11th Grade Florida History

PROBLEMS AS A RESULT OF URBANIZATION:

“COLORED TOWN MIAMI”

Essential Question

What are the main factors that contributed to the collapse of Colored Town Miami (Overtown) due to urbanization?

PROBLEMS AS A RESULT OF URBANIZATION:“COLORED TOWN MIAMI”

Florida literacy Standards Alignment:

LAFS.1112.RH.1.2Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary that makes clear the relationships among the key details and ideas.

NGSSS - Social Science Standards Alignment:

SS.912.A.1.4Analyze how images, symbols, objects, cartoons, graphs, charts, maps, and artwork may be used to interpret the significance of time periods and events from the past.


Topic: Problems As A Result Of Urbanization:“Colored TownMiami”

Essential Question

What are the factors that contributed to the collapse of Colored Town Miami (Overtown) due to urbanization?

Learning Goals

With the urbanization of Miami neighborhoods, students will understand the role that urbanization played on Miami’s Colored Town and the impact that it has on the community today.

Overview

Students will learn how the urbanization of Downtown Miami had a huge impact on the social and economic development of Colored Town Miami and how the negative effects of urbanization can be seen across the United States during the late 19th and 20th Centuries.

Background information

Overtown is a historically African-American community in the City of Miami. As Miami, was developing around 1910, the city’s black residents were allowed to purchase land only in one designated quarter of Miami’s municipal limits, which became known as Colored Town. The name Overtown came from people referring that they were going “over town” to this neighborhood.

Materials

  • “Urbanization in America”
  • “The Golden Side of the Tracks”
  • K-W-L Chart:
  • Jigsaw worksheet

Activity Sequence

Introduction (3 minutes)

  1. Discuss the factors contributing to urbanization in the United States during the late nineteenth century. And how those factors lead to problems in Miami’s Colored town. (You may want to reference the link below titled “Understanding Urbanization in America”
  2. Ask students what do they know about “Colored Town Miami”?(1 minute)
  3. Ask students to complete the first two sections of the K-W-L chart. (1 minute)

Activity (10 minutes)

  • Students will read “The Golden Side of The Tracks” to get an understanding of the history of Overtown. (3 minutes) The teacher will split the reading into sections for the purpose of the Jigsaw activity.
  • Students will fill in the Jigsaw chart, while using the reading to help guide them. (3 minutes)
  • Each group will then share out at the end of the reading/activity to inform the other groups on the three main ideas of their reading. (4 minutes)

Closure (2 minutes)

  1. Students will complete the “L” section of the K-W-L chart (1 minute)
  2. Based on what we have read and learned, what social and economic problems were the people of “Colored Town” facing by the late 19th and 20th centuries due to urbanization? (1 minute)

Optional Extension:

Have students watch the video from overtown.com titled “Overtown: Inside/Out” on “This is Overtown” ( 2:20 minutes)

References for links

Additional resources to help your students understand “Urbanization in America,”

Reading/Resources:

“The Golden Side of the Tracks”-

K-W-L Chart:

Jigsaw worksheet: file:///C:/Users/289838/Downloads/jigsaw%20graphic%20organizer.pdf

The Golden Side of the Tracks

What’s So Important AboutOvertown?

Overtown is one of Miami’s oldest communities born before the City of Miami was founded. Henry Flagler, oil magnate turned railroad man, almost singlehandedly brought development to Florida by establishing the first statewide transportation system, the Florida East Coast Railroad. But Flagler did not lay the railroad tracks, build the hotels that dotted the landscape from St. Augustine to Key West nor construct Miami’s highways and byways. Blacks from the Bahamas, Georgia and other parts of the South did. The historic town of Overtown was the primary place they lived, which due to their hard work, became transformed into a bustling community, yet it struggled under the weight of racial hatred and oppression. Overtown rose to become the cornerstone of Black progress while reflecting the nature of race relations at the turn of the last century and beyond.

How Was Overtown Born?

Southern Blacks began arriving into South Florida en masse after the devastating freeze of the 1890s that wiped out farming in the region. Similarly, the Bahamian economy was collapsing as a result of overplanting, bringing a wave of Bahamians to Florida looking for work. The black community was called Colored Town (although other smaller communities also existed such as Coconut Grove.) Flagler designated the northwest corner of each of the cities he built to become the black living quarters THE GOLDEN SIDE OF THE TRACKS Some of Colored Town’s original black founders. One of the more successful businesses in Colored Town owned by S.W. Brown, so that he had a ready source of labor to build his hotels, who could be separated from the white population after working hours. Colored Town was a crowded, harsh place to live, deprived of even the most basic services, resulting in diseases such as yellow fever and smallpox running rampant.

