MIAMI — Martin Luther King Jr. is a part of Miami history. The civil rights activist born in Atlanta was a regular at The Hampton House, a small hotel for Blacks, Latinos, and Jews during segregation.
Before his historic stance on Aug. 28, 1963, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the Baptist minister delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech at The Hampton House at 4240 NW 27 Ave.
“The person who was present there, that heard this, was A.D. Moore," said Enid C. Pinkney, a local preservation leader, about Moore, a civil rights activist. “And he told us that, and so, he said that he was so impressed that this was the speech that he gave at the Hampton House.”
Moore, a Congress of Racial Equality activist who died in 2015, and Pinkney, the first Black president of the Dade Heritage Trust, who died in 2024, both talked about the time King spent in Miami.
King “went to Virginia Key Beach. He loved the beach. I heard him speak at Mount Zion Baptist Church,” Pinkney told Local 10 News about the historic church at 301 NW 9th St., in Overtown. “He spoke there, and people would go hear him, and he could always draw a crowd.”
The Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus Library’s archives include a collection of photographs and videos of King visiting the city. He warned that there was a unique “social dilemma” in Miami as Cuban refugees and Blacks flooded the job market in the 1960s.
“It would be cruel and indeed inhuman for the power structure to pit these two ethnic groups against one another in competition for mere survival, thereby creating explosive tensions that might one day become a blight upon this lovely community,” King said. “I would like to leave Miami with the knowledge that the whole community will see this as its number one problem and assign it top priority on things to do in the near future.”
King, the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, visited the University of Miami campus in Coral Gables on May 19, 1966. During his speech, he talked about the causes of inner-city crime.
“Poverty, ignorance, social isolation, and economic deprivation breed crime, whatever the racial group might be,” King said. “And, it is a torturous logic, the use of tragic results of segregation as an argument for the continuation of it. It is necessary to go back to the cause or basis and deal with that.”
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Watch the video of King’s historic statement at UM
Local 10 News archives: A look back at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s impact in Miami
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