On July 28th, 1896, the City of Miami was incorporated. Of the 424 registered voters in the area, 368 were present: 206 whites and 162 blacks, documented in this charter document.
I found the charter while researching for Riders in Disguise and it felt like I’d discovered a century-old onion, so many layers beneath these simple numbers. Seemed relevant to the point of Riders in Disguise, so I included it as the second page.
Riders in Disguise coming late summer/early fall from Jitney Books.
Synopsis:
“Riders in Disguise follows the lives of four individuals in 1980s Miami at the height of the War on Drugs. Rig Lopez-Campbell is a middle-schooler navigating the streets of Liberty City following his father’s imprisonment. Tommy Munoz is a Pedro Pan survivor and former accountant dragged into the violent world of coke trafficking. Tina Pacheco is a Puerto-Rican freelance photographer turned journalist after capturing images of the 1979 Dadeland Mall Massacre. Ralph Williams is a homicide detective tasked with stemming the tide of carnage in the face of growing corruption within his own department. Touring the streets of Magic City during the Cocaine Cowboy era, Riders in Disguise takes a broad look at the impact of the most influential decade in Miami’s history.”
“Brilliant and scathing… Anderson Jr. delivers a smart vibrant unforgettable knockout… Riders in Disguise recalls The Wire in its piercing panoramic examination of the cruel forces that conspire to unravel our communities but also the front-line courage and resilience that holds them together.”
-Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author of This Is How You Lose Her
“…Compelling from the first page, Riders in Disguise perfectly captures the contradictions that beset Miami, a city both blessed and cursed by its diversity and its fearlessness.”
– Susan Hubbard, author of The Society of S Trilogy.
Autonomous Entity | Patrick Anderson Jr. 