Overtown and the Highway That Cut It Apart
Near Miami, Florida
When Miami was born in eighteen ninety six, the Black laborers who cleared the land and built the railroad were forced by law to live in a segregated district the city plat labeled Colored Town. Residents came to call it Overtown, and against every obstacle it thrived. By the nineteen fifties it held hundreds of businesses and tens of thousands of people, and its nightlife district was so vibrant it was called the Harlem of the South.
Stars like Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, and Billie Holiday performed for white audiences on Miami Beach but were barred from its hotels, so they came to Overtown to sleep, eat, and play, filling clubs along the strip known as Little Broadway. Then came the highways. City planners had a route for Interstate Ninety Five that followed an old rail corridor, but downtown business interests rejected it.
Instead the interstate and a massive interchange were driven straight through the heart of Overtown in the nineteen sixties. Thousands of families were expelled, homes and businesses flattened, and the population collapsed from roughly fifty thousand to just over ten thousand. What had been one of the most vital Black communities in the South was broken apart by concrete, and it has never fully healed.
