Black Bahamians and Miami history

Still image of Bahamians in late nineteenth century Miami.

 Esther Rolle, the late actress, starred in "Good Times."

I look forward to this Monday's class because I get to share with the students some of the history of Miami, Florida, my hometown. I also get to discuss the history of the migration of Bahamian people to Miami in the late nineteenth century. My  paternal relatives on my father's side are descendants of Bahamians, who initially settled in the Coconut Grove section of Miami. This immigrant group, a key labor source, figured into the early development of South Florida, which began in earnest with the construction of the Florida East Coast Railway in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This railway connected cities and ports around the country to ports in Miami, which was incorporated in 1896. These ports are just a few minutes drive from Coconut Grove, which is still inhabited by African Americans including descendants of people from the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, a country of several hundred islands in the Atlantic Ocean to the east of Miami.  In one of my earliest blog posts, I mentioned how I spent the first five years of my life in  Coconut Grove, the oldest community in the city and what is now Miami-Dade County. Many people of African and Bahamian descent from this neighborhood -  including some (though not all) members of my own family  -eventually relocated to other sections of the county. Some of us were pushed by segregationist practices facing other people of African descent around the country. Such movement led to the creation of what Arnold Hirsch has called "second ghettoes." Second ghetto communities were often earlier inhabited by whites who fled to other areas in response to the influx of African Americans, desiring better housing during the postwar period, a time that witnessed the migration of African Americans from the rural south to the North, West, and farther South. This was the second such migration in the twentieth century. Those arriving in Miami might have met the descendants of Bahamians who had been here since the city's beginnings.  I look forward to teaching the "second ghettoes" thesis to the students and making linkages between it and the recruitment of African American young men to the University of Miami football program in the early 1980s. I was an undergraduate at this university at the time and enjoyed watching this team help put Miami back in the national spotlight though not always in the way that many observers desired. Uncovering how this dynamic imparts more information about race, class and even black masculinity in  urban life will be a key task for me and this class. In this posting, you can see a a photograph of the late actress Esther Rolle, who is  of Bahamian descent, and a YouTube clip of Sidney Poitier, a notable Bahamian, who won "Best Actor" at the Academy Awards in 1964. Notice how he holds the hands of Anne Bancroft, an Academy Award-winning white actress and Best Actor presenter, something  unthinkable for many living in the South in that year. There is also a photograph of  early black Bahamians attending a tea party at The Barnacle, a nineteenth century house in Coconut Grove built by Ralph Middleton Munroe, an early white settler and seaman. Some day I plan to research Miami's history  in relation to people of Bahamian descent.