Qualla: Overtown: The Harlem of the South

Overtown: The Harlem of the South: Introduction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pietro, CC BY-SA 4.0. When Ella Fitzgerald finished her set at the Fontainebleau on Miami Beach, she could not stay the night. Segregation law barred her from sleeping in the hotel where she had just brought the audience to its feet. So she crossed the causeway to Overtown, where the Mary Elizabeth Hotel kept rooms for Black performers who headlined the white venues but were forbidden from lingering once the music stopped. Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole -- they all knew the route. Overtown was not just a fallback. By the 1940s and 1950s, it was Miami's other entertainment district, rivaling Miami Beach itself, a neighborhood of hundreds of Black-owned businesses humming with nightlife, commerce, and a fierce cultural identity forged under Jim Crow's restrictions.

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Image: Pietro | CC BY-SA 4.0

Overtown: The Harlem of the South: Built by the Railroad, Named by Segregation

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pietro, CC BY-SA 3.0. Overtown's origins trace to the very founding of Miami in 1896. Henry Flagler's Black railroad construction workers, the laborers who extended the Florida East Coast Railway south, settled just north of Flagler's Royal Palm Hotel on the Miami River. Of the 362 men who voted to in...

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Image: Pietro | CC BY-SA 3.0

Overtown: The Harlem of the South: Black Millionaires and the Florida Boom

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pietro, CC BY-SA 3.0. During the Florida land boom of the 1920s, Overtown produced D. A. Dorsey, one of the first Black millionaires in the American South -- a man who once owned Fisher Island. Booker T. Washington High School became the first high school educating Black students south of Palm Beach. ...

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Image: Pietro | CC BY-SA 3.0

Overtown: The Harlem of the South: The Expressways That Broke a Neighborhood

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pietro, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the 1960s, highway engineers drove I-95, the Dolphin Expressway, and the Midtown Interchange straight through Overtown's heart. The expressways did not just pass through -- they shattered the neighborhood's street grid, demolished homes and businesses, and severed the connecti...

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Image: Pietro | CC BY-SA 3.0

Overtown: The Harlem of the South: What the Concrete Could Not Erase

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pietro, CC BY-SA 3.0. Overtown's landmarks survived the expressways. The Lyric Theatre, built in 1913, was renovated and reopened. The D. A. Dorsey House, built in 1913, still stands at 250 NW 9th Street. Greater Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, constructed between 1927 and 1943, anchors one...

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Image: Pietro | CC BY-SA 3.0