Even through a closed door you can still hear DJ Greo's angry voice thundering away. "I got no life!" he hollers. "I got no girlfriend! I got no kids! I'm a grown-ass man now, and all I got is this!" This is Blaze 104.7 FM, the hip-hop station Greo has...
Close to HomeThey met at Victory Hospital back in August 1962. My mother had just given birth to me, but owing to problems during the delivery, she needed to be hospitalized for more than a week after I was born. One of her roommates was Rita Grady, who was expecting...
Please look to the left of this text. Thank you. You are very good at following directions. That woman with the dead-ahead gaze, the determined jaw, and the mahogany skin is Octavia Anderson. She is 33 years old. She is the mother of six children. She lives in the James...
John de Leon is attracted to conflict like an umpire to a baseball game: It's a fair ball as long as everyone plays by the rules of the U.S. Constitution. During the past four years, it often seemed as if no major controversy or protest occurred in Miami-Dade County without...
University of Miami film student Scott Alboum ventured into Liberty City to look at life through the eyes of former UM cornerback Nathaniel Brooks. In Alboum's 30-minute documentary, Black with No Excuses, the camera pans the trash-lined streets of the James E. Scott Homes, where the football player grew up...
From the porch of Toby's Market, Sweetcakes can all but see his neighborhood vanish like the swampland it once was. "That house right there," he says pointing across a small municipal park. "A black family owned it for like 40 years. Now a Spanish couple's buying it. This is going...
Marilyn Bell moves a white plastic chair, approved for outdoor use by the Miami-Dade Housing Agency, on to the small cement porch of her apartment and takes a seat. Light saturates the sand-colored buildings of Perrine Gardens on this late November afternoon, turning them an incandescent golden yellow. For Bell...
Editor's note: We greatly appreciate receiving letters from our readers and try to publish as many of them as possible. Predictably, though, some missives fall victim to space limitations or time constraints. In this issue we try to make amends. Below is a sampling of correspondence from the past year...
Just when it seemed the wheels of economic justice in Miami-Dade County had ground to a halt, they began revolving again -- at least for thirteen small businesses located in some of the most blighted parts of town. Last year their owners applied for commercial-revitalization grants from the county's Office...
On October 6, 1970, fourteen-year-old James Ingraham was late for school. When he got to his shop class at Liberty City's Drew Junior High School, he broke a glass. For these two transgressions, Ingraham was taken to principal Willie J. Wright's office to be paddled. When Ingraham protested, Wright called...
In 1997 Maria Yopp-Mathias whacked a man named Luther Clark in the head with a wooden stick. Clark, she claimed, had stolen from her. She later was convicted in Miami-Dade Circuit Court of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to four years in prison. Authorities sent Yopp-Mathias...
On a warm Friday morning in mid-December, the local Work and Gain Economic Self-Sufficiency (WAGES) coalition held its monthly meeting at Miami-Dade Community College's downtown Wolfson Campus. The troubled agency's mission is to ease program participants off welfare and into the work force, a transition that has been rocky at...
One Sunday night in October, Porsche Williams met with old friends from the Opa-locka neighborhood where she grew up. About twenty teens were partying together that evening at Platinum nightclub, toasting a friend's graduation. But it was also Porsche's first outing since she split with her boyfriend, Jonas Baptiste, and...
Twelve years ago, when Dale Ayres was an unhappy gay kid growing up in a small Illinois town, he put the business end of a shotgun into his mouth and prepared to pull the trigger. His mom caught him in the act, though, and knocked the gun aside. Dale, now...
A lot has changed since the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) embarked on a legal jihad against the City of Miami on behalf of 5000 vagrants in 1988. Senior U.S. District Court Judge C. Clyde Atkins, whose ruling in Pottinger v. Miami created a national stir, has died. So have...
Why is this a story?" grumbles the weary drug enforcement agent, clad in black boots, black pants, black sidearm holster, and a black T-shirt with the words Six to ten seconds to make a first impression on the back. He stands guard near the rear entrance of a dingy, five-story...
Off Miramar Parkway, in a community studded with pricey identical houses, Trick Daddy sits in his living room watching the Lifetime channel. Trick (his given name is Maurice Young) is a rapper whose latest album, www.thug.com, is a national hit. Although the past six months has been a succession of...
Vincent Michael PowellIt was a little after 4:00 a.m. this past July 3 when ten-year-old Vincent awakened to the smell of smoke in his Liberty City home. “I woke up because it got so hot,” Vincent told the Herald last year. “The smoke detector was going off, and the hall was filled with smoke. At first I […]
Vincent Michael PowellIt was a little after 4:00 a.m. this past July 3 when ten-year-old Vincent awakened to the smell of smoke in his Liberty City home. “I woke up because it got so hot,” Vincent told the Herald last year. “The smoke detector was going off, and the hall was filled with smoke. At first I […]
On a steamy Thursday at noon, animal-rights activist Howard Garrett prepares to walk into forbidden territory. He holds a camera and hides behind the flora of a blue Hawaiian shirt and black, hit-man-style shades -- tourist camouflage. Garrett scans his ticket and pushes against the turnstile. It's been more than...
Since the beginning of this year, Vivian Rolon's living space has shrunk from a two-bedroom apartment to a motel room to a tiny corner of her son's kitchen floor. That is where she lives right now: on a doubled mattress in front of a television. On top of the TV...
In some Miami neighborhoods, Pop Warner football is a community rallying point. Weekend games for kids age eight to fifteen draw thousands of spectators. Families gather to barbecue chicken and watch with passionate interest as tiny players wobble down the field in oversize helmets. The events are "therapy," says one...
