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The Rafael Miguel Zayas Collection contains the personal papers of Cuban sugar industrialist Rafael Miguel Zayas. It includes articles, essays and data on the Cuban sugar industry before and after the Revolution, as well as data on US and world sugar, Gaceta pages, government documents, and correspondence. Also included is a vinyl disc.

The Rafael Urruela Collection contains personal papers from Rafael J. Urruela, the former director of the Foreign Office at New Orleans City Hall. It contains photographs, correspondence with US and Latin American leaders, and clippings on trade and diplomatic activities in New Orleans.

The Rafael F. Risco papers are comprised of documents regarding Risco's involvement with the Rescate Revolucionario Democrático counter-revolutionary organization in exile. These materials include biographical materials, photographs, and correspondence between members of the organization.

The collection contains manuscripts and newspaper clippings related to the writings of author Rafael Esténger, active in Cuba in the 20th century.

The Rafael Baserva Soler Papers contain the personal materials of Cuban pianist, bandleader and composer Rafael Baserva Soler. They include CDs, vinyl, and cassette tapes of Soler’s music and performances, photographs of Soler and musical figures he worked with, sheet music, concert programs, pamphlets, and newspaper reviews.

Thanks to a grant sponsored by UM Libraries as part of the CREATE Grant Fall 2019 grant Cycle Awards, students under the supervision of Professor Robin Bachin (Associate Professor/Assistant Provost for Civic and Community Engagement) conducted interviews with Miami community members in neighborhoods that have undergone significant transformations over the last several decades.

The Race, housing, and displacement oral history collection documents the complicated and significant interconnections among race, housing, and displacement in Miami during the twentieth century. The 6 interviewees are from various neighborhoods including Overtown, Liberty City, and Little Haiti. The interviews were conducted over Zoom during April 2020.

The following individuals were interviewed as part of this collection:

1. Adrian Madriz: Executive Director of the Struggle for Miami’s Affordable and Sustainable Housing (SMASH)
2. Alana Greer: Co-founder of the Community Justice Project
3. Mileyka Burgos: Executive Director of The Allapattah Collaborative, CDC
4. Nancy Metayer: Candidate for Coral Springs Commissioner; member on the Steering Committee of the Miami Climate Alliance; former member of the Broward County Soil and Water Conservation District; Co-Founder of the Florida Disaster Preparedness Plan; environmental scientist; community organizer
5. Shirley Plantin, Chief Executive Consultant for U-Turn Youth Consulting Firm and the author of The Backstory of a New Reality
6. Yanick Landess, Director of Homeownership Programs at Neighborhood Housing Services of South Florida

This collection documents the activities of Dr. Frederick Solomon, a progressive rabbi in the Cuban-Jewish community of Havana, Cuba. The collection includes correspondence between Dr. Solomon and members of The World Union for Progressive Judaism in London, England, as well as articles, manuscripts of sermons, and outlines of religious services authored by Dr. Solomon for the United Hebrew Congregation at Temple Beth Israel, home to the Centro Macabeo de Cuba, dating from 1953 to 1960. The collection also contains two pamphlets for Jewish events held at Hebrew Union College’s Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1975 and 1976.

R. A. Seymour was a Wing Commander from the Royal Air Force. The collection contains photographs and memoirs Seymour's training at the Pan American Training Academy at the University of Miami during World War II.

The R. A. Cushman Papers contain the following items: (1) a U.S. flag, and letters from Arthur R. De Reyes, from the American Expeditionary Forces, to his mother written in 1917 and 1918; (2) three photographic prints from the U.S. Signal Corps; (3) 46 folders of reports, essays, transcripts, bibliographies, and pamphlets largely concerned with American foreign policy, touching on topics such as foreign trade, foreign concessions, foreign aid, U.S. exports, foreign banking, and immigration.

The posters in this collection were created by students for a project answering the question "What is Queer?" The project was part of Dr. Steve Butterman's Queer Studies class at the University of Miami. The posters in the collection present a variety of visual and textual representation of the students' interpretations of what it means to be queer, ranging in focus from familial concerns and sexual health/HIV to media representation, politics, and fashion. Many of the posters discuss the history of the use of  the term "queer" and question the idea of a single definition of queer.

A collection of negatives, photographs, color transparencies, audio-visual materials taken by Pyramid of University of Miami buildings and events.

The late Helen C. Purdy, professor emeritus and former head of the Archives and Special Collections Department, donated a variety of library materials following her retirement in 1991. This collection consists of maps of Florida and the West Indies.

The Puente de Jovenes Profesionales Cubanos records contain the official records of the organization, including financial records, legal documents, correspondence, pamphlets and event programs, membership records, and articles written about the organization. It also includes officail stationary.

Jesse Wooley was a professional photographer from New York who visited Florida in 1896. Wooley used his trip to create a stereopticon or lantern-slide lecture about Florida. Several of these lantern slides were colored.

