A Nation of Walls

Along NW 12th Avenue from 62nd to 67th Streets in Miami’s Liberty City runs a low concrete wall. Bordering a planted strip that divides the avenue from a parallel service road, this drab-yellow-painted structure might be taken as an unassuming retaining wall. It is in fact a piece of racist infrastructure – the remnant of a barrier built in the late 1930s to isolate a Black neighborhood from a white one. Leonardo Jackson grew up in Liberty City, but learned about the origins of the wall only recently. “I was disappointed in myself,” the seventeen-year-old told an interviewer in 2018. “To have something so historic and important to the Black community’s culture, right here, in my own community, and I didn’t even know about it.”