Miami
20th century

During the early 20th century, migrants from the Bahamas and African-Americans constituted 40 percent of the city's population. When landlords began to rent homes to African-Americans around Avenue J (what would later become NW Fifth Avenue), a gang of white men with torches marched through the neighborhood and warned the residents to move or be bombed.

Miami prospered during the 1920s with an increase in population and development in infrastructure as northerners moved to the city. The legacy of Jim Crow was embedded in these developments. Miami's chief of police at the time, H. Leslie Quigg, did not hide the fact that he, like many other white Miami police officers, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Unsurprisingly, these officers enforced social codes far beyond the written law. Quigg, for example, "personally and publicly beat a colored bellboy to death for speaking directly to a white woman".

The collapse of the Florida land boom of the 1920s, the 1926 Miami Hurricane, and the Great Depression in the 1930s slowed development. When World War II began, Miami became a base for U.S. defense against German submarines due to its prime location on the southern coast of Florida. This brought an increase in Miami's population; 172,172 people lived in the city by 1940. The city's nickname, The Magic City, came from its rapid growth, which was noticed by winter visitors who remarked that the city grew so much from one year to the next that it was like magic.

After Fidel Castro rose to power in Cuba following the Revolution in 1959, many wealthy Cubans sought refuge in Miami, further increasing the city's population. The city's national profile expanded dramatically in the 1970s, particularly in 1972. The region hosted both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in the 1972 Presidential election. The Miami Dolphins also made history with their undefeated "perfect" season. The area's educational and cultural institutions had also developed significantly in this period, positioning the city to service a larger and increasingly international population. Miami also developed new businesses and cultural amenities as part of the New South in the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time, South Florida weathered social problems related to drug wars, immigration from Haiti and Latin America, and the widespread destruction of Hurricane Andrew. Racial and cultural tensions sometimes sparked, but the city developed in the latter half of the 20th century as a major international, financial, and cultural center. It is the second-largest U.S. city with a Spanish-speaking majority (after El Paso, Texas), and the largest city with a Cuban-American plurality.
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