The Eugene Provenzo Collection contains a manuscript by Provenzo and William E. Brown titled "From Ice to Snow to Flowers and Fruit: Jesse Wooley's 1896 Tour of Florida." The manuscript by Provenzo and Brown aimed to reproduce this lantern-slide lecture with the original lecture notes, as well as to provide a historical analysis of lantern slide lectures and a biographical essay on Jesse Wooley. The collection also contains correspondence regarding the manuscript, duplicate pages of the manuscript, research documents and notebooks, photographs and photographic slides taken of the surviving lantern slides, clippings, articles, and other documents.

Promotional exhibition materials for Feliciano Centurion; José-Antonio Fernández-Muro; Neo Muyanga; Anna Bella Geiger; Magali Lara; Lea Lublin; Margarita Paksa; Gory (Rogelio Lopez Marin); Rene Francisco Rodriguez; Gustavo Acosta; Luis Enrique Camejo; Marta Minujin; Luis Cruz Azaceta; Carolina Sardi; Sara Grilo; Meira Marrero; José Toirac; Carlos Quintana; Jose Manuel ForsMarcia Schvartz

The Leo Price Collection contains a single scrapbook compiled by Leo Price which chronicles the story of the Bonus Expeditionary Forces, an assemblage of approximately 43,000 protesters - some 17,000 of which were World War I veterans and their families - who marched on Washington in 1932 under the encouragement of retired U.S.M.C. Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler. The veterans, many of whom had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression, demanded immediate cash payment of Service Certificates granted to them eight years earlier via the Adjusted Service Certificate Law of 1924. The march was suppressed by the U.S. army under the leadership of Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton.

The scrapbook tells the story by means of newspaper clippings, photographs, and a piece of fabric.

This collection contains memorabilia related to the former University of Miami President Edward T. Foote and his administration, which spanned from 1981 through 2001.

The collection Preserving U: University of Miami Hurricanes Heritage Campaign contains 7 reports written in 2005 by the Alumni Team, Campus Team, Campus Media Team, Iron Arrow Team (2 reports), Media Team, and Student Government Team.

The campaign to collect memorabilia and preserve university history was a joint effort by Iron Arrow, the University of Miami libraries, the University of Miami Alumni Association, and Dr. Tilson's public relations campaigns classes.

Power U for Social Change was founded in 1999 by renowned activists Denise Perry and Sheila O’Farrell. Perry has been a dedicated international labor and community organizer for over twenty-five years; she has organized health care workers into labor unions in the east and southeastern U.S. and worked throughout Africa and the Caribbean to train and work with women labor activists as a part of the Women’s Global Equity Project. Power U was originally based in the historic Black community of Miami, Overtown (1896), as the organization formed in order to fight for solutions to threats being faced by this area specifically, such as poor-quality, unaffordable housing, and gentrification. However, in latter years Power U has placed additional focus on working with schools to advocate for young students of color, as well as continuing to address issues of environmental justice and emerging challenges faced by vulnerable communities.

Being a historically Black neighborhood, Overtown – named “Colored” town in the Jim Crow Era – has been variously subject to state neglect and, in recent years, an excess of attention; however, the continuity between the discrepancies in how Overtown has been (dis)engaged with lie in the fact that at no point has the county championed the interests of the residents. Once a bustling center of Black industry, Overtown has been in decline since the early 1960s when the construction of the highway I-95 decimated the business district and led to the removal of 10,000 people¹. In the years leading up to the founding of Power U, Overtown became under threat again but for different reasons. Samara and Chang narrate, “Long neglected, the Overtown neighborhood has in recent years become an area of interest to the city and to developers. The ‘revitalization’ of Miami has made Overtown suddenly valuable again, but the proximity of a poor, Black neighborhood to downtown stands as a glaring obstacle to urban renewal. This combination of ‘bad’ people and good land could only mean one thing in the new Miami: the neighborhood had to be redeveloped” (14). The notion that Overtown is “suddenly valuable again” is a story that is having yet another revival in context of Black neighborhoods in Miami such as Little Haiti and parts of Allapattah where the pressures of rising sea levels have galvanized interest in these elevated areas². Therefore, both Power U’s initial and continued work in Overtown has proven to be vital in an area that is under consistent threat; for example, in 2003 they stopped the expansion of an I-95 ramp that would cause further destruction in addition to the initial damage wreaked by the highway. In addition, in 2008 Power U created the Renter Majority Project in response to the growing epidemic of substandard living conditions and illegal evictions in Overtown, the renters being at the mercy of “slumlords³.” With the assistance of the Community Justice Project and DataCenter, they undertook a huge survey of individual people in the neighborhoods of Liberty City, Little Haiti, Wynwood, Allapattah, Overtown, Coconut Grove, and Little Havana which evaluated housing costs, quality, and renter rights⁴. The report, “State of Miami Renters,” was subsequently published in June 2012⁵.

