The Year of Dangerous Days

The Year of Dangerous Days - Riots, Refugees, and Cocaine in Miami 1980 by Nicholas Griffin, Simon & Schuster 2020

There's hope here for other large, diverse U.S. cities dealing with crime, police, drugs, race and immigration, but not without lives lost and vicious confrontations that make us question the basics of civilization:  safety, housing, work.  All these items came up for grabs - for purchase, really - during Miami's tumultuous journey into and through the Eighties.  Somehow, says Nicholas Griffin, a resident of today's Miami, the city made it through those explosive times just thirty plus years ago and became an international  hot spot.  

But first, the pain.  Edna Buchanan, a reporter for the Miami Herald broke a story on the wrongful death of a black man, followed it seemed inevitably by a police cover-up.  Sound familiar?  But this is the old Miami, clearly divided between Anglo, white and black populations and neighborhoods and standards.  The author takes us into the lives of each main character, and watching them, we feel what Miami felt like in those Jimmy Carter days.  Maurice Ferre, elected mayor six times, had a vision for the city, a racially smooth, undivided spread of happy neighborhoods, a melting pot.  

Were too many big things attempted in that single year?  Problems that we now recognize as common across the US - big money drugs, a spiking crime rate, and powerful waves of immigration, stressed the city's ordinary systems and ordinary citizens.  What we see up close in The Year of Dangerous Days is what citizens - not government wonks or bureaucratic strategists think they see -  experienced.  For some citizens, the city had become a dangerous place, an area whose divisions should have set off alarms to anyone watching crime stats.  The night of the McDuffie verdict when the four police officers accused of beating a black man to death were let off, was filled with retribution as looters set fire to a $50M development project in Overtown, a well-intentioned city redesign intended to upgrade and stand proud.    

Sadly, the personal stories, so sharp and engrossing throughout this book,  become, says Griffin, "One story... laid on top of another, until some stories have been suffocated.  There's not even a plaque to preserve the memory of Arthur McDuffie."   Readers who remember the clear blue Miami Bay and its sand beaches and vibrant nightclub scene will be shocked at the human trials and pain pushed back down behind the welcome signs.  Coming out of this pandemic, its a wonder that other US cities will reject the tragic and difficult directions Miami took during that one challenging year.