In 1896 Henry M Flagler, builder of the Florida East Coast Railway System, extended the railroad from West Palm Beach to Miami. Anticipating a tourist city similar to Palm Beach, he sent the black workforce to Miami to build hotels and cottage before completing the railroad.

July 28, 1896, the day the city of Miami was incorporated, much of this black workforce was advised to report to a place on Avenue D (now Miami Avenue) instead of reporting to work. There, they were counted along with other men until it was determined that the two-thirds of the qualified electors needed for incorporation were present.

At that time women were not qualified to vote, but black men were qualified. In fact, the black men present that day compromised more than one-third of the number required by the State of Florida to create a municipality. With each name, race was recorded-either black or white. The designation of “black” was the clerk’s description. According to Dorothy Fields, founder and chief archivist of the Black Archives History Research Foundation of South Florida, Inc., blacks in the late 1800’s would not have describe themselves as such. “Those were fighting words.”

Later the opinion of the 1896 Supreme Court case, Plessy vs Ferguson, while taking away the right to vote from blacks, disenfranchised these very same black incorporators.