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WORK TITLE: The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1975
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
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http://www.rowan.edu/colleges/chss/departments/history/facultystaff/faculty/rose.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1975, in London, England; immigrated to United States.
EDUCATION:Florida International University, B.A., M.A.; University of Miami, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ, associate professor of history.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
In her monograph The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America’s Tourist Paradise, 1896-1968, Rowan University professor of history Chanelle Nyree Rose presents a comprehensive but more nuanced way of looking at race relations, with special emphasis on the development of the city of Miami, Florida. Although black residents of the city are the focus of the book, Rose shows that they were not the only influence on the emergence of civil rights in the area. “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,” explained Steven Noll in the Canadian Review of History. “Determined to make Miami a tourist paradise …, these men endeavoured to simultaneously entice white vacationers from the north, and increasingly from Latin America, while rigidly maintaining the colour line.” Rose points out that from its beginning Miami was seen as separate from the historic Deep South. Elaborating on this point, Noll wrote, “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.”
The metropolis of southern Florida only emerged as a major city after the railroad reached the area in 1896. The railroad brought with it an influx of tourists from the North with money to spend. Recognizing an important business opportunity, local elites responded by trying to display their city as a paradise in which racism had no place. “According to Rose,” stated Devin T. Leigh, writing in H-Net Reviews, “Miami is unique because the city’s white power structure had an historic investment in a resort-style tourism that depended upon the perpetuation of a facade: a racially progressive national reputation that masked widespread inequality. In other words, white civic elites were historically more interested in keeping their lucrative tourist economy going by avoiding the explosive social unrest that characterized other cities in the New South during the civil rights movement than in actually changing the city’s institutions of systematic racial oppression.”
The racial situation became even more complicated when the city extended its welcome to Jews and to black tourists from the Caribbean. “The elite’s willingness to profit by catering to dark-skinned, Spanish-speaking tourists while simultaneously denying first-class citizenship to native blacks resulted in an arbitrary racial caste system,” Leigh continued. “Activists leveraged the hypocrisy of this system against image-conscious moderates as a tactic to accelerate social change. This resulted in a Faustian bargain: leaders consented to desegregation to preserve the progressive image, but real change was once again deferred.” Irvin D.S. Winsboro in the American Historical Review also commented on Rose’s analysis of racial and class contradictions in Miami’s history: “Throughout the book, the author develops this theme of transformative heterogeneity, and traces the ethnic and racial cross-fertilization that shaped Miami’s inner struggle to live with the myth of southern moderation despite the reality of color lines.”
“That juggling act which shows the flexibility of white supremacy when pressured by capitalist interests is what makes this book such a significant contribution to black and Latina/o studies,” remarked Felipe Hinojosa in the Journal of Southern History. “Moving beyond the black/white binary provides a more complete history of Miami and a closer understanding of `the nuances of southern race relations’.” Other reviewers likewise appreciated Rose’s work in modifying the standard narrative of civil rights in the South. The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami, stated Leigh, “is an exceptional history in at least two respects: for bestowing on black activists the full range of political tactics, and for using Miami as a case study to demonstrate how race relations have been both supported and undermined by a tri-ethnic border city dependent upon a tourist economy.” “The story is unique,” said Winsboro, “in that Miami exhibited a rich and sometimes volatile background of race, ethnicity (particularly a strong Latinization), geography (America’s gateway to Latin America and vice versa), tourism (a southern paradise image), northern transplants (particularly Jewish-Americans), and intra-urban, racial-ethnic permutations that typified no other southern metropolis.” The study, Winsboro concluded, provides an informative look at “how racial and ethnic heterogeneity can somehow, and sometimes, derail conventional racial habits.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Historical Review, April, 2016, Irvin D.S. Winsboro, review of The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America’s Tourist Paradise, 1896-1968, p. 576.
Canadian Journal of History, winter, 2016, Steven Noll, review of The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami, p. 629.
Journal of Southern History, August, 2016, Felipe Hinojosa, review of The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami, p. 728.
ONLINE
H-Net Reviews, https://networks.h-net.org/ (September 1, 2015), Devin T. Leigh, review of The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami.
