Chanelle N. Rose. The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami

“Unique” is a word most scholars eschew. Yet, Chanelle N. Rose boldly uses the adjective to describe Miami’s long and troubling history of race relations. While the reader’s first inclination is to ponder whether Rose should have used “unusual” rather than “unique” to describe her subject, by book’s end Rose establishes that “[t]he City of Miami and its freedom struggle are unique in a number of ways” (2). In developing this thesis, Rose contends that the confluence of a tourist-minded white elite with the Latinization of Miami tempered this Deep South city’s definitions of blackness, resulting in racial prerogatives for some Latinos with African blood that proved anomalous for Florida and most of Dixie. Throughout the book, the author develops this theme of transformative heterogeneity, and traces the ethnic and racial cross-fertilization that shaped Miami’s inner struggle to live with the myth of southern moderation despite the reality of color lines. The story is unique in that Miami exhibited a rich and sometimes volatile background of race, ethnicity (particularly a strong Latinization), geography (America’s gateway to Latin America and vice versa), tourism (a southern paradise image), northern transplants (particularly Jewish-Americans), and intra-urban, racial-ethnic permutations that typified no other southern metropolis.

Art history · Jazz · Miami · Paradise · Racism · Sociology · White (mutation) · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies