A World More Concrete

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It seemed like a good idea at the time. During the afternoon of 30 July 1969, more than a thousand men, women, and children gathered beneath Interstate 95, in the heart of Miami’s Central Negro District. The occasion was a ribbon- cutting ceremony for “one of America’s fi rst underexpressway parks.” Over the previous year, city officials and corporate and individual donors cobbled together thirty thousand dollars to erect jungle gyms, swings, other amusements on nearly fi ve acres of what city planners had already deemed “dead land.” Playground equipment replaced hundreds of houses and apartments that state road builders bulldozed, just a few years earlier, to make room for I- 95.1 The park was the brainchild of the city’s fi rst black city commissioner, M. Athalie Range. The owner of three funeral homes and several rental properties, Range had become the most recent entrepreneur to assume prominence as the nominal leader of Miami’s “Negro community.” A widow with children, she was also, notably, the fi rst woman to do so. The city’s under expressway park would bear Range’s name and enjoy endorsements from an influential, interracial coalition that included the city’s mayor, several white city commissioners, and past and present heads of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The City of Miami’s Tourism Bureau took scores of photographs at the opening ceremony and later publicized the event in national news outlets.2 Shadowed beneath a bustling freeway, Mayor Stephen Clark spoke to the residents of South Florida’s poorest neighborhood with what was likely unintended irony. “Miami does not shove socio- economic problems under the rug,” the mayor assured, “but in the spirit of enterprise, copes with them.”3 Celebrants at the park’s opening paid little attention to the new and already
wilting grass, which lay, in some places, right up against the legs of playground equipment. Somehow, dry sod, hastily planted, was supposed to grow in weak soil and scant sunlight. No one would say that a similar expectation had been placed on Miami’s poorer black children, even if the comparison seemed apt in the midst of underfunded schools, substandard housing, and minimal access to decent city services. Nor would anyone comment on the potential symbolism of a park that effectively rendered these kids invisible to travelers whisking above between the region’s airports, beaches, and suburbs. Below that freeway, in one of the most spectacular year- round climates in America, the embodied future of black Miami looked up at a concrete sky. The city’s black newspaper of record, the Miami Times, affirmed the general tenor of the occasion. It avoided reminding its readers about the twelve thousand people displaced to make room for Interstate 95. Over the previous decade, the freeway, as an instrument of slum clearance and regional prosperity, had been a project that Miami’s preeminent Negro weekly repeatedly championed. Now, the hum of half a million cars and trucks passing overhead provided an audible reminder of Greater Miami’s innovative leadership and economic progress, not of the park’s compromised air quality This book does not principally concern a single park opening or the disruptive force of an interstate highway. It attends to the political and commercial transactions that inspired these kinds of events, and it endeavors
to render a world in which “colored only” beaches, mass displacements of working families, and even playgrounds under highways seemed, at one
point or another, like good ideas.5 A World More Concrete argues that Americans, immigrants, and even indigenous people made tremendous investments
in racial apartheid, largely in an effort to govern growing cities and to unleash the value of land as real estate. Even today, land and its uses serve as expressions of acceptable governance. And between the 1890s and the 1960s, people built a sturdy and supple infrastructure for white supremacy that remains very much in place.

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