If you forget history, they say you have to repeat it. We as a society must therefore rely on the custodians of history to help us regain lost stories, interpret meanings, and direct our attention to moments large and small that bear an obligation to collective memory.
Marvin Dunn is one such influencer. The retired psychology professor taught for decades at the FIU and during this time started the garden project Roots in the City to beautify neglected parts of the city and to offer jobs to people with low qualifications. His book “Black Miami in the 20 local area.
Dunn is also known for his excavations of the small town of Rosewood, Florida, which resulted in a horrific racial massacre while writing his four books in the 1920s.
Dunn was at the Perez Art Museum today, on the 125th anniversary of the founding of the city, for his significant impact on the history and progress of Miami.
FIU Magazine: Your work deals with the social aspects of Miami’s history. It goes beyond building buildings and the rise of commerce to talk about the people behind that growth.
Marvin Dunn: When I first started studying black history in Miami 30 or 40 years ago, I found there was almost nothing in the history books. You would find information about black workers as workers and all that. But once you get past the workers at the bottom of the economic pile and some black millionaires like the Stirrups and the Dorseys, most of the black story is left out, especially the context in which all of these things happened. How do you explain what was going on in housing, politics, education, what happened to schools as our community grew?
How could the neglected history of Black Miami best be taught in our community?
We have to do this through schools and the internet. That’s why I’m working very hard on digitizing my material on the history of Black Miami [see dunnhistory.com] and turn my book into an audiobook. We have to reach the next generation virtually. Young people don’t go to museums. We need to teach our history through a medium that we know is easily accessible to people.
I went to high school during Black History Month in February and there must have been 800 students in the room and I asked how many had ever heard of Arthur McDuffie [a Black former Marine beaten to death by police, whose acquittal in 1980 spurred riots in Miami]. No hand went up. I wonder, how many will know who George Floyd was 40 years from now?
My mission now is to save these stories, to preserve the memories and knowledge of these events so that we do not repeat them.
It’s important to keep the stories and tell them to our young people, not pointing blame or blame, but just making people aware of what happened and why it happened and what we need to do to keep those things from happening again . My impression is that we can teach history virtually because we can give a lot of information to researchers, just curious people who just want to know what happened. For this we need an archive like the one I have at the FIU.
With all that you know and have written about the history of inequality, do you have hope for the future?
Yes, because I see young people, I am in contact with young people and I don’t hear the hostility, suspicion and suspicion that I hear among some of us who have been around for a long time. When you go to a Miami-Dade County public high school and watch the kids interact, that’s encouraging.
Young people give me hope. I think they have more capacity and interest in reaching out to others who are different from the adults.
What should residents of Miami and the wider area know about Black Miami and its history?
I want everyone to know that most of the African Americans in Miami-Dade are not poor, not homeless. People should know that most African Americans really belong to the middle class and beyond, that most of us don’t live in slums fighting crime and drugs. This image of the black community needs to be changed. That’s why I started taking FIU students to Overtown 40 years ago – to build gardens on vacant lot – because I wanted them not to see Liberty City, what we saw in the media. We are a living community, not a downtrodden, dangerous segment to avoid.
It’s great to celebrate the many communities within the larger South Florida collective, but will we ever be one?
At some point we’ll just become a Miami. If we win the Superbowl or the Miami Heat wins the national championship, we become a Miami. We also became a Miami during Hurricane Andrew in 1992. This calamity brought us together. Neighbors started talking to people they didn’t even know lived across the street and helped each other. It didn’t matter if you were Cuban or black or white. If you needed help, we helped each other through this crisis. The same happened with the 1926 hurricane. The tragedy brings people together, at least for a short time. This also applies to sports for a short time.
What we need is something that will bring us together for a long time, more than just a few days or a couple of weeks. We look for the magic that brings us together in a way that lasts beyond the moment.
History teaches us that such harmony can be elusive.
I just want to say, and I first made this comment about progress as a community a year or two ago: we need to feel each other’s pain. Those of us who are African American must feel the pain of the Cuban people and Cuban Americans here. They are in pain, they have lost a lot and people have died. They have legitimate pain that we who are not Cubans should acknowledge, and those of us who are blacks, especially African Americans, also have pain that everyone else should acknowledge. Don’t say get over it, slavery was 100 and a few years ago your parents weren’t slaves. This does not go down well with people who have risen from the depths.
So we need the people who are feeling our pain, and we need to move forward without feeling guilty, without anyone feeling responsible for what is going on. Put aside feelings of guilt, put aside shame, put aside reproaches, and find out what we need to do to create a united community. For me, that means recognizing every pain, including that of the white Miamians who felt they had been pushed out of their community. Everyone has suffered something over the past 125 years. Let us acknowledge and respect that.
The post Black history is Miami history | FIU magazine first appeared on Daily Florida Press.
from Daily Florida Press https://dailyfloridapress.com/black-history-is-miami-history-fiu-magazine/
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