The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

In December of 1982, the Cuban-born Luis Alvarez, a Miami police officer, shot and killed Neville Johnson Jr., a young Black Caribbean American man, in an Overtown arcade as Johnson was playing a video game. The following conflagration left eighteen dead and shut down more than two hundred businesses. There was no conviction.

In terms of crops, Florida was once best known for its oranges. When Andrew Jackson took control of Florida in 1821, he established two counties: Escambia and St. Johns, with the Suwannee River as the dividing line. In 1845, when Florida became a state, Central Florida was organized under the name Orange County for its abundance. But now Florida’s

it may be said of the Reconstruction Era that the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow…a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man better than the black man.”

Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America;