Along NW 12th Avenue from 62nd to 67th Streets in Miami’s Liberty City runs a low concrete wall. Bordering a planted strip that divides the avenue from a parallel service road, this drab-yellow-painted structure might be taken as an unassuming retaining wall. It is in fact a piece of racist infrastructure – the remnant of a barrier built in the late 1930s to isolate a Black neighborhood from a white one. Leonardo Jackson grew up in Liberty City, but learned about the origins of the wall only recently. “I was disappointed in myself,” the seventeen-year-old told an interviewer in 2018. “To have something so historic and important to the Black community’s culture, right here, in my own community, and I didn’t even know about it.”
Jackson is not alone; in their bluntness and ordinariness, such race barriers or segregation walls tend to hide in plain sight. Yet they are common in American cities and towns. Not unique to the south or to a bygone era, walls and fences like these have been erected for decades by public agencies, developers, and white homeowners, often working in tandem and sanctioned by the courts. In the words of a white public-housing official in Houston in the 1950s, the obstructions were intended to separate the races “psychologically and physically.” Of those that still stand, some continue to demarcate racialized boundaries, while others — like the wall in Liberty City — now run between majority Black areas. Not surprisingly, there remains a deep difference in experience between those who recognize, or are not allowed to forget, a race wall’s meaning; those — like young Mr. Jackson — whose lives are impacted by these built forms without their realizing it; and those who now pass by without a thought. Overall, the paradoxical effect of such structures is to simultaneously highlight and trivialize the historical oppressions they represent, and the injustices they continue to enact.
Immediately west of the Liberty City wall stands Liberty Square, one of the first public-housing projects for African Americans in the United States. The segregated development was constructed in the 1930s in order to relieve substandard conditions in Overtown — then known as Colored Town — “which was set aside in Miami’s original charter (1896) as the one area for African-Americans to settle.” A report preceding the construction of Liberty Square found that, in Overtown, one might see “three to fifteen shacks on a city lot of 50’ x 150’,” and declared that “The living conditions are inconceivable and are a shame and a disgrace to the responsible citizens of Miami.” Motivated less by shame than by the suspicion that domestic workers coming from such overcrowded housing might transmit disease to their white employers, designers sought to establish a self-sufficient community on the city’s outskirts. A collection of one- and two-story buildings with open space between, Liberty Square was praised as an exemplary modern development, featured in the May 1937 issue of Architectural Record.