When entrepreneur Henry Flagler pushed to make Miami a city, which happened on July 28, 1896, the 368 residents at the time voted for it, among them 162 people of African descent. When he decided to build what eventually became the Florida East Coast Railway in the 1880s, opening up tourism and economic opportunities, he brought in African American workers from Georgia and Bahamians.
Between 1910 and 1929, African Americans also constructed landmark buildings such as Villa Vizcaya, Miami Woman’s Club, Plymouth Congregational Church, Freedom Tower, Booker T. Washington and Miami high schools and the Fisher Island estate. They also built the Lyric Theater for African American businessman Gedar Walker.
Yet, a half-century later, when Dorothy Jenkins Fields, then librarian at Myrtle Grove Elementary School in what is now Miami Gardens, looked for books about African Americans in Miami, she could not find any…