The Bahamian Migration
What Happened
Before the railroad, before the boom, Black Bahamians were already crossing to South Florida — to the Keys and then to the mainland — bringing exactly the knowledge a subtropical frontier required: how to build in coral rock and wood for heat and storms, how to farm tropical fruit, how to sail and fish the shallow bay. They were among the earliest settlers of Coconut Grove, where the West Grove became the oldest Black community in the area, predating the City of Miami itself.
When Flagler's railroad arrived and Miami incorporated in 1896, Bahamian labor — alongside African American labor — physically built the city: cleared the land, laid the track, raised the buildings, and made up a large share of the workforce and even the incorporating voters. Yet the city they built confined them, by law and covenant, to segregated districts — the West Grove and Overtown — and excluded them from the place they had made.
Why It Mattered
The Bahamian migration is the foundation the rest of Miami stands on, and the first instance of the city's enduring pattern: a community arrives, builds the place, and is then written out of the official story. The skills Bahamians brought were not incidental — they were the difference between a habitable coast and an impossible one. The Grove's distinct character and Miami's deep Caribbean orientation both begin here.
It also establishes the racial fault line this site returns to throughout. The injustice done to the Black community that built Miami — segregation, then the later destruction of Overtown by highway construction — is the counter-melody beneath the city's immigrant success story, and it starts with the Bahamians.
Where You See It Today
The West Grove in Coconut Grove remains the living heart of Bahamian Miami, with its churches, its Goombay festival, and its shotgun houses, even under intense gentrification pressure. Bahamian building techniques shaped the oldest surviving architecture in the area. And the broader Caribbean character of Miami — the sense that the city faces the islands as much as the mainland — traces its first chapter to this migration.
Further Reading
- Marvin Dunn, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century
- Histories of the West Grove and early Coconut Grove
- HistoryMiami Museum — Bahamian Miami collections
Neighborhoods: Coconut Grove · Overtown Eras: The Flagler–Tuttle Era · Tequesta & the Frontier Related people: Ralph Middleton Munroe · Marvin Dunn