Liberty City: What I-95 Destroyed and What Survived
Near Miami, Florida
Liberty City exists in its current form largely because of a highway.
In the nineteen forties and fifties, the heart of Black Miami was a neighborhood called Overtown, sometimes called Little Broadway. Overtown had Lyric Theatre, hotels that welcomed Black performers when downtown hotels would not, jazz clubs where Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald performed, a dense commercial and cultural life built over decades. Miami's Black community had made something extraordinary in Overtown under the constant pressure of segregation.
Then the city decided to run Interstate Ninety-Five through it.
When the southernmost section of the interstate opened in nineteen sixty-eight, it had displaced eight thousand five hundred households from Overtown. The elevated highway physically demolished the neighborhood, splitting it into fragments and cutting off the blocks that remained from the surrounding city. Thousands of families moved north to Liberty City.
Liberty City had existed since the nineteen thirties as a neighborhood built specifically to contain Black residents who were being pushed out of other areas. It grew fast as the Overtown diaspora arrived. By the nineteen seventies it held half of Miami's Black and Afro-Caribbean population, many of them in overcrowded housing, underserved by city services, subject to aggressive policing.
On December seventeenth, nineteen seventy-nine, a Black insurance executive named Arthur McDuffie was stopped on his motorcycle by Miami police. He was beaten to death with flashlights. Five officers stood trial for manslaughter and evidence tampering, out of eight originally charged. An all-white jury acquitted all five on May seventeenth, nineteen eighty.
Liberty City erupted. Three days of rioting left at least eighteen people dead and caused an estimated one hundred million dollars in property damage. It was the first major American race riot since the nineteen sixties.
The neighborhood has been rebuilding ever since, slowly. The history of Liberty City is the history of what American cities do to Black communities, and what those communities build anyway.
