Overtown Youth Center

The Overtown Youth Center opened in 1993 on NW 11th Street in Overtown, the neighborhood the city had confined to a segregated “Colored Town” at its 1896 incorporation and that the I-95 and I-395 interchange construction had reduced from a community of 50,000 to one of under 10,000 by 1980. The Center offers academic tutoring, athletic programming, arts instruction, and career preparation to young residents of the neighborhood, filling service gaps that the highway clearances and subsequent disinvestment created.

The Center operates from a campus that has expanded several times since its founding and serves several hundred young people annually. Its presence on NW 11th Street, within the former footprint of the neighborhood that Little Broadway anchored, gives it a direct institutional stake in resisting the climate gentrification now repositioning investment capital toward Overtown’s high-ground location.

The Center’s community benefit work connects to the broader organizing tradition that the Black Archives and the Miami Workers Center maintain in the neighborhood. The Center’s youth programs build the next generation of community leadership in a neighborhood that the I-95 construction stripped of the civic institutions, from fraternal lodges to mutual-aid societies, that had organized community life since the 1920s.