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.

The broken oasis is a motif in the post-emancipation South. Wilmington is but one example. Others include Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Rosewood, Florida. And Little Hayti, not the one in Miami but the long-lost Black town near Durham, named after the first Black republic and birthplace to Vogue’s André Leon Talley. And Zora Neale Hurston’s Eatonville, Flor