Rowan University, https://academics.rowan.edu/ (March 5, 2017), author profile.
Chanelle Rose
Biography:
Chanelle N. Rose specializes in modern American history, with an emphasis on African-American history. Born in London, England, she immigrated to Miami, Florida, during her adolescent years. She received both her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Florida International University and her Ph.D. at the University of Miami. Her areas or research and teaching include African-American history, post-World War II America, Civil Rights-Black Power, tourism, and urban history. Her first book, The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 1896-1968, was published by the Louisiana State University Press in 2015. The book examines the long struggle for civil rights in one of the country's most popular tourists destinations. It complicates the black/white binary and offers a new way of understanding the complexity of racial traditions and white supremacy in southern metropolises like Miami.
Dr. Rose has also written several research articles which have appeared in such publications as the Journal of Social History, and Florida Historical Quarterly. Her current research explores the evolution of modern black conservatism in local communities and its impact on the African American struggle for racial equality from 1950 to 1985.
The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil
Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 1896
1968
Steven Noll
Canadian Journal of History.
51.3 (Winter 2016): p629.
http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/CJH.ACH.51.3.05
COPYRIGHT 2016 University of Toronto Press
http://www.usask.ca/history/cjh/
Full Text:
The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 18961968, by Chanelle N.
Rose. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2015. xiii, 315 pp. $47.50 US (cloth).
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 multiethnic makeup 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 indepth 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 "AfricanAmerican" 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 "AfroCaribbean" 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 subtitle),
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 sitins 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
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Fascism," Rose shows how "Miami's white civic elite ... [upheld] the city's tourist progressive mystique ... [by]
constructing a paradise facade that obscured its less glamorous Deep South attributes" (93).
Rose places Miami's midcentury 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 1960s profoundly reshaped
race relations in southeast Florida as the area underwent profound ethnic and social changes. Blacks expressed
frustration and outrage over the preferential treatment provided to Cubans by virtue of their anticommunist credentials.
In what she calls "privileging Cuban exiles" (217), Rose provides a very thorough analysis discussing the governmental
support (at the federal, state, and local levels) given to those refugees at the expense of Miami's Black population.
On the whole, Rose does a nice job examining the intricacies of endeavouring to shoehorn a bifurcated Jim Crow social
and political system into a multiethnic, multilingual society and the Black response to that attempt. However, there
are certain things she fails to address. After the first two chapters, AfroBahamians disappear from the narrative. I
would like to have known what became of them and whether their voices still mattered later in the twentieth century.
Rose fails to mention the iconic 1964 Sonny ListonMuhammed Ali (when he still was Cassius Clay) heavyweight
championship fight in Miami Beach and its effect on race relations in southeast Florida. I also wish the author would
have at least taken the narrative up to the 1980 riots surrounding the death of Arthur McDuffie, a Black motorcyclist, at
the hands of four Miami police officers. Finally, the book needs a good copy editor; a reputable press such as LSU
should easily catch the spelling and factual mistakes that exist throughout the text. One should not have to read that
John Marshall was Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1963 (161). That, however, is the fault of the
press, not the author. Those caveats aside, this is a book that deserves to be read for its insights on both Florida history
and the history of civil rights.
DOI:10.3138/CJH.ACH.51.3.05
Steven Noll, University of Florida
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Noll, Steven. "The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 18961968."
Canadian Journal of History, vol. 51, no. 3, 2016, p. 629+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477085856&it=r&asid=97ab89f4a073c55fa727878886d2a22c.
Accessed 2 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477085856
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The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil
Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 1896
1968
Felipe Hinojosa
Journal of Southern History.
82.3 (Aug. 2016): p728.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 18961968. By Chanelle N.
Rose. Making the Modern South. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. [xvi], 315. $47.50, ISBN
9780807157657.)
In The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 18961968, historian
Chanelle N. Rose documents the rise of the African American freedom struggle in a city known more as a tourist
destination than as a center for civil rights activism. Beautifully written and using an impressive amount of primary
documents, Rose's book traces the emergence of the black freedom struggle in relation to the Latin Americanization of
the city and the multiple and evolving approaches to civil rightsfrom accommodationist to radicalas black activists
"exposed Miami's paradise image as simply a facade" (p. 91).
