White supremacy in mass marketing of Miami

Urban space particularly mediates the relationships that define national, urban, and personal identities. Public space also serves as an important arena for struggles over public power, resources, and values. Groups, in short, secure broad recognition of their identities by colonizing public spaces, particularly in cities. Such was the case in Miami from the 1890s through the 1920s, as evidenced by postcards depicting the Ku Klux Klan (below) as masters of urban spaces in contrast to racial “others” as rural, pre-modern, and politically impotent.

Promotional brochures, postcards, and sundry other ephemera thus depict an urban consumerist society with whites who are synonymous with power firmly in control of urban spaces and, by implication, the consumer market, in stark contrast to racial “others” who are far removed from urban spaces and thus also removed from consumerism, which is synonymous with American modernity.

In the decade after the premiere of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), Klan membership boomed in South Florida. And by 1925, the local Klan chapter had an estimated 1,500 members, a large sum considering Miami was home to just 70,000 citizens, 30 percent of whom were black. In 1923, the John B. Gordon Number 24 order paraded from Flagler Street along North Bay Shore Drive to the county causeway to Palm Island.

Thousands lined the parade route, and hundreds watched as a cross burned to ash. Symbolizing their “crusade against ignorance and miscegenation,” the Klan’s float featured three hooded knights with swords drawn next to a dragon with “The Enemies of American Ideals” blazoned on it. “American ideals,” according to the float, seem to be synonymous with white supremacy and racial segregation. The Dragon, for instance, appears primed to protect a kindly white child outside a red schoolhouse.

The float, not surprisingly, won first prize. This type of public spectacle played itself out in New South cities all across the region in the early decades of the twentieth century. Few New South boosters were, however, as publicity-conscious as marketers of Miami, some of whom used postcards of the Klan to market Miami to the world beyond Biscayne Bay.

This spectacle in early 1920s Miami, like so many other racist spectacles (such as lynching) throughout the urban Atlantic World during the Jim Crow/Apartheid era, was ultimately designed to project the notion that the “Invisible Empire” was prepared to employ political violence to protect and defend white supremacy of urban spaces.

But as much as the Klan’s use of spectacle was calculated to establish Miami as a white man’s haven, reports of such vigilantism also helped to racially codify South Florida for a national audience of consumers. In addition to segregated housing and job markets, consumer advertising, such as the postcards below, which were designed to seduce consumers to Miami by any means necessary, circulated anti-black stereotypes across the nation and propagated the cultural association between white consumers and black objects/servants as synonymous with the “Magic City’s” brand.

This postcard celebrating the KKK in Miami particularly demonstrates how public and popular the “Invisible Empire” had become in the decade after Birth of a Nation debuted, and that Jim Crow in Miami was a particularly complete cultural system. The copyright date (1916) on the card is just a year after Birth of a Nation was released. “Ku Klux Klan Float,” (J.N. Chamberlain, 1916). Historical Association of South Florida, Miami Postcard Collection.

Note how this postcard, with whites ruling Miami’s suburban spaces, contrasts with pejorative imagery of black folks and Seminole Indians set in nature (see images below). “Ku Klux Klan Float” (J.N. Chamberlain, 1916). Historical Association of South Florida, Miami Postcard Collection.

White Supremacy, as the postcards above and below indicate, was a defining feature of southern urbanization. Segregation, as it took full legal form in the 1880s and 1890s, was a response to urbanization and deliberately deprived urban blacks of dignity and equality.

The alliance between working-class and bourgeois white northerners and southerners as the New South industrialized and urbanized reflected a widespread conviction that disfranchisement, segregation, and voter proscription were not only the foundation of a logical social system of racial control, but that it also promised a greater measure of social stability, economic development, and white political unity.

Since Miami was so nascent, groups such as the KKK, as well as city fathers, many of whom were real estate barons, sought to establish the city as a white man’s haven in contrast to northern cities, which were increasingly peopled by foreigners and black Americans in the early decades of the twentieth century, especially after World War I. The symbolic racial violence propagated in newspapers and political discourse was symbiotic to political violence in Miami.

The industrialization of second-class citizenship, which is as rooted in racially segregated housing and labor markets as it is with disenfranchisement, was reified by racist ads of Jim Crow Miami that depict both black Floridians and Seminole Indians as subservient, sometimes imperiled, but always politically impotent rural caricatures in contrast to urbane and sophisticated white consumers and leisure seekers depicted in chapter five of this study.