Thriving Business Community

Despite these conditions, Colored Town became a leading center of black commerce. D.A. Dorsey became Miami’s first black millionaire by building houses for the local black population and starting the first black bank. Besides a plethora of family-owned businesses, a growing black professional community was established which included doctors, dentists, and hospitals. The community also had seven black newspapers and over a dozen community organizations including the Eastern Star Lodge, the Masons, the Elks, the Odd Fellows and more. Transportation blossomed along the heart of Colored Town, Second and Third Avenues, where automobiles, bicycles, horse-drawn carriages and wagons moved people and wares across the community. The church community provided not only a spiritual connection for blacks, but also a foundation for social and political activism as well as a source of public welfare.

The Harlem of the South

Most prominent in Colored Town was its entertainment palaces led by the Lyric Theater, which featured vaudeville, music, silent movies and more. Other venues included the Rockland Palace, the Harlem Square Club, the Cotton Club, the Ritz Theater, the Mary Elizabeth Hotel, the Sir John and many more. These clubs and theaters featured the greatest artists of The Lyric Theater, one of Overtown’s premiere venues. their day including Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Billie Holiday, and Cab Calloway to name a few. This entertainment served as a source of pride for the community but also directly related to entertainment serving the larger white community. Black entertainers who performed for the white community were not allowed to stay on Miami Beach or in traditional hotels, so they performed first for the white community and then in Colored Town, often for free, before getting some shuteye at a hotel in Overtown.

Racism Raises Its Ugly Head

Lynchings were not a rare occurrence in the black community. The Klan formally arrived in Miami in the 1920s, fomenting mob action against blacks, using dynamite to blow up homes, and running blacks out of town through force of violence. The police were not friends of the black community either. Many were from the South where attitudes concerning blacks were mixed at best. Blacks were routinely locked up under dubious vagrancy laws, outright torture was practiced against black prisoners including the use of electric chairs, and occasionally police officers committed murder against the black population with impunity.

The End of an Era

In the 1950s plans were laid to build an extension to Interstate 95. Although several alternatives existed, the chamber of commerce and the road department decided to build the expressway running through Overtown. With urban renewal and expressway construction, over 20,000 blacks lost their homes and a bustling black community lost its footing. What wasn’t taken by the construction of the roadway was taken through urban renewal, which for many blacks resulting in their removal from the community. Overtown today is not dead. Although the population is substantially smaller today than during its heyday, it faces a new threat, gentrification. During the building boom of the mid 2000s, tens of thousands of condos were planned in and around Overtown. Substantially all of the new homes were well above the I-95 changed the face of Overtown forever. Power U Center for Social Changes works to organize the community, affordability threshold of most Overtowners. In fact, the City of Miami was demolishing more affordable housing units than it was building despite the millions of dollars allocated for this purpose. With today’s building bust, the black community is seeking creative solutions to solve their housing crisis. Some are working with government officials to insure that money allocated for housing projects goes to low cost housing. Others are organizing to seek alternative avenues of housing for the poor and homeless including organizations such as Take Back the Land and the Miami Workers Center. Whatever the solutions will be, Overtowners will need a strong voice so that history does not repeat itself and the community once again fights for its heart and soul.

Why Should We Remember Overtown?

Overtown is the epitome of every city in America. Built by invisible workers who worked for subsistence wages while being forced to live in squalor while the larger city prospered. Yet despite the deprivation or maybe because of it, Overtown became a bustling center of black life for over half a century, and many Overtown residents hope its final chapter has not yet been written. Understanding the history and heritage, culture and contributions of Overtown as part of our collective history enriches us all. We share the joys of all that was accomplished and to learn from mindless hate that too often colors relations between men. The more we learn from our collective history, the better chance our children and grandchildren can build a future that values and enriches our shared journey…

Contact: Center for Cultural Preservation, PO Box 1066, Flat Rock, NC 28731

Jigsaw Recording FormName______

Topic ______

Instructions: Your teacher will divide you into small groups to discuss a specific topic.

GROUP #1: Discuss the 3 most important ideas about your topic. Each person in the group needs to write these ideas down below.

GROUP #1: - TOPIC ______

Main Idea # 1
Main Idea # 2
Main Idea # 3

GROUP # 2:Change groups so that you are in a group with different people. Each person shall share their notes from Group#1 with the new group while the new group takes notes.

Topic # 1: ______
1.
2.
3. / Topic # 2: ______
1.
2.
3. / Topic # 3: ______
1.
2.
3.

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENCES