Miami's Liberty City Riot of 1968
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LONG ROAD TO REBELLION: MIAMI'S LIBERTY CITY RIOT OF 1968 by Eric G. Tscheschlok A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida August 1995 Copyright by Eric Tscheschlok 1995 ii LONG ROAD TO REBELLION: MIAMI ' S LIBERTY CITY RIOT OF 1968 by Eric G. Tscheschlok This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate' s thesis advisor, Dr. Raymond A. Mohl, Department of History, and has been approved by the members of his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the facul ty of The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts . SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: TheS'AdViSor ._ Chairperson, Department of History Dean, The Schmidt College of Arts and Humaniti es dies and Date iii ABSTRACT Author: Eric G. Tscheschlok Title: Long Road to Rebellion: Miami's Liberty City Riot of 1968 Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Raymond A. Mohl Degree: Master of Arts Year: 1995 This thesis examines the circumstances leading to the 1968 ghetto riot in the Liberty City community of Miami, Florida. After placing the Liberty City uprising in natioanl and local contexts, the thesis chronicles race relations and African American living conditions in Miami from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s. The thesis focuses upon major grievances of Miami's black community in the 1960s. These included deplorable housing conditions, economic exploitation, bleak employment prospects, racial discrimination, poor police-community relations, and economic competition with Cuban refugees who settled in the Miami area during the 1960s. The thesis argues that the riot in Liberty City constituted a form of African American protest against these factors. In brief, Miami's 1968 ghetto revolt marked an attempt by local black residents to improve their life chances and living standards by demanding empowerment within their own communities and control over the processes that affected their lives. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 - The Liberty City Riot in National and Local Contexts ................................ 1 Chapter 2 - Prologue to Unrest: The Pattern of Race Relations in the South and in Florida ........ 29 Chapter 3 - Shadows of Conflict: Race Relations and Miami's Black Community, 1896-1940 ........... 56 Chapter 4 - Sowing the Seeds of Discontent: Second- Ghetto Formation in Miami, 1940-1968 ......... 93 Chapter 5 - Black Activism and the Civil Rights Movement in Miami, 1940-1968 ................ 136 Chapter 6 -Of Riots and Ghettos: Origins, Course, and Aftermath of the Liberty City Uprising .................................... 199 Chapter 7 - Paving the Road to Rebellion: Ghetto Grievances .................................. 229 Bibliography ........................................... 285 v CHAPTER ONE THE LIBERTY CITY RIOT IN NATIONAL AND LOCAL CONTEXTS In 1898, social reformer Josiah Strong predicted that "the problem of the twentieth century will be the city." Five years later, Negro-rights advocate W. E. B. Du Bois declared that "the problem of the twentieth century" would be "the problem of the color-line." Both forecasts proved accurate, for in conjunction they prefigured the centrality of urban race relations in the formation of modern America. Moreover, these turn-of-the-century prophecies still hold relevance today. As historian Richard C. Wade noted in 1990, the relationship between blacks and whites in the nation's cities remains "both a central theme of American history and also the central test of American democracy." 1 Few people would dispute Wade's assertion, which by his own admission "seems almost self-evident." Yet, as Civil War scholar David M. Potter repeatedly observed, self-evidence is often a by-product of omniscient hindsight. That is, everything seems self-evident after the fact. Hence, because urban race relations emerged as the nation's foremost domestic crisis in the 1960s, the significance of that issue seems obvious to Americans in the 1990s. They, after all, confront urban and race-related dilemmas regularly and have never known otherwise. 2 To Americans in the 1950s, however, who lacked the ex post facto perspective of the succedent generation, the problematic implications of urban race relations did not appear especially self-evident. In fact, to most Americans at midcentury, DuBois's and Strong's utterances of racial and urban difficulties would have seemed well-nigh ludicrous. Despite the pervasiveness of Jim Crowism- customary and codified discrimination against blacks--the old racial caste system was showing some signs of decline. The United States Armed Forces, for example, began a slow process of desegregation in this period. At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a number of judgments ban ning state-sponsored segregation in housing, interstate transit, and education. These decisions, of course, culminated in the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared the racial segregation of schoolchildren to be an unconstitutional and "inherently unequal" practice with "no place" in the "field of public education. " 3 Moreover, around the time of the Brown decision, Southern blacks began organizing dozens of community-level movements to secure full citizenship rights for African Americans. Under the weight of these civil rights strug gles, the barriers of racial imparity began to fall in 2 rapid succession. To be sure, the readjustment of race relations in the South did not go uncontested. Using all possible means, including violence and intimidation, white Southerners resisted the civil rights onslaught and slowed school desegregation to a halt. Yet, this resistance ultimately failed to buttress the crumbling framework of state-sanctioned segregation and discrimination. African Americans continued to make sweeping legal and political gains, as virtually all forms of Jim Crow lost their official footing. 4 Not surprisingly, to many Americans the civil rights revolution held the promise of a "Second Reconstruction." Unlike its nineteenth-century predecessor, this latter-day Reconstruction, they believed, would succeed in establishing a truly colorblind democracy. 5 The momentous civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s reinforced this belief. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, for instance, aimed to eliminate color-based discrimination in employment, housing, and public facilities. That same year, the ratification of the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution exempted federal elections from all poll-tax requirements--devices long used by the South to immobilize the Negro electorate. Meanwhile, the 1965 Voting Rights Act banned other suffrage-restrictive artifices such as literacy tests, while empowering federal authorities to file suits challenging 3 the legality of state poll-tax laws. Accordingly, in 1966, the Supreme Court outlawed state poll taxes as "an invidious discrimination" that "[ran] afoul" of the concept of equal protection for all citizens. 6 Seemingly, these edicts marked the fruition of the long struggle for racial equality; they restored to African Americans the constitutional rights and personal freedoms that they had lost to the cause of white supremacy nearly a century before. Thus, to hopeful Americans of all races, such human rights breakthroughs seemed to portend the emergence of a "New Frontier" · and of a "Great Society" in which an integrated and open commonwealth was at hand. And, as most Americans envisioned, this New Frontier would take shape in the cities. This seemed only logical, as urbanization thrust whites and blacks into an interracial setting in which they inevitably came into contact, if only grudgingly and intermittently. 7 By the mid-1960s, then, the optimistic visions of many Americans--at least many white Americans--bore little semblance to the prognoses offered by Strong and Du Bois six decades earlier. America's millenial aspirations proved illusory, however. Just days after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Law--the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement--the all-black Watts district of Los Angeles erupted into a week-long riot. Tragically, Watts was merely 4 a foretoken of things to come. For the next three summers, racial unrest rent urban America asunder. From 1965 through 1968, city after city went up in flames, as the nation's black ghettos exploded into violent protest against long endured deprivations and injustices. These developments bore out the dire prophecies Strong and Du Bois: the city and the color line had, indeed, proved troublesome--a combustible mixture with deadly potential. 8 Throughout most of this riot-torn period, though, Miami, Florida escaped the nationwide pattern of violence. And, white Miamians anticipated no disruption of the status quo. After all, Miami's racial history stood in marked contrast with the strife-ridden past of cities like Detroit, which had endured three terrible race riots since the end of World War I. Miami had experienced no racial turmoil of this magnitude As a result, whites in Miami and in the rest of metropolitan Dade County perceived no threat from the racial turmoil that engulfed the rest of the nation. As the Wall Street Journal reported just weeks after the Watts rebellion, Miami was taking pride in the fact that "there has never been a major race clash here." 9 Owing to this "perfect" race-relations