In 2007, in response to the violent repression of a peaceful student demonstration in a predominantly Black high school in Miami’s urban core, Power U became actively involved in the fight to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and promote restorative justice practices in schools. Their development of restorative justice practices, including the anti-criminalization of school children, was a focused extension of work they had already begun to revitalize Miami’s school system, such as obtaining one million dollars in funding for school improvements. In 2003, they provided certified graduation for more than one hundred and forty students who had met all graduation requirements but failed to graduate on the basis of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), which has already attracted huge criticism on the basis that the State set achievement goals on the basis of race and ethnicity, and set far higher and harder to achieve goals for Black and Hispanic students, for example, than it did for white and Asian students⁶. In the same year, they also established the People of Color Alliance for Public Schools. Throughout Power U’s various endeavors, the voices of the children actually affected by racist practices that have compromised their educational pathways are consistently centralized. In 2012 in association with Advancement Project⁷, Power U released a video documentary in which students of color discussed their personal experiences of the school discipline crisis in South Florida, explaining how they felt pushed out of the classroom and racially targeted by school staff through harsh disciplinary practices that were not commensurate with the codes of conduct they had supposedly broken⁸. Their efforts seemed to have paid off when, in 2015, Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS) announced that they would no longer suspend students from school, but rather send them to “Student Success Centers,” which would offer additional support to struggling students. However, as detailed in Power U’s 2017 report, Miami-Dade County Public Schools: The Hidden Truth, which was a result of interviews and surveys of over five hundred young people, these success centers are anything but successful and are actually serving to mask continuing systemic discriminatory practices in Miami’s schools.

Founded by feminist activists, unsurprisingly Power U has consistently advocated and developed programming specifically for women and Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual (LGBTQIA) youth. In 2009, they launched their first reproductive justice project, Powerful Women and Families (PWF). PWF worked towards developing Black mothers’ consciousness and organizing skills to increase their agency over their own birthing experiences. Through a variety of workshops, training, and campaigns Power U aimed to demystify the medicalization of birthing, expose community members to the tradition of midwifery, and extolled the benefits of breastfeeding. Because of resource constraints, Power U unfortunately had to discontinue the PWF program but stays committed to maintaining reproductive justice as a crucial element of their work. For example, Power U runs programs at a local alternative high school for young parents, which combines birth and political education to develop participants’ awareness of reproductive justice, criminalization, and restorative justice. More so, in The Hidden Truth Power U dedicated substantial space to specifically analyze Miami-Dade County public schools in terms of the experiences of young Black femmes and Transgender and Gender and Gender Non-Conforming (TGNC) students. In the report they argued, “If our schools continue to be environments where girls’ bodies, sexualities and identities are preyed upon and objectified, our schools will continue to be unsafe” (10).

Aside from their continued projects and advocacy, key to Power U as an organization is the sustained recruitment of new generations of Black and Brown working-class activists, who through social media and on-the-ground organizing, continue to safeguard Power U’s presence as a resource for some of the most vulnerable populations in Miami.

Written by:
Laura Bass
UGrow Fellow for the Department of Manuscripts and Archives Management, 2019-2020

Notes:

¹ See also N. B. D. Connolly. “Colored, Caribbean, and Condemned: Miami's Overtown District and the Cultural Expense Progress, 1940-1970.” Caribbean Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2006, pp. 3–60.
² See Jesse M. Keenan, Thomas Hill, and Anurag Gumber. “Climate gentrification: from theory to empiricism in Miami-Dade County, Florida.” Environmental Research Letters, vol. 13, no. 5, 2018, iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabb32.
³ See Roshan Nebhrajani. “Smashing the Slumlords in Liberty City.” The New Tropic, 26 Jan. 2017, thenewtropic.com/smashing
slumlords-liberty-city/. Also, see website for the organization Struggle for Miami’s Affordable and Sustainable Housing (SMASH), www.smash.miami/.
⁴ For more information about the Community Justice Project see: Community Justice Project Records, Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries.
⁵ Power U for Social Change, Community Justice Project, and DataCenter. “State of Miami Renters.” June 2012, pp. 1-23, static1.squarespace.com/static/54179ca4e4b0b0c7bc710d3d/t/54225611e4b097e05f75b895/1411536401877/State+of+Renter+Report.pdf
⁶ See John O’ Connor. “Explaining Florida’s New Race-Based Achievement Goals.” State Impact: NPR, 15 Oct. 2012, stateimpact.npr.org/florida/2012/10/15/explaining-floridas-new-race-based-achievement-goals/.
⁷ See advancementproject.org/ for details about the Advancement Project.
⁸ See video here: www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=159&v=sbkfdg84g8U&feature=emb_title.

Works Cited:

Power U and Advancement Project. Miami-Dade County Public Schools: The Hidden Truth. October 2017.

Samara, Tony Roshan, and Grace Chang. “Gentrifying Downtown Miami.” Race, Poverty & the Environment, vol. 15, no. 1, 2008, pp. 14–16.