Roaring 80s
Miami had reached a boiling point in its short history. It was like a teenager who had grown up too fast, seeing things most adults never do. It was not the melting pot that civic leaders portrayed it to be, but a bubbling chemical experiment.
It began smoldering in the late 1970s with the arrival of more than a hundred thousand Haitian and Nicaraguan refugees. The Haitians, who were black, poor and did not speak English, arrived in rickety boats, fleeing poverty and human rights abuses imposed by Dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier.
The Nicaraguans, who came from their country’s upper and middle class, arrived by plane, fleeing the newly imposed Sandanista government. The federal government ruled that the Haitians were not allowed to enter the country because they were fleeing economic hardships rather than a communist regime, a judgment that was perceived as racist by Miami’s Haitian and African-American communities.
Adding sparks to this simmering tension was the Mariel boatlift, which began in April 1980 and brought more than 125,000 Cuban refugees to Miami over a six-month period. It is estimated that up to 25,000 of them had been released from Castro’s jails or mental institutions.
Miami then exploded with one of the bloodiest civil disturbances in the history of the United States.
On May 17th, one month into the boatlift, an all-white jury acquitted four police officers in the death of Arthur McDuffie, a black ex-marine who was beaten to death by several white police officers. McDuffie was unarmed and had no criminal record when he was chased on his motorcycle and beaten to death for a traffic violation six months earlier.
Police had then tried to cover up his death by making it look like he died from injuries sustained in the motorcycle wreck. As news of the verdict spread through Miami’s black neighborhoods, a rage that had been simmering for years erupted onto streets.
Black residents pulled white drivers out of cars and killed them before turning the cars over and setting them on fire. White residents drove into black neighborhoods and began shooting blacks at random, including a 14-year-old boy who was shot in the head.
Police and blacks exchanged gunfire as businesses were looted and burned. And for three days, a black plume of smoke hung over Miami as the Florida National Guard tried to maintain order. When it was over, 18 people were dead, more than 400 injured and more than $1 million were left in damages.
In the wake of the riot, black community leaders echoed the same reasons they did after the 1968 riot: Loss of jobs to Cuban refugees and excessive brutality at the hands of Miami police. There had been a series of well-publicized police injustices against the black community in the year leading up to the riot including a white state trooper getting probation for molesting a black girl.
When police killed McDuffie in December of 1979, it had been another drop in the bucket for Miami’s black community. But when the all-white jury acquitted the four white officers, it became a flaming match thrown into a can of gasoline.
However, the lesson fell on deaf ears because Miami officials had their hands full with the thousands of Cuban and Haitian refugees swarming the city. Five months after the riot and six months into the boatlift, crime in Miami had skyrocketed - including a 775 percent increase in robberies – mostly attributed to the criminal element among the Cuban refugees.
And despite an increase in Coast Guard boats that began intercepting Haitian refugees at sea and turning them back, the Haitians continued coming to Miami for a chance at a better life. In 1981, the bodies of 33 Haitians who had drowned at sea after their boat had capsized, washed upon an exclusive residential beach in Broward County, once again, shedding an international spotlight on South Florida.
As rival Colombian gangs continued to shoot it out on Miami’s streets in a bloody battle for cocaine territory, the criminal element among the newly arrived Cuban refugees moved in for a piece of the action. And so did Miami police, who were on their way to becoming the most corrupt police department in the United States.
By the end of 1981, Miami had become the “Murder Capital of the USA” for the second year in a row, with an average of two murders a day, mostly attributed to the flourishing drug trade. Bodies were popping up everywhere. Bound and gagged and stuffed in car trunks. Slumped over steering wheels after being machine gunned at traffic lights. And strewn in Dumpsters, canals and shallow graves in the Everglades. It got so bad that a refrigerated trailer that had been seized in a drug raid was placed outside the morgue to handle the overflow of bodies.
And the turmoil continued into 1982, when another three days of rioting broke out in Miami’s black community after a Cuban police officer shot and killed a 20-year-old black man who appeared to be reaching for a gun. But this time, they did not wait for a trial and verdict to begin rioting. It started less than an hour after the shooting. One person died in that riot – a black looter at the hands of a police officer.
Then came the Miami River Cops case. In 1985, more than a dozen police officers raided a drug boat docked on the Miami River to steal cocaine. Three drug dealers ended up jumping overboard and drowning. The cops also killed a bar owner as a way to eliminate the middleman in their flourishing drug business.
An investigation unveiled a wide pattern of corruption within the Miami Police Department that had been building up for years. More than two dozen police officers were convicted and 17 officers sent to prison. And almost 100 other officers were disciplined for their involvement. Most of the corrupt officers were young, Hispanic and part of the recruiting class of 1980, in which the department significantly lowered standards to meet the demands of a city facing skyrocketing crime.
In the late 1980s, another wave of Nicaraguan immigrants arrived in Miami, fleeing the civil war that was ravaging their country. Unlike the previous Nicaraguan immigrants, most of these immigrants were poor and unskilled. And rather than fly into Miami International Airport as their predecessors did, they worked their way up through Central America and Mexico, entering the country through Texas before making their way to Miami to join the more than 100,000 Nicaraguans who had settled in the city in the prior decade.
The decade ended just the way it started; with another inner-city riot. But this time, more than 1,500 journalists were in town for the Super Bowl, a moment that civic leaders were counting on to change Miami’s image.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1989, just six days before Miami would host its sixth Super Bowl, a Colombian police officer shot and killed a 23-year-old unarmed black motorcyclist in the back of the head. A second black man, who was a passenger on the motorcycle, died the following day from injuries sustained in the wreck that followed.
Within minutes of the initial shooting, crowds gathered at the scene and began pelting police officers with rocks and bottles. By that evening, cars and buildings were burning in several black communities in Miami. After two days of rioting and looting, one person was dead and more than 20 cars and buildings had been torched.
A month later, the riot claimed its second victim, a black man who had intervened when he saw two black men attack a white man during the riot, allowing the white man to escape. Hilliet Williams, a lifelong resident of Liberty City, had been beaten so severely that he was hospitalized for a month before he died. Almost a year later, as the city held its breath for another riot, the officer in the shooting was convicted for manslaughter. William Lozano appealed the decision and was acquitted in 1993. Nobody rioted.
The 1980s were by far the most turbulent and divisive decade for Miami, but there were many shining moments. The University of Miami Hurricanes emerged as a national powerhouse that decade, winning three national championships by mostly recruiting South Florida high school football players – many who grew up playing on Miami’s riot-torn streets.
Those three championships marked some of the few times during the 1980s where the city celebrated together, regardless of ethnicity. Today, with five national championships under its belt, the Hurricanes provide more players to the National Football League than any other university by continuing to recruit local high school players.