The Jewel of the South?: Miami, Florida, and the NAACP\u27s Struggle for Civil Rights in America\u27s Vacation Paradise

The most recent studies on civil rights activism in Florida demystify popular notions of the ostensibly atypical southern state as an aberration from the Deep South.1 However, V.O. Key\u27s 1949 characterization of the tremendous gap in tempo epitomized in the contrast between a sleepy, rural Old South county of northern Florida and the bustling city of Miami exemplified the widening gap between the intrastate regions in the era following the Second World War. As Miami Herald reporter Philip Meyer noted, neither northern nor typically southern, Miami is a kind of sociological time capsule suspended between two worlds. 2 Such characterizations as well as the prevailing image of the Magic City as a tropical paradise have limited the scope of scholarly investigation of the black freedom struggle in the southern region of the state