Rose convincingly argues that "the interplay between tourism and racial disparities" in Miami complicates the narrative
of black civil rights in the South (p. 242). Without question, Miami is a city of contradictions. The Jim Crow laws that
severely limited African American life in Miami often did not apply to Spanishspeaking migrants or to tourists of
African descent. "Darkskinned" Latinos, in other words, were often served in public places deemed for whites only.
This "peculiar Jim Crow" experience was a calculated move that white business owners and politicians practiced as
they envisioned Miami as a gateway city to Latin America (p. 183).
Throughout the book, Rose does a nice job of highlighting Miami's unique history of tourism and immigration. With its
palm trees, posh hotels, and connections to Latin American commerce, Miami is somewhat of an anomaly in the South.
It is a southern city with close ties to Latin American culture and a place with a "'triethnic' character" that in many
ways set the stage for black civil rights struggles (p. 184). Much of the black population migrated from Key West and
the British West Indies, while others were middleclass professionals from other parts of the South who saw Miami as a
place of opportunity. In the postwar era, "[t]he purchasing power of Spanishspeaking visitors" forced Miami's tourist
economy to move away from simply catering to a wealthy white population (p. 163). Add to that mix the Cuban exiles
who arrived in Miami after 1959 and were afforded an honorary white status. Against this multiethnic backdrop,
African Americans in Miami organized groups like the Interdenominational Minister's Alliance, the Negro Uplift
Association, the Negro Civic League, branches of the NAACP, and others. Each of these groups practiced various
forms of political resistance. Some were militant, others moderate, and some, especially in the church, practiced an
accommodationist resistance that relied on negotiating and collaborating with the white establishment.
In this timely and important book we get a clear picture of the different groupsblack churches, Jewish groups, white
progressivesthat throughout much of the twentieth century challenged racism in Miami even as they collectively
worked to maintain the city's importance as a tourist destination. That juggling actwhich shows the flexibility of white
supremacy when pressured by capitalist interestsis what makes this book such a significant contribution to black and
Latina/o studies. Moving beyond the black/white binary provides a more complete history of Miami and a closer
understanding of "the nuances of southern race relations" (p. 8). The book also pushes the analysis away from the
American West as the haven for studies on multiethnic histories. From the beginning, Rose brilliantly situates her work
within an expanding framework of U.S. border cultures that pays attention to the connections with Latin America. The
result is an exceptional model of engaged and politically necessary scholarship that should be assigned in upperdivision
undergraduate courses and graduate courses interested in how transnational networks helped shape black civil
rights in the Deep South.
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FELIPE HINOJOSA
Texas A&M University
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Hinojosa, Felipe. "The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 1896
1968." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 3, 2016, p. 728+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460447815&it=r&asid=0852e5c92248eeed6dd61a8e13db5601.
Accessed 2 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460447815
Leigh on Rose, 'The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 1896-1968'
Author:
Chanelle N. Rose
Reviewer:
Devin T. Leigh
Chanelle N. Rose. The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 1896-1968. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. 385 pp. $47.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8071-5766-4.
Reviewed by Devin T. Leigh (University of California, Davis)
Published on H-Florida (September, 2015)
Commissioned by Jeanine A. Clark Bremer
The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami is the first book written by Chanelle N. Rose, associate professor of history and co-coordinator of the African Studies Department at Rowan University, New Jersey. The book is a social and political history of the long civil rights movement in Miami, a unique city in the American Deep South. According to Rose, Miami is unique because the city’s white power structure had an historic investment in a resort-style tourism that depended upon the perpetuation of a facade: a racially progressive national reputation that masked widespread inequality. In other words, white civic elites were historically more interested in keeping their lucrative tourist economy going by avoiding the explosive social unrest that characterized other cities in the New South during the civil rights movement than in actually changing the city’s institutions of systematic racial oppression. Rose surveys seventy years of black activists and black-led organizations in Miami fighting to achieve first-class citizenship from this racist power structure. In doing so, she sets to paper the protracted struggle for personhood in what she describes as an often neglected, racially heterogeneous southern US border culture during the volatile era of Jim Crow.
