Sublime

“More than three hundred years ago your forefathers were taken from the western coast of Africa as slaves. The people who dealt in the slave traffic were Christians. One of your famous Christian hymn writers, Sir John Newton, made his money from the sale of slaves to the New World. He is the man who wrote ‘How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds’ and ‘A

Historians think Vesey was born in Bermuda in 1757. He was sold to a planter in Haiti, who ultimately returned Denmark to his original owner because he had epilepsy. Once Vesey’s master settled in Charleston, a cosmopolitan hub, Vesey became literate. At a crossroads of history, his story is yet another reminder of the breadth of the antebellum Sou

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

And although he specifically denied any hierarchical intent, Hunter’s imagery inspired the obstetrician Charles White (1728–1813) to think about race as physical appearance.

This was not the case with the American Negro slave. He is unique among the black men of the world in that his past was taken from him, almost literally, at one blow. One wonders what on earth the first slave found to say to the first dark child he bore. I am told that there are Haitians able to trace their ancestry back to African kings, but any A

To be an American is to be infused with the plantation South, with its Black vernacular, its insurgency, and also its brutal masculinity, its worship of Whiteness, its expulsion and its massacres, its self-defeating stinginess and unapologetic pride.

After the funeral, while I was downtown desperately celebrating my birthday, a Negro soldier, in the lobby of the Hotel Braddock, got into a fight with a white policeman over a Negro girl. Negro girls, white policemen, in or out of uniform, and Negro males—in or out of uniform—were part of the furniture of the lobby of the Hotel Braddock and this w

There was also a community of Black Miamians in Liberty City, and one in Coconut Grove, though there, in the early twentieth century, Bahamian culture predominated. In the late 1920s, Zora Neale Hurston visited Miami and was delighted to witness a Bahamian dance. This prompted her to travel to the Bahamas,…

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Long before Vesey, there was the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, in 1739. Those insurrectionists, led by an enslaved Angolan named Jemmy, planned to go to Florida, another nation then, where freedom had been promised. But they were intercepted and killed, or deported as slaves to the Caribbean. Prohibitions on gatherings, education, and group mo