The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America’s Tourist Paradise, 1896–1968 by Chanelle N. Rose (review)

A perennial question asked about Florida is: How southern is the Sunshine State? One answer is often provided: The further north in Florida you go, the further south you get; and conversely, the further south in the state you proceed, the further north you end up. Chanelle Rose’s book complicates that truism by examining race relations in Miami from its founding up to the middle of the civil rights era. By placing Black activists at the centre of her analysis and by emphasizing the shifting multi-ethnic make-up of the city, Rose provides a nuanced study of how the Magic City both reflects southern racist ideology and transcends it. While the book demonstrates how an in-depth localized case study can give answers to broad questions, it also shows the limitations of such inquiries.

Rose starts the book by questioning the very applicability of the term “African-American” as it relates to Miami’s Black population. Because of southeast Florida’s isolation from the rest of mainland North America (at least until the completion of Henry Flagler’s railroad to Miami in 1896) and its connectivity to the Caribbean, Rose adroitly labels this demographic group “Afro-Caribbean” or “Bahamian Transnationals.” Her discussion of the tangled roots of the links between the islands and Miami, especially in the early twentieth century, are among the strongest points of her argument. One wishes she had carried on that analytic framework into the later years she examines. By probing the Caribbean roots of Black Miami activism, she places the Garveyite and Black Nationalist movements of the 1910s and 1920s into a wider perspective. Rose also shows readers the multiplicity of Black perspectives regarding race relations in south Florida. Often tied to the Black church, these viewpoints shifted over time in response to events within both the wider world of white Miami and the Black community itself.

The racial dynamics of south Florida were not only shaped by Black Miamians, but also (and especially) by members of the city’s white power elite. Determined to make Miami a tourist paradise (as Rose calls it in the book’s sub-title), these men endeavoured to simultaneously entice white vacationers from the north, and increasingly from Latin America, while rigidly maintaining the colour line. That these seemingly antithetical goals were not only achieved but upheld into the 1960s shows the control influential whites maintained over the city but also over the image of Miami that was presented to the world. Marketed early as a world city rather than as a southern, or even Floridian, one, Miami came to be seen as a city where race was not an issue. But the coming of the civil rights movement affected not only Memphis but Miami. Racial tensions heightened as Blacks pushed for a true world city, one in which they could fully participate as citizens, in every aspect of life from voting to hotel accommodations to swimming at Miami’s iconic beaches. Rose shows the importance of both the Hispanic and Jewish influences on the city as it moved to dismantle Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s. This movement did not come without violence and struggle, as Rose chronicles downtown lunch counter sit-ins and synagogue bombings that make Miami seem more like Birmingham rather than the sun and fun capital of America. In response to radical journalist Stetson Kennedy describing Miami as an “Anteroom to Fascism,” Rose shows how “Miami’s white civic elite. . . [upheld] the city’s tourist progressive mystique. . . [by] constructing a paradise façade that obscured its less glamorous Deep South attributes” (93).

Rose places Miami’s mid-century racial issues firmly in the context of the Cold War and the Cuban Revolution. While Miami had always been seen as part of Latin America, the influx of Cuban refugees in the...