Rose obtained her degrees from Florida International University and the University of Miami. The Struggle is a refurbishing of her 2007 dissertation, Neither Southern nor Northern: Miami, Florida and the Black Freedom Struggle in America’s Tourist Paradise, 1896-1968. Understandably, Rose demonstrates an exceptional knowledge of the breadth of Afro-history in Miami. She makes considerable use of both the HistoryMiami and Black Archives, and she demonstrates a solid understanding of texts by Marvin Dunn, Raymond Mohl, Melanie Shell-Weis, and N. D. B. Connolly that pertain directly to her work. Historians of Miami will recognize iconic scholars throughout her text, from Dorothy Jenkins Fields to Paul George and Stetson Kennedy. But how successful Rose is at integrating the historiography on the New South, African American/West Indian relations, the broader civil rights movement, and US border cultures is for another reviewer to judge. Rose employs William H. Chafe’s concept of the white, tourist “progressive mystique” as the central organizing principle for her analysis of historic race relations in Miami (p. 7).
The Struggle is a difficult book to review because Rose covers an enormous amount of ground. She claims that her work “is not intended to offer a conclusive history of Miami’s black freedom struggle,” but this is often hard to believe (p. 11). Her work is broad and appears to strive for completeness. Sometimes the book takes on an encyclopedic tone, listing black figures and black-led organizations from Miami’s past. Rose addresses Caribbean transnationals, Garveyites, black boosters, militant radicals, Pan Africanists, leftist labor leaders, moderates, conservatives, liberal Jewish transplants, anticommunists, white supremacists, New Dealers, NAACP heads, accomodationists, gradualists, Spanish tourists, Latin immigrants, Cuban exiles, grassroots desegregationists, Black Nationalists, and more. Each of these groups appears to be represented by a half-dozen organizations with their own acronyms in any given decade. This broad scope is typical of a refurbished dissertation, and one gets the sense that Rose has created many opportunities for future projects. She has built a basic scaffolding of major players and events in the struggle for black liberation in Miami; any one of her chapters could be expanded into a book of its own, a book where the author is permitted to narrate more, question more, and more fully explore the inner emotions of her characters.
At the risk of being reductive, the next three paragraphs will attempt to summarize the chronology Rose sets forth in regard to the long struggle for civil rights in Miami. At first, there is a “tourist progressive mystique” (p. 7). This promotional image was constructed mainly by white business elites who desired to control the pace of racial change in accordance with their financial interests. Later, these elites wanted to establish ties with Latin America that would foster business and thwart communism during the Cold War. This became the context in which early black boosters and militant radicals lobbied for social change, often amidst significant intraracial and interethnic tensions. In the 1930s, the black liberation struggle became defined by a more “broad range of black protest,” symbolized by accomodationists and militants whose activism was shaped by the liberal context of the New Deal (p. 66). In the 1940s and 1950s, black liberation movements won an increasing number of tangible concessions against a volatile Jim Crow segregationist structure. Nonetheless, certain segments of the black liberation struggle felt that these were only token concessions, granted by a white power structure that was ultimately unwilling to concede systematic change. This appears to be one of the main arguments set forth by Rose: elites in tourist-resort cities like Miami will be motivated to do only what is necessary to protect their image and nothing more.
The Struggle emphasizes the period from 1950 to 1968. The first 92 pages take the reader up to 1950, with the last 150 pages discussing themes from these last eighteen years. In fact, the first thirty-five years of Miami history are given particularly short shrift, covered in only twenty-six pages. Chapter 4 addresses political alliances between black activists and liberal Jewish transplants from the North in the context of Cold War hysteria. Chapter 5 and 6 focus on the pivotal role of the NAACP in causes like school and housing desegregation after 1954. There is also a discussion of political gradualism in Florida’s postwar administration and coverage of a face-off between the NAACP and an anticommunist group. Chapter 7 discusses how the Latinization of Miami after World War II transformed the black civil rights struggle. The elite’s willingness to profit by catering to dark-skinned, Spanish-speaking tourists while simultaneously denying first-class citizenship to native blacks resulted in an arbitrary racial caste system. Activists leveraged the hypocrisy of this system against image-conscious moderates as a tactic to accelerate social change. This resulted in a Faustian bargain: leaders consented to desegregation to preserve the progressive image, but real change was once again deferred, resulting in the social unrest of the 1980s, when no less than four race riots occurred in Miami.
