What’s this?

BY JAMES WILLIFORD

On February 12, 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a packed house at the Greater Bethel AME Church in Miami. A film of the event, preserved at Miami Dade College’s Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives, shows a youthful King standing calmly in a neat, dark suit against an unadorned backdrop, delivering one of the most powerful speeches of his career. Its central message is expressed in short, carefully intoned sentences: “We must, and we will, be free. We want freedom now. We want the right to vote now. We do not want freedom fed to us in teaspoons over another hundred and fifty years.”

Footage of King’s speech and many other important moments in Miami’s struggle for civil rights will be shown with commentary by University of Miami historian Gregory W. Bush on November 19 at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida. Covering a period from the 1950s to 1966, the film clips offer a broad perspective on the issues, events, and people that defined racial politics in the city. There are shots of demonstrators at lunch counter sit-ins and picket lines, scenes of city commissioners meeting with representatives of the black community, and interviews and press events from both sides of the integration conflict.

Among such a diverse collection of footage, one would expect the national heroes of the civil rights movement to stand out. And, in conventional ways, they do: King’s rhetoric is brilliantly polished; James Farmer’s demeanor is self-assured and commanding. But Miami’s homegrown advocates and on-the-ground activists are at least as compelling as their famous contemporaries. Captured on film, the faces, voices, and words of these unsung men and women have a remarkable, and sometimes unexpected, capacity to affect and inspire.

	Floridians march to honor victims of the Birmingham bombing, September 23, 1963. —The Historical Museum of Southern Florida

Take, for example, Olive Anderson, an elderly resident of the Miami metro area, who begins her portion of what appears to be a press conference, “I am a Negro by accident, I had no choice ... or what you call a Negro in America,” before adding with more poise and force than printed words can convey, “I am a person.” Or another South Floridian, identified in the footage only as “Mrs. Johnson,” who says that if real progress toward racial equality cannot be achieved through committee negotiations, “we shall demonstrate.” Or A. D. Moore who, in what is perhaps the most moving of the film clips, leads a local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality through a beautifully simple rendering of the freedom song “Woke Up this Morning.”

By exploring the history of the civil rights movement in Miami through these films, the Historical Museum of Southern Florida offers a potent reminder that the effort to end racial discrimination extended far beyond the borders of Montgomery, AL, Greensboro, NC, and Washington, DC, and that the principles that drove leaders like King, Farmer, and Roy Wilkins were fully articulated in the minds and spirits of countless other Americans.