Miami metropolitan area
Miami
Overtown held 50,000 African-American and Afro-Caribbean residents before I-95 and I-395 cut through its core in the mid-1960s. The community fell to about 10,000 by 1980.
Overtown grew alongside Miami’s 1896 incorporation. African-American and Afro-Bahamian workers who built Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway settled in the area the city called “Colored Town,” a segregated district north of downtown that became the commercial and cultural heart of Black South Florida. By 1950 Overtown held approximately 50,000 residents. The Miami Downtown Development Board, working under the federal Housing Act of 1949, began acquiring parcels in the 1950s under urban-renewal designation. Construction of I-95 through the corridor in the early 1960s and the I-95/I-395 interchange near the end of the decade displaced more than 12,000 residents. By 1980 Overtown’s population had fallen to approximately 10,000. The Black Archives, History and Research Foundation of South Florida, founded by Dorothy Jenkins Fields in 1977, carries the record. Climate gentrification now pushes investment capital onto Overtown’s relatively high ground; the Underdeck park proposal beneath the I-395 ramps is the current remedial frame.