Chapter 8 explores how modernizing elites and activists collaborated to secure Miami’s Pan-American reputation as “Gateway to the Americas.” Finally, chapter 9 explores how the modern black liberation struggle was shaped by emerging groups: disgruntled Black Power advocates, Liberty City rioters, and Cuban exiles. The latter group’s privileges in the context of whiteness, Cold War federal aid, the ability to speak Spanish, and their “staunchly political conservative ideology” drove a new wedge between Anglos fleeing the city and the black communities that remained (pp. 244-255).
Above all else, Rose’s The Struggle is dedicated to complicating the story of the fight for black freedom in Miami, showing how the many nuances and tensions of Miami’s black liberation movement disrupted “the normative narrative of a biracial South” (p. 8). By augmenting the standard cast of dramatis personae of civil disobedient radicals and white supremacist racists with moderate black boosters, foreign nationals, Jewish transplants, and conservative Cuban exiles, Rose reminds her readers that the historic battle lines for racial equality in the Deep South were not necessarily drawn according to the one-drop rule. There are sections where Rose juxtaposes dynamic leaders in the black liberation struggle with different political outlooks, such as the accomodationist John Culmer and the militant Sam Solomon. These moments are exceptional. Rose does justice to the viewpoints of both her subjects without taking sides. In doing so, she demonstrates the “multifaceted forms of struggle for racial empowerment” (p. 5). Moreover, Rose does not downplay interethnic or intraracial tensions. Instead, she sees them as opportunities to be honest about the complexity of struggles for social justice in a multiethnic city.
One of the downsides to The Struggle, however, is there remains a lack of nuance in regard to segregationists and non-allies. Rose assumes that her readers will understand where the prejudices of white boosters, or black elites like Joe Kershaw, in Miami’s history originate. Whether Miami’s racism is formed by a perceived competition for opportunities, by fear or hatred of cultural differences, or by other factors entirely, Rose leaves this question largely untouched. As a result, the narration is occasionally reduced to a dichotomous battle between good activists and bad elites. The good activists are given all of the wonderful nuance and complexity stated above, while the bad elites are used as a backdrop for the valorization of heroes. When summing up a particular section and restating her thesis, Rose tends to attribute the idea of a tourist progressivism solely to white elites, despite stating elsewhere that black boosters, newspapers, and accomodationists also bought into the assumptions of Miami progressivism. As is sometimes the case with histories written to document the struggle of a particular minority group, The Struggle credits oppressed peoples with action when something positive occurs yet depicts them as acted upon when something negative occurs.
Rose ends The Struggle by suggesting that complete social change in Miami remains deferred. Black Miamians continue to face such systematic issues as foreclosures, police brutalities, disproportionate incarceration rates, housing discrimination, unequal employment competition, a widening economic gap, and a brain drain to other regions of the New South. In an epilogue that takes the history of the struggle up to 2013, Rose cites the murder of Trayvon Martin by the neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman. To this reviewer, the inclusion of this event symbolizes the way that the otherwise exceptional nuances of The Struggle break down at critical moments. Rose cites the incident as an example of the continued brutality against blacks, but brutality by whom? Are we to place Zimmerman in the same camp as the segregationists, supremacists, or civic boosters of Miami’s history? Are we supposed to place Martin in the same camp as people like Herbert Brooks, who was lynched in the 1920s? In other words, when we think about this recent incident, does Rose want us to see two complex people with nuanced motivations? Or does she want us to see two people—one black and one not—who exemplify a racial binary between the oppressed and the oppressor?
