West Dixie Name Change With Or Without Gables

Miami FL

26 May, 2021

11:28 AM

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By John Dorschner, Miami Times Contributor May 25, 2021 While other media has focused on how tony Coral Gables finally took a half-step in rejecting the Confederacy on Tuesday by renaming a portion of South Dixie Highway after a renowned abolitionist, almost no one has noticed that the Miami-Dade County Commission has already taken a much bigger step in completely abolishing the Dixie Highway name in a 3.5-mile section of North Dade. Few know about the North Dade change – wiping out the West Dixie name and replacing it with Harriet Tubman Highway – because the county traffic department has yet to change the street signs, even though commissioners decreed the move 15 months ago. Meanwhile, Coral Gables has attracted a lot of attention. After rejecting the Tubman name some weeks ago, the city commission unanimously supported a resolution on Tuesday to call highways the Harriet Tubman Highway, after the revered "conductor" of the Underground Railroad. Nine other cities and the county have already approved the Tubman name change. With Coral Gables the last to join, Tubman's name will be officially placed on two signs at the beginning and end of South Dixie Highway – while the Dixie name will continue on many dozens of signs in between. In fact, large parts of Dixie Highway in southern and northern Miami-Dade will retain the Dixie name until the Republican-dominated Florida Legislature decides to get rid of it, and that won't be easy. Statewide, many conservative politicians still embrace the Confederacy and/or don't want to be viewed as kowtowing to Black Lives Matter. North of 163rd Street, a four-block stretch is named Ben Laurenzo Way, after the founder of an Italian market./John Dorschner for The Miami Times The Legislature, however, has no control of West Dixie from NE 163rd Street to the Broward County line at NE 215th Street. That's a county road. This complex situation goes back to February 2020, when then Commissioner Dennis Moss introduced a resolution to abolish the Dixie name on local streets. The resolution decried "Dixie's toxic history [that] runs deeply through the veins of this country, as its racist roots date back to the 19th century and the deplorable comedic movement of blackface minstrels, and would become the rallying cry and unofficial anthem of the Confederacy during the Civil War as they fought to uphold an institution that enslaved and tortured countless African Americans." The resolution passed unanimously. All commissioners, including several Republican Cuban Americans, voted to rename the highways after Tubman, the fierce anti-slavery activist. The rub: South Dixie is a state highway. So is West Dixie from NE 119th to NE 163rd streets That means name changes require approval from the Legislature. Still, in 2020, it passed a bill signed by Gov. DeSantis that allowed Miami-Dade's Dixie state roads to add Tubman's name as a "memorial highway" – if approved by the 10 municipalities in which the highways ran through. Nine did so quickly, including North Miami and North Miami Beach; Gables balked. Commissioners said they were concerned that supporting the Tubman name change would lead to cascading political correctness, including ridding the city of its founder George Merrick, already being decried by University of Miami students as a racist. Lago, then a Gables commissioner, dismissed the Tubman idea as "a pure example of playing politics," a backhanded slap at the Black Lives Matter movement. The Herald also revealed that Lago was one of several prominent politicians who signed a letter criticizing Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart for adding coursework after the 2020 protests to teach students about racism and Black history. After weeks of public pressure, Lago said he'd changed his mind. Lost in all this public and media discussion was that the northernmost portion of West Dixie was a county, not state, road. Miami-Dade didn't need any approval to dump the Dixie name from this stretch and rename it for Tubman. Indeed, that's exactly what was said in the 2020 Moss resolution. The commission approved "renaming that portion of West Dixie Highway from NE 163rd Street to NE 215th Street as Harriet Tubman Highway. So, it's a done deal. Why haven't the signs changed along that stretch? Most county officials aren't saying. Mayor Daniella Levine Cava's office said more time was needed to formulate a response and the county office of traffic signals and signs was unreachable. County Commissioner Sally Heyman, whose district includes the northern part of West Dixie, acknowledged, "Technically, that could be done," but Heyman thought that it made more sense to wait until the state had acted, so that a long array of Tubman signs could be mass produced at cheaper cost to replace the old Dixie signs. "It would save the taxpayers money." Truth is, while South Dixie is a bustling highway in affluent suburbs, West Dixie is an oft-ignored road of strip malls. They house many small businesses: tax and immigration services, cell phone and computer repairs, clinics, pawn shops, laundromats, small restaurants, convenience stores and even a kickboxing gym. There's also a sports bar named Styx, a Bible store and many auto repair shops. Just north of 125th Street in North Miami, Dixie Highway is also named after Phares Duverne, a Haitian journalist who died in 2015./John Dorschner for The Miami Times To make it more complex, West Dixie has already been named for others. In North Miami, just north of 125th Street, it's the Phares Duverne Highway, honoring a Haitian journalist who died in 2015. In North Miami Beach, at 163rd Street, it's Ben Laurenzo Way, named after the founder of the nearby Laurenzo's Italian Specialty Food Market, which closed in 2019. And at 190th Street, it's also dubbed Coach Blatch Street, named for Gregory Blatch, who for decades sold doughnuts and held dances and other fundraisers to take kids at nearby Ojus Elementary School on trips. Near 190th Street, the road that's now officially named Harriet Tubman is also Coach Blatch Street./John Dorschner for The Miami Times In fact, before the Tubman-Dixie proposal exposed intense political divides in the Trump v. BLM era, politicians generally have had no trouble giving West Dixie additional names. In 2017, the state Legislature approved the Duverne name in North Miami. Coach Blatch Street and Ben Laurenzo Way were both approved by Miami-Dade Commission resolutions. Just to add a final complication: There's a completely ignored East Dixie Highway in Northeast Dade that looks like it's either in Aventura or unincorporated Miami-Dade County. No one has attempted to deal with that one. The Miami Times is the largest Black-owned newspaper in the south serving Miami's Black community since 1923. The award-winning weekly is frequently recognized as the best Black newspaper in the country by the National Newspaper Publishers Association.