History
As development flourished in South Florida from the early 20th century through the 1920s, restrictive covenants and Jim Crow laws barred black Americans in the Miami area from living outside of Overtown. Overtown, then called Colored Town, grew to be one of the most densely populated areas in South Florida. Several city blocks of Overtown homes were dilapidated shotgun houses with no electricity or access to municipal water and sewer, being host to a relatively high incidence of infectious diseases in many areas. Community organizings and advocacy by black businessmen and clergy, such as the works of Kelsey L. Pharr and Reverend John E. Culmer, informed the creation of the Southern Housing Corporation (SHC). Formed by seven white Miami-area attorneys and lead by former state attorney John C. Gramling, the SHC garnered public support for the endeavor from Miami residents. It then lobbied the new administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the first 100 days for the creation of a new "negro colony" on what was-then the outskirts of the city to alleviate blight and to largely displace blacks from Overtown to spur further private real estate development in Downtown Miami.
The new facility opened 243 single-family units opened to tenants February 6, 1937. Built just west of the north Miami neighborhoods of Buena Vista and Lemon City, opposition to the proximity of the new apartments to the mostly white communities led to the erection of a four-foot tall wall along West 12th Avenue from North 62nd Street north to 71st Street, most of which was torn down since the 1950s. Construction of I-95 and I-395/State Road 836 (then, the North-South and East-West Expressways, respectively) purged thousands of African Americans from Overtown into other black area communities like the burgeoning Liberty Square and surrounding Liberty City area.
Until the de facto racial segregation in public accommodations and private homeownership practices ended after the enactment of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, Liberty Square became the most densely populated subdivision in the Miami area. Once a largely middle income community, a purge of poor elderly and several welfare-dependent single mother families from Overtown fled to Liberty Square, leading to a black flight of middle and higher-income African Americans to suburban Miami-Dade county and a decline in living standards in the project between 1960s and the 1980s. Liberty Square and surrounding area were the location of notable Miami area race riots in the years following the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, most notably in 1968, during the 1968 Republican National Convention on Miami Beach, and in 1980, following the killing of Arthur McDuffie.
Read more about this topic: Liberty Square (Miami)
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—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
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—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)