Honor Lemon City Cemetery and our Black Bahamian roots
Miami’s Little Haiti is rapidly changing. The recent sale of over 20 properties along its main commercial street and the displacement of more than 100,000 Haitians due to gentrification is an important part of this unfolding story. Many worry that Little Haiti, like other Black neighborhoods in the country, is doomed to disappear with the history of its residents.
Before the neighborhood became known as Little Haiti, it was Lemon City. Much of its past has been erased — or literally built over. As the city and nation grapple with housing affordability and resilience to climate change, the story of the Lemon City Cemetery — a Black and Bahamian burial ground — offers lessons of forgiveness and hope for today’s fast-changing urban landscape.
As early as 1870, shortly after the Civil War, Lemon City was the southernmost settlement in the area, about four miles north of what would become Miami. Many of Lemon City’s early residents migrated from the Bahamas; construction of the Florida East Coast Railroad in the 1890s boosted migration.
When Miami was incorporated in 1896, more than 40% of the city’s Black population was Bahamian. White settlers may have seen a land that was difficult to plant, but Black Bahamians saw opportunity, cultivating plants and tropical trees. The name Lemon City is thought to have come from groves of unusually sweet lemon trees planted in the area.
The area’s Black Bahamians didn’t just cultivate the land. They were teachers, churchgoers, business owners, musicians and more. The Lemon City population grew, drawing Haitians, Jamaicans, Cubans and others, especially in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Though many Black institutions in South Florida have been erased, a powerful preservation movement began to grow in this area of Miami in the 1980s. Enid Pinkney, a prominent community leader, educator and activist of Bahamian descent, has played a leading role.
She worked to protect the historic Hampton House from demolition in 2002 and restore it into a thriving center for Black heritage. She also has helped save the Lemon City cemetery.
Dating back to at least 1911, the cemetery was first threatened in the 1970s by construction of Interstate 95 and a power plant distribution center. Surrounding sites in Lemon City were redeveloped multiple times but the cemetery remained relatively untouched until the early 2000s, when a YMCA was built on the grounds.
In 2008, the City of Miami sold the property to developers to build affordable housing. Though the developers were warned that the site was a cemetery — a letter in the Black Archives History and Research Foundation of South Florida is evidence — construction began in 2009. A few months later, human remains were discovered.
When Dr. Pinkney learned of the situation in 2009, she began working toward the site’s recognition. With others, she created the Lemon City Cemetery Community Corporation, lobbying local government to memorialize the site. A historical marker now acknowledges the cemetery’s story.
The developers reduced the project from two to one buildings and left a portion of the grounds unbuilt for a memorial garden commemorating those buried there. Families today can find the names of their ancestors on a list of 525 people, though some say there may have been as 1,796 burials on the land. Dr. Pinkney herself, after carefully reading the list of those interred, surprisingly found her own grandfather’s name: John Clark.
Lemon City — now also known as Little Haiti — remains a largely
Black neighborhood today. But it is threatened by accelerated development.
The acknowledgment of Lemon City’s past is perhaps more important than ever. Planting a new canopy of trees would act as a living memorial, a powerful gesture that seeks to repair and help recognize the communities, including indigenous ones, who are the root of Miami’s history.
Elisa Silva is an architect and associate professor at FIU. Lila Coffey and Amaya Cameron are 2023 architecture graduates of FIU. Enid Pinkney is responsible for the preservation of the Historic Hampton House and the Lemon City Cemetery.