historymatters2020

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Welcome to Vizcaya’s Lost Lagoon.

*Photos courtesy of Vizcaya Museum & Gardens Archives

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Even when the silence speaks strong, the memories speak louder.

“I will never forget that day. All our houses [Were] destroyed they burned every house in that town… churches and everything, they left nothing. “ - Minnie Lee Langley, Rosewood Massacre Survivor, Sworn Statement given to Stephen F. Hanlon, Jacksonville, June 2, 1992

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She sang the Blues and it impacted our society, culture, and changed the course of music as we know it today.

Her name was Bessie Smith.

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‘This Shit Ain’t The Real Tobacco Road’, but it’s damn near close to have it back again.

“As the Seminoles were attacking Cape Florida Light, before Julia Tuttle sent orange blossoms to Hank Flagler, while Carl Fisher was dredging up a sandbar now known as Miami Beach, when there were streetcars, there was a landmark. It was called then in a rough and tumble way, Tobacco Road. The front was a respectable eating emporium, the rear was the speakeasy on the Miami River, a constant source of anguish to law enforcement agencies. There were dark doings, booze-wise, in those days, but the Tobacco Road has evolved into a great dining spot, a purveyor of hefty, yet super-economic drinks. It holds the oldest cabaret license in Miami and is open from bird song to 5 a.m. — damn near the clock around. Visit the historic Tobacco Road. It’s a good and easy habit to get into.”

- Hand inscribed passage on a door in the upstairs bar from the original Tobacco Road

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A strange and bitter fruit... life is just that. For Billie Holiday, life was a literal hell on earth created by a relentless man.

“It was called 'The United States of America versus Billie Holiday'. And that's just the way it felt... In plain English that meant no one in the world was interested in looking out for me.”- Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues (1956)

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We were a part of history today. A dark part. Our country was attacked by the greatest enemy that we fear the most... by US.

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Harmon Murray. Florida’s Premier Outlaw.

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"This may seem far-fetched to you, but as surely as the sun rises and sets, all of this [Miami] will come true." - Julia Tuttle

From: How the Mother of Miami, Julia Tuttle, Set the Future in Motion by Eliot Kleinberg, The Florida-Times Union, January 30, 2020

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A murder most foul. A haunting reminder in the State of Georgia’s history. Georgia’s Shame.

Did Leo Frank kill that girl? We may never know.

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A Counterculture Criminalized.

“The zoot suits represented a spectacular style that was once fashionable yet defiant. Amid patriotic appeals for conformity and austerity, the conspicuous clothing came to signify the second-generation’s dissatisfaction with the poverty and discrimination faced daily by the Mexican community.” - Elizabeth R. Escobedo, “The Pachuca Panic: Sexual and Cultural Battlegrounds in World War II Los Angeles” Western Historical Quarterly 38, No. 2 (2007): 136.

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During the Red Summer of 1919 a Black Woman Defended Her Space.

The Jim Crow South was the harshest of times in American history for African Americans for they were seen as “separate, but equal”. The story of Hattie Wright would ultimately question black self-defense and make the system of Jim Crow turn on its head.

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Anarchy, Massacre, and Hate.

The only words that can describe the events that occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina on November 10, 1898. A city overrun by white supremacists to bring back order to a society that was truly advance for its time. The unequivocal strides we aim for today to make the American society catch up to civil rights and equality is monumental. We must also remember our democracy is reliant on those who can set forth change to make it happen even in strangest of times we are not knowing what lies ahead for our future hopefully for the better and possibly for the worst.

DISCLAIMER: the Democrats I am mentioning in this post is not the Democrats we know today. This was before the political realignment of the parties after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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“For Americans, the hardest part of paying reparations would not be the outlay of money. It would be acknowledging that their most cherished myth was not real.” -

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!

HOW YELLOW JOURNALISM IMPACTED AND INFLUENCED AMERICAN JOURNALISM

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“My Father was a freeman, but my mother a slave, belonging to William Johnson, a wealthy farmer who lived at the time I was born near Independence, Jackson county, Missouri. While I was a small girl my master and family moved to Jefferson City. My master died there and when the war broke out and the United States soldiers came to Jefferson City they took me and other colored folks with them to Little Rock. Col. Benton of the 13th army corps was the officer that carried us off. I did not want to go. He wanted me to cook for the officers, but I had always been a house girl and did not know how to cook. I learned to cook after going to Little Rock and was with the army at The Battle of Pea Ridge. Afterwards the command moved over various portions of Arkansas and Louisiana. I saw the soldiers burn lots of cotton and was at Shreveport when the rebel gunboats were captured and burned on Red River. We afterwards went to New Orleans, then by way of the Gulf to Savannah Georgia, then to Macon and other places in the South. Finally I was sent to Washington City and at the time Gen. Sheridan made his raids in the Shenandoah valley I was cook and washwoman for his staff I was sent from Virginia to some place in Iowa and afterwards to Jefferson Barracks, where I remained some time. You will see by this paper that on the 15th day of November 1866 I enlisted in the United States army at St. Louis, in the Thirty-eighth United States Infantry Company A, Capt. Charles E. Clarke commanding.” - Cathay Williams, St. Louis Daily Times, January 2, 1876

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Welcome to Harder Hall. A relic of Old Florida’s past and its current future.

Published: July 24, 2020

Updated: July 16, 2023

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“If we saved one boy from being made homosexual, it was justified.”- Charley Johns (1972)

Not only did the Johns Committee investigated at the University of Florida but also Florida State University and the University of South Florida. Countless lives have been affected by this McCarthyist witch hunt and the institutions involved have to bare the dark memory of its assault on the LGBTQ+ community. The recent ruling of #scotus on June 15, 2020 which discrimination of sexual orientation and gender identity falls under the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 shows how far and long the Gay Rights Movement has come for acceptance and equity in our modern day society.