Sublime

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 1989, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in Overtown, the Colombian-born police officer William Lozano crashed his car into a biker, Clement Lloyd, who was fleeing him. Another young Black man riding with Lloyd, Allan Blanchard, also died from the ensuing crash. Blanchard had just arrived in Miami from the Virgin Islands. Three days of uprisin

Though the Chemical Warfare Service ran tests on animals—goats were a favorite—it insisted that all gases and equipment be ultimately tested on humans. Those humans were soldiers, recruited with modest inducements such as extra leave time or appeals to patriotism. They participated in three types of tests. In the drop test, liquid was applied to th

In late July 1906, a couple of months after their contracts with Hunt expired, the government stepped in and sent home all of the Filipinos—except five who stayed on as witnesses in Hunt's trial. The court cases dragged on. Five Filipino witnesses were kept in America until March 1907. On March 20, they too returned to the Philippines.

Beth and Stacey didn’t know that some companies avoided using the shoddy ponds, nor did they know the potential health effects of hydrogen sulfide gas. According to Beth, the DEP told her only that hydrogen sulfide was naturally occurring.

Nineteen thirty-five was the year of the bomb: at National City Bank (today known as Citigroup), at post offices, at police stations. They exploded on holidays—New Year’s Day, the Fourth of July—or directly after Albizu’s speeches. Nobody was killed and nobody was convicted, but it wasn’t hard to guess who was responsible. “Some night, here, we wil