Sharony Green

As far back as the New Deal era, South Florida's white power brokers wanted African Americans to live in the northwest section of then Dade County and away from the region's lucrative seaside. Even today, however, people of color, many of Bahamian descent, remain in Miami's bayside Coconut Grove community, but they do so amid gentrification. Such ongoing settlement and the eventual migration of people of African descent to the northwest section of the county by the late 1960s fit into a larger narrative of black self-determination in Florida. Relying greatly on oral histories and the historical record, this article explores such settlement and migratory patterns and how they fit into a larger black resistance tradition dating back to the nineteenth century. In 1972, my family moved to the northwest section of then Dade County, about twenty or so miles north of Miami. Sand dunes and empty fields surrounded our often pastel-painted homes. We were in the boondocks. We also lived in a "second ghetto," the idea being that after leaving a segregated neighborhood, we had found ourselves in a similar state owing to recent white flight. But that whites had once lived in this area at all suggests the limits of racial housing politics in South Florida. As far back as the New Deal era, realtors, policy makers, and developers wanted African Americans to live in this section of the county, away from the region's lucrative seaside. It was only decades after power brokers wanted us there that we were in fact moving to this community , then the unincorporated part of the county called Carol City (now the City of Miami Gardens). Our belated move to the northwest section of the county suggest irregular spatial and racial politics across time worth studying.

Using a review of several letters from the papers of Rice C. Ballard, a former Virginia slave trader, this article examines the lives " fancy girls, " a little known group of high-end, enslaved women who were sold for use as concubines or prostitutes during antebellum America. Specifically, this study uses letters from two women to demonstrate how this unique female slave encountered an industrializing America in ways that often differ from the experiences of other female slaves.