Voices from a Black Miami Neighborhood: The Baa Haas, Liberty City, the Grove, and Beyond

This Palgrave Pivot is a personal and universal history of gain and loss. Via memoir and oral histories, Sharony Green, a native of Miami with ancestral roots in the American South and the Bahamas, sheds light on ups and down of African American residents before and after the Second World War. The author uses the ’Baa Haas, ’ an outlying community in Miami-Dade County, a region that is also a gateway to Caribbean and Latin America, as a starting place to think through such things. As early as the New Deal era, white powerbrokers desired to relocate people of African descent from the lucrative waterfronts to a desolate and sandy area about twenty miles northwest of Miami’s downtown. This community was later nicknamed the ’Baa Haas, ’ presumably because its nearby prehistoric beach resembled California’s Bajas beaches. Whether spelled Baa Haas, Bajas or Bahas, the tiny neighborhood, whose biggest landmark nowadays is Hard Rock Stadium, is noteworthy. It was not until whites themselves settled there first, beginning in the fifties with the help of the 1944 GI bill, that people of African descent, aided by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, at last moved there. Some arrived from older Miami communities like Liberty City, Overtown and Coconut Grove or even elsewhere in the States. Essentially, two federal initiatives collided with positive gains for the oppressed. As people increasingly find themselves displaced owing to gentrification, this book permits an opportunity for readers to see what had been possible for prospective black homeowners.

Sharony Green is Professor of History at the University of Alabama, USA.