Miami, an enterprise almost totally dependent on white consumerism and black labor for survival in the early decades of the twentieth century, thus particularly helps to illuminate John Cell’s assertion that Jim Crow was more than embedded in local customs or legal practice. Jim Crow was, especially in New South Miami, a particularly complete cultural system rife with rituals and terrorism by vigilantes and police alike, but always embedded in the consumer market and symbiotic to the “Magic City’s” real estate and tourism industries.

Racial segregation of the labor force, polity, and Miami’s housing and tourism industries were symbiotic to the racial segregation celebrated and reified in the mass marketing of South Florida. With segregation precluding black patronage at most tourist facilities in New South cities such as Miami, African Americans were incorporated into southern tourism not as full equals, but as domesticated “others” represented for “public consumption.”

Nina Silber, in fact, wrote that northerners viewed southern blacks “as simply another feature of the landscape.” Her assertions are particularly demonstrated in the marketing of South Florida, which often depicts African Americans and also Seminole Indians as rural, exotic, and impotent social “others” that, as Marguerite Shaffer might argue, helped to reaffirm middle-class white tourists' own sense of refinement, culture, status, urbanity, and Americanness.

Note how this boy is staged in nature with a donkey and surrounded by citrus, one of South Florida’s most vital resources and exports to the rest of the nation. Notice how there is, however, no hint of urbanity in the image. “Among the Oranges in Florida,” early twentieth century, Florida Historical Society, Cocoa, Ada E. Parrish Postcard Collection, folder: “black.”

Much like images of Vizcaya and Flagler hotels helped to imbue value in otherwise frontier and thus mostly valueless land, images depicting minorities as a relic of the past and/or part of nature and far removed from urban space also served to market the ideology of white supremacy in the realm of consumerism, pop culture, and white nationalism. The black boys (above right) are staged adjacent to oranges, as if both were equal parts of the South Florida landscape. “Miami, Jewel of the South,” (J.N. Chamberlain, Miami, Fla., 1920), University of Florida Special Collections, Smathers Library, Ephemera collection, folder 44, number 1240.

Seminole Indians and black Floridians were both often depicted as imperiled and/or part of nature, but never urbane. “Seminole Indian Children at Musqisle,” early twentieth century, Miami, Florida Historical Society, Cocoa, Ada E. Parrish Postcard Collection, folder: “Seminole.”

Both black folks and Seminoles were often staged as helpless children preyed upon by alligators. “An All-in Gator Lunch in Florida,” early twentieth century, Florida Historical Society, Cocoa, Ada E. Parrish Postcard Collection, folder: “black.”

Black Floridians were often depicted as imperiled by alligators in postcards advertising turn-of-the-century South Florida. Also note the caricatured vernacular in the caption (top right). “A Darky’s Prayer,” Curt Teich & Co. Inc., early twentieth century, Florida Historical Society, Cocoa, Ada E. Parrish Postcard Collection, folder: “black.”

Note the land reclamation billboard juxtaposed with a Seminole Indian, which underscores how Miami was often marketed as a racially coded frontier of capitalism, prime for exploitation; Claude C. Matlack, Seminole navigating a canal along the Tamiami Trail. (Tamiami Canal, Fla.), March 27, 1920, Matlack Box 5, number 30, Historical Museum of South Florida.

The black men in this image are employees, and the white folks are guests at Henry Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel. Note the Victorian attire of the ladies in contrast to the servile attire worn by the black laborers, which is similar in design to the attire worn by servants in nineteenth century India – the “crown jewel” of the British Empire. Florida photo album Collection, late 19th and early 20th century; Florida Historical Society, Cocoa, Florida.

Racist ads for South Florida that depict both African Americans and Seminole Indians (a nation comprised of Cherokees who had intermarried with runaway slaves) as inferior and/or part of nature and thus far removed from urbanity were often used to stealth market the Gold Coast’s hotels, attractions, and real estate -- the markets of which were segregated by race and class.

But Seminoles’ and especially black Miamians’ marginal status was not just commodified via mass marketing, such as postcards and brochures, it was also performed daily via the city’s tourist attractions, and in restaurants and hotels, all of which barred black patronage yet often hired black servants to tend to the all-white clientele.

Part of the luxurious spectacle associated with vacationing in a New South city such as Miami was being almost exclusively tended to by black maids, cooks, waitresses, porters, bellhops, busboys, and rickshaw pullers.

A vacation in Miami, in that sense, was comparable to what a vacation would have been like during the antebellum era in the American South. Images, as well as rituals of consumerism, such as a vacation in a Jim Crow city, such as Miami, served to reify to white Americans what seemed to be their naturally ordained superiority in the housing and labor market. In other words, Miami was crafted to be a place where white supremacy was ritualistic and so deeply embedded in the city’s industries, culture, and identity that it seemed as if it had always been that way, which, in Miami, it had.