A final point of critique is that The Struggle is difficult to read because it conforms to some of the awkward conventions that are typically associated with history dissertations. Recurring abstract concepts like progressive tourist mystique and civic boosterism often stand in for more meaningful discussions of the factors that drive the story’s antagonists. On this note, the idea of a tourist economy is helpful for understanding why desegregation was initially less violent in Miami than in other New South cities, but its explanatory power is ultimately limited. What other cities, tourist destinations or not, have succeeded in making the kind of systematic changes that Rose suggests the elites and moderates avoided?
On a technical note, The Struggle exhibits a writing habit that is symptomatic of our graduate training in history. This habit is the presence of lengthy topic sentences, sometimes five or six lines long, that strive to be impenetrable. In these sentences, the subject and the verb are occasionally separated by as many as three lines. Here is an example: “The desire of African American leaders to help cultivate Miami’s tourist progressive mystique by embracing a civic boosterism that served their own economic interests while fostering interracial conciliatory relations often resulted in their decision to distance themselves from black foreigners, particularly transient Bahamians who had less invested than permanent residents or citizens forced to live under oppressive Jim Crow conditions” (p. 26).
In this instance, would it be simpler to say “Some African American leaders wanted to help cultivate Miami’s progressive mystique,” and then break the remaining content into additional sentences? Also, does the passive-voice combination of the abstract subject (desire) and the qualified verb (often resulted) alleviate responsibility from the leaders who actually made the choice to distance themselves? This comment is not intended as a minor critique of writing, though this reviewer accepts that it may be seen that way. Rather, this critique is meant as an opportunity to discuss some of the popular conventions that are encouraged in our genre. These conventions make modern historical works difficult to read, especially for those outside of academia but even for those within its halls.
In 2014, the historian N. D. B Connolly demonstrated in his book A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Making of Jim Crow South Florida that the clichéd political binary between the racist, conservative capitalist and the radical, liberal reformer was complicated during Miami’s long struggle for civil rights. Connolly argued that both parties had significant roles to play in processes that hurt the greater black community, such as urban renewal, slum clearance, gentrification, and revitalization. Now, one year later, Rose has complicated the clichéd racial binary of activists in Miami’s long civil rights movement during the same period, 1896 to 1968. The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami is an exceptional history in at least two respects: for bestowing on black activists the full range of political tactics, and for using Miami as a case study to demonstrate how race relations have been both supported and undermined by a tri-ethnic border city dependent upon a tourist economy. On this note, Rose’s chapters on the intersections between the black liberation struggle and the postwar Latinization of Miami will make valuable reading for any graduate seminar.
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=44878
Citation: Devin T. Leigh. Review of Rose, Chanelle N., The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 1896-1968. H-Florida, H-Net Reviews. September, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44878
Chanelle N. Rose. The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America’s Tourist Paradise, 1896–1968.
Irvin D. S. Winsboro
Am Hist Rev (2016) 121 (2): 576-578.
“Unique” is a word most scholars eschew. Yet, Chanelle N. Rose boldly uses the adjective to describe Miami’s long and troubling history of race relations. While the reader’s first inclination is to ponder whether Rose should have used “unusual” rather than “unique” to describe her subject, by book’s end Rose establishes that “[t]he City of Miami and its freedom struggle are unique in a number of ways” (2). In developing this thesis, Rose contends that the confluence of a tourist-minded white elite with the Latinization of Miami tempered this Deep South city’s definitions of blackness, resulting in racial prerogatives for some Latinos with African blood that proved anomalous for Florida and most of Dixie. Throughout the book, the author develops this theme of transformative heterogeneity, and traces the ethnic and racial cross-fertilization that shaped Miami’s inner struggle to live with the myth of southern moderation despite the reality of color lines. The story is unique in that Miami exhibited a rich and sometimes volatile background of race, ethnicity (particularly a strong Latinization), geography (America’s gateway to Latin America and vice versa), tourism (a southern paradise image), northern transplants (particularly Jewish-Americans), and intra-urban, racial-ethnic permutations that typified no other southern metropolis.
