Tempest in the Forbidden City: Racism, Violence, and Vulnerability in the 1926 Miami Hurricane

The “big blow” began just after midnight on September 18, 1926. Its 120-milean-hour winds screamed across Miami Beach and headed straight across Biscayne Bay toward the mainland. Pulling ocean waves up over the land like covers over a bed, the storm dragged ships into the streets of downtown Miami, denuded the city of its picturesque palm trees, and reduced to splintered ruins the shoddily constructed homes built during the real estate boom of the previous five years. Because scientists at the U.S. Weather Bureau, the forerunner to the National Weather Service, had predicted that the storm would steer clear of Florida, it caught Miami by surprise. Tracking satellites and hurricane-hunter weather planes lay decades in the future, and the bureau relied on information from ships and weather stations in numerous Caribbean islands to predict the path and intensity of storms. The hurricane did not pass over these islands, so bureau scientists had little advance information about its strength or size. Their representative in Miami did not hoist a hurricane warning flag until 11 p.m. on September 17, just an hour before the hurricane arrived. With radio in its infancy, such a delayed warning proved useless.¹

Local knowledge about hurricanes also remained limited, given that many residents were recent arrivals. After the headwinds had passed and the dead-calm of the eye lay overhead, many people ran into the streets to rejoice that the storm was over or rushed to Miami Beach to play in the frothy waves the winds had stirred up. When the hurricane’s tail arrived, dragging a second “mountainous wall of water” over the beach and into Biscayne Bay, a number of these people drowned. “All streets near the Ocean at Miami Beach were covered with sand to a depth of several feet, and in some cases automobiles were entirely covered,” a Weather Bureau report stated.² The bureau claimed there were 327 hurricane deaths, but the actual total remains unknown. If a similar storm were to follow the same path today, it is estimated that it would cause over $87 billion in damage in Miami alone.³

At first, the hurricane appeared to upend the social order of this racially segregated resort city. Miami Beach and other prime coastal areas had taken the brunt of the storm. Since black residents were barred from living in these areas or traveling to them at night due to strict codes of racial segregation, most escaped drowning in the nocturnal storm surge. Segregation of beaches also meant that only whites were swept away in the tailwinds while frolicking in the surf.⁴

An editorial in the Chicago Defender, the nation’s foremost black newspaper, described this racially disparate pattern of mortality in Old Testament overtones. Entitled “The Forbidden City,” the piece intoned that the storm was God’s vengeance on Miami:

Miami—the fairest of playgrounds for white people in the South—is for us the city of the damned. It is in Miami that justice is unknown. It is in Miami that a black man is shot down for speaking to a black woman if a white man happens to desire her. It is in Miami that white men assault chauffeurs who dare to drive certain cars on the streets. It is in Miami that you cannot sit on street cars. It is in Miami that only cooks and maidservants may enter hotels and they through back doors. It is in Miami that only we are forbidden the chance to employ our talents to earn the food necessary to health (it was in Miami that an entire orchestra was brutally assaulted because the members dared come there to play). It is in Miami that a black man’s life is not regarded as highly as that of a black dog. And it is in Miami that the storm took its greatest toll.

The city, the editorial concluded, had become a modern day “Sodom and Gomorrah.”⁵

But what happened after the storm subsided? Was this really a case of reverse racial disparities...