Miami was founded in 1896, more than a generation after the American Civil War (1861–1865). Jim Crow’s rise in Miami is thus more peculiar in the “Magic City” than perhaps in any other New South urban-industrial center.

Since Miami was so young and new, it was a kind of tabula rasa that could sidestep more traditional patterns of urbanization in more established southern cities such as New Orleans, Atlanta, Charleston, Charlotte, and Nashville. Miami, as such, did not go through the “sorting out” by class, race, and land use that so many other cities in the South did.

The rise of Jim Crow in Miami, in fact, can be traced directly to the “mother” and “father” of Miami. Julia Tuttle’s original land deeds specified the west side of town as the location for factories and for black residences. Miami’s local newspapers, which were every bit as much ads for South Florida as the ads analyzed throughout this study, also peculiarly propagated and naturalized Jim Crow. The Metropolis, which was owned by Flagler until 1905, for example, unabashedly advocated the mass deportation of blacks from Florida as a proposed solution to the state’s social and political woes.

Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, Florida’s Populist Governor from 1905 to 1909, who was otherwise adversarial in many ways to northern industrialists such as Flagler, likewise proposed the mass removal of black Floridians from the state as a means of quelling racial conflict and lynch terror that dissuaded investment in the state’s languishing economy and increasingly pushed black southerners north of the Mason-Dixon Line in the early decades of the twentieth century. Both of Miami’s major newspapers, The Metropolis and also The Miami Herald, which was considered the less progressive of the two, consistently wrote of the social and political inferiority of black South Floridians, and they carried racially degrading stories, which often caricaturized African Americans and Bahamians as “hamfat,” “coon,” “brute,” “fiend,” and “darky.”

In 1897, B.B. Tatum, a Southern Democrat from Georgia, even advocated lynching when he editorialized, “The deplorable circumstances of the assault upon a respectable white woman” (reported in Key West) “by a fiendish black brute,” brought “home to us (white Miamians and visitors to the city) the question of what can be done with these black sons of hell.” He also encouraged would-be vigilantes to dole out a “necktie party” to the man charged but not yet convicted of assailing the white woman in question.

The rise of Jim Crow in Miami, in short, skirts the de jure/de facto segregation debate because the city was founded by northerners as a racially segregated city in 1896, the same year in which the federal government ultimately sanctioned Jim Crow as a protection of private property rights (Plessy v. Ferguson).

Miami is also somewhat exceptional from many other Jim Crow cities in the New South, as well as racially segregated cities throughout the Atlantic World because it, far more than most, desperately depended on white consumers’ patronage and black service industry workers to serve them.

Miami’s image as a utopian resort city readymade for white consumers deep in the heart of Dixie, as depicted in tandem in racist ads and local newspapers, was deeply connected to the reality of white terrorism and racially segregated housing and labor markets in South Florida.

Black laborers — particularly service industry workers and agricultural workers — were, as Melanie Shell-Weiss, Robert Cassanello, and other scholars have helped to illuminate, especially vital to Miami’s astounding growth and development in the early decades of the twentieth century. And though black cabbies were backed by city fathers to break the color line in the years immediately preceding the Roaring Twenties, in 1921, the banker-politicians on the Miami City Commission wrote a new city charter granting themselves the power to “establish and set apart” separate residential districts “for white and Negro residents.”

The charter explicitly prohibited blacks and whites from establishing businesses in districts set aside for the racial other. Jim Crow thus permitted real estate developers to literally dictate the price of land based on how close it was to the bay or beach and how far it was from black sections of the city. A racially divided labor force concomitantly gave city fathers the lion’s share of bargaining power amongst both black and white construction workers and service industry workers.

The burden of responsibility for Jim Crow in Miami ultimately lies with socioeconomically privileged white real estate barons such as Flagler, Tuttle, and newspapermen, as well as the Miami Board of Trade and City Council, and various lobbying groups with the greatest amount of capital invested in the “Magic City’s” tourism and real estate industries.

White supremacy, in other words, is not exclusively — or even mostly — the product of crude, irrational prejudice concocted in the paranoid minds of ignorant, unskilled white workers suffering from status anxiety.

Jim Crow was prominently packaged and sold by commercial-civic elites, real estate developers, advertisers, medical professionals, and various other people with access to state-of-the-art communication technology, albeit readily consumed by white working– and middle-class consumers, who benefited hand-over-fist from the black second-class citizenship reified in Miami’s commodified form specifically, and American consumer culture more generally during the early decades of the twentieth century.