Historically, Miami’s Black Coconut Grove has nurtured young athletes. Now that legacy is under threat

MIAMI– Amari Cooper’s football jersey is in the Coconut Grove Sports Hall of Fame. The same goes for Frank Gore, along with tributes to Negro League baseball player Jim Colzie and football coach Traz Powell, whose name adorns perhaps the most revered high school football stadium in talent-rich South Florida.

They represent West Coconut Grove when it was a vital, majority-black neighborhood hidden among some of Miami’s wealthiest areas that thrived with family-owned businesses, local hangouts and sporting events. Some call it West Grove, Black Grove or Little Bahamas in a nod to its roots. Most just call it The Grove – a place filled with cultural history transformed over the decades.

“When you talk about what The Grove is, you’re talking about the true history of South Florida,” said Charles Gibson, grandson of one of the first black members of the Miami City Commission, Theodore Gibson.

Sport was his heartbeat. It fueled the early careers of Olympic gold medalists and football stars like Coopernational champions and Future Football Hall of Famers like Goreall of whom trace their earliest sporting memories to this close-knit community.

Today, there are few traces of this proud black heritage. Years of economic neglect followed by recent gentrification have eliminated much of the neighborhood’s cultural backbone. Robust youth leagues and sports programs have dwindled. Now, the community that once created an environment for young athletes to succeed – a trusted neighbor watching over a young football player on his way to training, a respected coach instilling discipline and persistence in a future track and field star – is in disarray. risk of extinction.

“I think in two or three years, if something isn’t done, Black Grove will be completely eradicated,” said Anthony Witherspoon, a West Grove native and founder of the Coconut Grove Sports Hall of Fame.

Witherspoon, known as “Spoon” to everyone in town, is a former college basketball player and coach who returned to West Grove in 2015 after nearly 30 years in Atlanta and found a neighborhood very different from the one that raised him.

Witherspoon recalled the late 1970s when she walked down the aptly named Grand Avenue — once the economic epicenter of West Grove — after a Friday night football game, dined at a local family restaurant and hung out at the popular Tikki Club.

The neighborhood’s previous generations died out, many of their families moved elsewhere, and disinvestment led to poverty and abandonment. Then redevelopment moved, replacing longtime local residents with non-black newcomers. The family has largely disappeared. The same goes for the Tikki Club, now an empty building, with its last remnants of vibrancy in Bahamian-inspired colors remaining on its walls.

“I was here. I lived in the community. I felt the impact of sports,” Witherspoon said. “I came back from Atlanta, Georgia, and I came across gentrification. And that was on my mind: We still need to preserve this history.”

Witherspoon founded the Hall of Fame as a way to keep that legacy alive. A time capsule of about 90 area athletes and coaches, it begins with figures like Colzie, a World War II veteran who played baseball for the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro Leagues, and continues with former professional running back Gore and Cooper, a receiver with the Cleveland Browns.

“Coconut Grove is the nesting place for all of us athletes in this neighborhood,” said Gerald Tinker, a West Grove native who won a gold medal in the 1972 Olympics as a member of the US 4×100 meter relay team. “They would always expect us to be as good (as previous generations) and equally humble. And it’s always been like that.”

The community’s athletics reputation was born at George Washington Carver High School, a segregated black school. Carver was a football powerhouse in the 1950s and 1960s, winning five state championships under Powell, who helped shape Miami’s high school sports scene.

Harold Cole, the former coach and athletic director at nearby Coral Gables High School who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2019, said Powell’s influence spanned generations.

“He was a coach; he was a mentor,” Cole said. “He was responsible for a lot of the athletes that came out of Coconut Grove.”

Cole said West Grove still has youth sports programs, but because many families have moved and children have dispersed to other school districts, “it’s not quite the same.”

Integration in the 1970s forced Carver to close. It is now a high school, located in the wealthy neighboring city of Coral Gables.

“That division broke the fabric of the community to some extent in the 1980s,” Witherspoon said.

Nichelle Haymore’s family hopes to preserve part of the old neighborhood by reopening the Ace Theater, a popular venue for black residents during the Jim Crow era. Haymore’s great-grandfather, businessman Harvey Wallace Sr., purchased the theater on Grand Avenue in the 1970s. Born in West Grove, Haymore spent years in Texas before returning in 2007 to help maintain the theater.

“The feel of the neighborhood is different,” Haymore said. “The neighbors who may have taken care of your house in the beginning, don’t say hello, don’t talk. People take their dogs for walks in their backyard. This respect for the neighborhood is different because the neighborhood is different.”

Shotgun Style Homes owned by black residents were demolished in exchange for elegant, boxy estates – called ice cubes by some – and condominiums too expensive for the middle-class people who built the community. Abandoned, boarded-up buildings sit where landmarks used to draw crowds. Giant real estate advertisements are plastered on the fences of vacant lots.

“They’re tearing down houses that have been in people’s families for years and they’re building townhomes,” said Denzel Perryman, a Coconut Grove native and former University of Miami star who is a linebacker for the Los Angeles Chargers. “So it affects the community because some kids that are from there end up going to different places, different parks because they don’t live in the Coconut Grove area.”

Perryman, who lived in Miami historic black neighborhood of Overtown As a child, I spent most of my time in West Grove playing football at Armbrister Park or participating in the many extracurricular activities the community had to offer.

Some still exist today. Perryman watched his childhood football team, the Coconut Grove Cowboys, win a Pop Warner championship in December. Youth teams still hold training at Armbrister Park, although some of them look different to previous years’ teams.

“It’s unfortunate because you lose a lot, the character,” said Gibson, the football and lacrosse coach. “There are certain things in a community that have family ties. When you lose that, I think it’s sad.”

Gibson is determined, like many other residents, to foster the same family environment that created him.

“You can’t put a dollar sign saying, ‘Go to grandma’s. She (lives) next door,’” Gibson said. “You don’t even have to look outside because you know it’s only 10 steps and they’re in the house. How can you put a value on that?”

At The Grove, that’s the question people are struggling to answer – before it’s too late.

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