00:00When most people think of Miami, they think of...
00:18But what many people don't know is the influence that blacks had on Miami.
00:25There was a very powerful, very active underground railroad for slaves coming into Florida to
00:31escape slavery, and many of those ended up going to the Bahamas.
00:36I remember some years ago finding a document in the Bahamian newspapers about the Bahamians
00:42coming over and rescuing the Seminoles off of Virginia Key and Key Biscayne, and that
00:48was a very common practice, and there were even some places in the Bahamas that were
00:52peopled by these runaway slaves from the United States.
00:55The first ferrying of black escaped slaves we know of from Georgia primarily to the Bahamas
01:01to freedom happened with these Bahamian fishermen encountering these people right here on these
01:06shores.
01:07And it's a very important part of our history.
01:09Blacks had a huge impact in Miami, from its inception to its progress, from the pirates
01:15in Biscayne Bay to its progressive civil rights movements.
01:20This is I-95 behind me.
01:22I-95 was put in to go directly through Overtown.
01:26It divided Overtown into east and west.
01:29Overtown went from some 40,000 people down to about 12 or 15,000 people in less than a
01:34decade.
01:35This overpass behind me is just one of the evidences of how the interstate was built to
01:40ride over the community.
01:41So that if you didn't really want to see black people, all you had to do was not look down.
01:45Overtown's population in 1960 was 34,000 plus people and today it's about 9,500.
01:50The expressway is probably the major bill in there.
01:52Based off of the book, Black Miami in the 20th Century by Dr. Marvin Dunn, The Black Miami
01:59is a documentary that takes you deeper inside America's magic city than you've ever been
02:06before.
02:06And to know about the future, you must learn about the past.
02:11But I think in order to appreciate the changes, both good and bad, you need to know what happened
02:15in the beginning.
02:16So I'd say study its origins to understand what was it like then and how it's changed
02:21today.
02:21Take an educated, inspiring, and entertaining journey deep into the roots of Miami's history.
02:29The Black Miami, a documentary coming soon.
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