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Timely innovations: planes, trains and the ‘whites only’ economy of a Pan-American city

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

N. D. B. CONNOLLY*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Johns Hopkins University, Dell House, Suite 1501, 2850 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 2128, USA

Abstract

‘Timely innovations’ uses Jim Crow segregation, and the human activity it inspired, to account for Greater Miami's emergence as a city of global importance. It shows how city dwellers in South Florida deployed race and racism as technologies of economic and demographic control. The article also explores how evolving forms of racial segregation worked in tandem with other innovations in human mobility, urban planning and US foreign policy, with each helping Miami's residents maintain a white-over-black social order. Jim Crow, the author argues, never quite disappeared. Rather, it experienced a series of modernizations, leaving even Miami, one of the most culturally diverse American cities, beholden to the mores of bi-racial governance.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 See, for instance, Sassen, Saskia, The Global City: New York, London, and Tokyo (Princeton, 1991)Google Scholar; examples of works about ‘new’ American cities, see Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick, City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (Berkeley, 1993); Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 2, ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’, 27–47; Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City (London, 2000).

2 The work of Carl Nightingale and the recent books by Scott Kurashige and Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof represent a few of the more recent works that treat urban segregation as part of transnational forces. Nightingale, Carl H., ‘The transnational contexts of early twentieth-century American urban segregation’, Journal of Social History, 39 (2006), 667702CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Before race mattered: geographies of the colour line in early colonial Madras and New York’, American Historical Review, 113 (2008), 48–71; Kurashige, Scott, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton, 2008)Google Scholar; Hoffnung-Garskof, Jesse, A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950 (Princeton, 2008)Google Scholar.

3 I draw my understanding of race ‘doing work’ from the historian Thomas C. Holt. See especially Holt's The Problem of Race in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000).

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31 On government modifications of Jim Crow's racial rules during the ‘Good Neighbor’ moment, see Thomas A. Guglielmo, ‘Fighting for Caucasian rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the transnational struggle for civil rights in World War II Texas’, Journal of American History, 92 (2006), 1212–37; Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr Saavedra Lamas of Argentina, quoted in Scott, ‘Good Neighbor policy’, 290; ‘April-time will be fiesta-time in Miami’, Miami Business, Mar. 1947 (no page number provided); Miami Chamber of Commerce, Minutes of Committee on Pan American Relations, 18 Sep. 1942, Committee Meetings Minutes vol. 2 (1941–1946), Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce collection, HASF; Time magazine quoted in correspondence from Charles Sykes, executive director of the Pan American League to A.B. Curry, Miami city manager, 7 Dec. 1944, Office of the Miami city clerk, Agenda Point 17, ‘Simon Bolivar Memorial’, 17 Jan. 1945, Resolutions and Minutes of the City Commission, 1921–1986, box 31; Resolutions 21401 and 21402, 4 May 1949, Resolutions and Minutes of the City Commission, 1921–1986, box 37, SAF.

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35 ‘Represents major line’, Chicago Defender, 11 May 1946, 9; ‘Pan American Lines boasts of race equality policy’, Chicago Defender, 16 February 1946, 3; Lowe, ‘Miami’, 13.

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38 Henry Grattan Doyle, ‘A realistic approach to practical inter-Americanism’, paper delivered to the Pan-American League of Miami, 10 Jan. 1945, reprinted in Hispania, 28 (1947), 208–9.

39 City Planning Board of Miami, Miami's Railway Terminal Problem (Miami: City Planning Board of Miami, 1941), 9.

40 ‘Pleasure dome’, Time, 19 Feb. 1940, 18–19; 1941 Time magazine article quoted in correspondence from Charles Sykes, executive director of the Pan American League to A.B. Curry, Miami city manager, 7 Dec. 1944, office of the Miami city clerk, Agenda Point 17, ‘Simon Bolivar memorial’, 17 Jan. 1945, Resolutions and Minutes of the City Commission, 1921–1986, box 31, SAF.

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