You guys know what the last restaurant to officially integrate was?
The old Biscayne Cafeteria in Coral Gables.
Any of you old enough to remember Miami in the late 70's and 80's?
Some of the worst race riots in American history.
Miami may be a cosmopolitan city, but beyond the facade of South Beach and the gates of Gables By The Sea that melting pot is really a bubbling cauldron.
I remember back in the 90's I was running a marketing program for the airport Radisson and the Cuban American Association was holding a rally at the hotel for their candidate for President, David Duke.
He was the head guy for The Klan.
Not saying Miami sucks, just saying you don't have to go to Mississippi to look for racism.
Just go anywhere in America and you will find it, or if you are a minority like myself, it will find you.
I lived in Miami well before the '70's and '80's and not that long after, I lived in some southern cities, including Atlanta and Tallahassee, and central Florida near Brevard County. There might have been riots in Overtown in the late '70's and '80's, but I don't believe Miami was nearly a racist city as the real southern towns were. I don't remember Miami having the school integration problems that they had in the deep south. I don't know, maybe things changed later on. Could it be there were frictions between the black population and the later influx of Hispanics? When you think about it, the riots that occurred in this country did not occur in hardcore southern cities, but northern cities, or cities that did not have the rigid code of segregation like Birmingham or other cities. There were some demonstrations in Birmingham, but as I remember, they were put down very quickly by brutal racist police. I remember riots in cities with huge ghetto populations, like Washington, DC, Detroit, Los Angeles (Watts), etc. They were not southern, and the segregation was more de facto, not based on hundreds of years enforced segregation like existed in the deep south.
The fact that there was a Cuban American organization that supported David Duke might not mean that this was a mainstream organization. I would suspect that this was just a fringe organization. I think that Cuban Americans in south Florida have tended to be more conservative, but not Klan-like racist. And no, they're not one and the same.
Before I moved from south Florida in the early '60's, I recall going into the old Jefferson store near 163rd Street. I recall dual drinking fountains, and it was obvious that these fountains had originally been intended to be separate, for blacks and whites. I remember looking at them with a friend, puzzled. The signs had been removed, so it was not possible to tell which fountain had been intended for which race. This was highly unusual, and something I rarely saw, especially in Miami.
I know there was racism in Miami, and I'm sure there still is, but I think it might be much worse in the deep south, even today.
And I've wondered, since I started following recruiting in the early to mid '80's, why all the southern black kids, including kids from north Florida, would want to go to SEC schools or FSU. I can't understand why they don't want to get away from the southern environment.
