Buying into Black

There Goes the Neighborhood

WNYC Studios and KCRW

History, City, Nyc, The, Nation, Documentary, News, Brooklyn, Gentrification, York, Boroughs, Real, Race, New, Estate, Society & Culture, Business News, Wnyc

4.8 • 543 Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2019

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Valencia Gunder used to dismiss her grandfather’s warnings: “They’re gonna steal our communities because it don't flood.” She thought, Who would want this place? But Valencia’s grandfather knew something she didn’t: People in black Miami have seen this before. In the second episode of our series on “climate gentrification,” reporter Christopher Johnson tells the story of Overtown, a segregated black community that was moved, en masse, because the city wanted the space for something else. If you haven't heard part one, start there first. Reported and produced by Kai Wright, Nadege Green and Christopher Johnson. This is part two of a three-part series produced in partnership with WLRN in Miami. WNYC’s health coverage is supported in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Working to build a Culture of Health that ensures everyone in America has a fair and just opportunity for health and well-being. More at RWJF.org.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everybody. This is Kai, host of the first season of There Goes the Neighborhood,
0:05.5	and I'm here to say, we haven't forgotten about you. We've been hard at work on a collaboration
0:10.4	with Miami's public radio station, WLRN, and which we've been looking at the relationship
0:15.8	between gentrification and climate change. We made a three-part series for our podcast, The Stakes,
0:22.3	and I want to share it with all of you, too.
0:25.4	So here's episode two.
0:27.9	This time, Stakes reporter Christopher Johnson
0:30.3	takes us into Miami's Liberty City.
0:42.8	I'm Kai Wright, and these are the stakes.
0:46.8	In this episode, Bying into Black.
0:54.5	All right, so the best place to start, Kai, is by introducing you to somebody.
1:01.4	Us being Miamians, like, we have, like, a certain type of accent, right?
1:06.9	This is Valencia Gunders. She's a community activist, native Miamian, absolutely southern.
1:09.3	We don't think we country like the rest of the South.
1:12.5	Oh, but you are. You are?
1:17.7	Yeah, we got a little Southern draw, but you can't, you can't tell a Miami and we country.
1:23.8	So Valencia traces her South Florida roots all the way back to her great, great, great,
1:28.8	grandfather. That's about the 1870s. This is before Miami was even a city.
1:34.2	The other side of my family, which came from the Bahamas, was one of the pioneer families that came to settle here and actually helped build Miami. So South Florida's first blacks
1:40.3	worked pineapple plantations and lime farms and starch mills.
1:44.4	They were maids, they were servants, turtle hunters.
1:47.1	They chopped through the mangrove swamps and forced their way down into stubborn coral rock,
	...

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