Rose’s story of the “Magic City” and its history of exceptionalism will appeal primarily to scholars and lay persons interested in an almost overly detailed focus on the persons and organizations that shaped the racial/ethnic currents of Miami’s urban district. In many regards, the sizable black population, supplemented over the decades by a largely black Bahamian and Caribbean influx, coupled with the growing Jewish-American population of Miami by mid-century, defined and fomented the inner struggle of the area to wrest measures of equality from the entrenched white power structure. That scenario took a dramatic turn after the rise of Fidel Castro and the resulting massive migration of Cubans into Miami; by 2013 Hispanics/Latinos comprised almost 66 percent of the population of la Ciudad Mágica. Miami’s development as a historically maturating racial mixture and ethnic polyglot has not only set it apart from other Deep South cities but, as Rose surmises, defined “social forces specifically within the context of Miami’s black freedom struggle” (4). This evolving thesis is sound on many levels, but it is a continuation and expansion of earlier works by Paul S. George, Marvin Dunn, Gregory W. Bush, and the late Raymond A. Mohl.
The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America’s Tourist Paradise, 1896–1968 builds on these authors’ foundational works by describing in depth a large number of leaders and organizations from the black community, augmented with and reinvigorated by the growing Jewish-American population in the 1950s and 1960s, that challenged the white elites of Miami through a series of direct, indirect, and legal challenges to the city’s racial fault lines. This is a complex story complicated by the civic elites’ propagation of a “tourist progressive mystique” (93) that oftentimes concealed the racist underbelly of Miami from outsiders. The book encompasses three major themes as it traces the origin and development of the black experience in twentieth-century Miami: “The Racial Politics of Boosterism, Black Protest, and Jim Crow Tourism” (part I, two chapters); “Post–World War II Protest, Northern Migration, and the Illusion of Moderation” (part II, three chapters); and “Civil Rights Liberalism and Black Power in America’s Burgeoning Tri-Ethnic City” (part III, four chapters). An insightful epilogue follows these three demarcations of the book and adds insight to the reader’s historical and contemporary understanding of Miami’s largely unconventional social/ethnic history. Rose has woven a rich narrative of South Florida’s singular race/ethnic struggle into a case study that will prove essential reading for scholars of South Florida or those interested in the growth and development of the region into the U.S.’s “Gateway to the Americas” (164).
Rose presents her case well, but could have increased the effectiveness of the study by providing a more measured analysis of how Miami’s leaders and organizations fit within the broader theaters of struggle in Florida and the nation. Indeed, the reader at times becomes overwhelmed by the continuous stream of names, organizations, abbreviations, and acronyms; there are eighty-one such examples listed in the “Abbreviations” section alone. The author’s depiction of Governor LeRoy Collins and certain white “progressive” factions in Miami as moderates is also problematic. Did the metropolis’s residents of Colored Town see the exclusion actions of these powerful persons and elements as moderate or simply lacking the more incendiary rhetoric of even worse-behaved segregationists in the South? Did the fact that Miami instituted Florida’s first attempted public school integration at Orchard Villa Elementary in the fall of 1959, followed by white flight and a resegregated school and district by early 1960, demonstrate the Magic City’s spark of progressivism? Or did the election of the antisegregationist mayor Robert King High in the same year as the failed racial experiment at Orchard Villa ostensibly demonstrate a moderate streak; if so, the pressing question for historians is how deep and how pervasive was this streak in the backrooms of white power in Miami? This notion of moderation and how to define it appropriately from an interracial perspective is a subject of recent studies on Florida history. Rose would have done well to have properly addressed the Miami-Dade Public School’s desegregation of Base Elementary at the Homestead Air Reserve Base at the time of the Orchard Villa experiment, and fully mined Bush’s foundational work on the black struggle and public space in South Florida in his chapter contribution on Virginia Key Beach and the black struggle for public space in my edited collection, Old South, New South, or Down South? Florida and the Modern Civil Rights Movement (2009).
Even so, The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami presents a valuable case study of a South Florida “paradise” that cries out for more local and national integrative analysis in the literature. Rose explores many arcane nooks and crannies of her subject and produces, as a result, a stimulating and useful expose of how racial and ethnic heterogeneity can somehow, and sometimes, derail conventional racial habits.