Coral Gables should reverse its vote against renaming Dixie Highway after Harriet Tubman

There are many good reasons to rename Miami-Dade County’s stretch of Dixie Highway — a name that harks back to the days of the racist Confederacy — after abolitionist Harriet Tubman.

An iconic figure in U.S. history, Tubman escaped slavery and then helped others gain their freedom, too, becoming the “conductor” of the Underground Railroad. Anyone who was awake during civics class knows that.

But she was so much more. A member of the Union Army, Tubman served as “a scout, spy, guerrilla soldier and nurse” during the Civil War and is considered the first African-American woman to serve in the military,” says the National Women’s History

Museum.

Every municipality through which the state road runs sees the value of the name change, except one — Coral Gables, whose new mayor, Vince Lago, voted against the Tubman designation in January as a commissioner.

“Playing politics,” Lago called the proposed and longoverdue retirement of Dixie Highway.

GABLES’ BAHAMIAN ROOTS

But his opposition is an excuse to not give a historic Black woman her due in a city that may be 79 percent white, but that was built thanks to the hard work of Black Bahamian laborers. All that beautiful coral rock is their skill in masonry.

Lago’s opposition and that of other Coral Gables commissioners to honoring Tubman is an excuse to continue to whitewash and cover up the ugly history of racism in Florida.

This becomes quite clear when Lago warns that he’s worried Coral Gables founder George Merrick, who advocated for moving Black residents out of Miami in the 1930s, may be another target of the national movement to remove racist symbols.

He wants Merrick’s statue, installed in 2006 by the city’s Garden Club, to remain right where it is, in front of City

Hall.

But shouldn’t burying the history of discrimination against Blacks in our community worry Lago more than a statue whose proper place is an educational museum?

Keeping two wrongs in place to avoid dealing with one of them doesn’t get anybody anywhere. But it sure does say a lot about the ones keeping hostage the renaming of a prominent artery, unanimously approved by the Miami-Dade Commission, and endorsed by every other municipality.

Again, what is feared are the revelations.

RACIST AGENDA

The renaming is the right thing to do, but it’s the second recent issue to shed light on the lack of understanding in sectors of the Cuban-American community when it comes to the modern-day racial issues that are shaping a more dignified United States of America.

Lago and his wife signed, along with some 150 other parents, a letter criticizing anti-racism teachings and an adopted mission statement that incorporates inclusion as a value at the Catholic Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart.

The Tubman Highway issue only compounds what is at best ignorance, and at worst, pure racism. Either way, some in elected positions in MiamiDade fail to grasp that there’s a new generation demanding that America, finally, live up to its founding principles of equality and justice for all.

That we live in a state run by a governor, Ron DeSantis, who pushes and prioritizes dog-whistle anti-protest legislation is only, hopefully, a temporary condition.

Yet Cuban-American Republicans in elected positions are betting their careers — and their reputations — on aiding and abetting DeSantis’ racist Trump-like agenda.

“Calling out Florida’s elected Cuban Republicans has revealed the festering debate about whether ‘privileged’ Cuban legislators are acting out their culture and upbringing, or whether they are emulating their non-Hispanic mentors and role models who have convinced them that insensitivity and indifference to race is a pathway to acceptance into the circle of neo-Confederate ‘leaders’ in our state,” former Miami city attorney and law professor George Knox wrote me.

He adds: “The Cuban elected officials who lean hard right appear to renounce their simpatico just to gain access to the plutocrats who feed them gruel and call it ice cream. One answer to whether Republican Cuban-American thought leaders who support voter suppression are clueless or racist may be that they are slavish assimilationists who don’t realize they are being used.”

May Knox’s words enlighten where mine have failed.

Coral Gables’ rebuff has given the predominantly Republican Florida Legislature the excuse the lawmaking body needed to stall and kill SB 1216, the bill to designate 42 miles of U.S. 1, a federal and state road, Harriet Tubman Highway.

Another stain on Tallahassee is par for the course.

Another racial stain on diverse, multicultural MiamiDade is unacceptable.

Fabiola Santiago: 305-376-3469, @fabiolasantiago