"Despite their apparent support of the expressways as necessary for municipal 'progress,' both the Greater Miami Urban League and the Miami Times urged official attention to the crucial issue of relocation housing. The expressway system, especially as it ran through Overtown, would uproot thousands of families. The Miami Slum Clearance Department initially reported in 1957 that fifty-seven hundred people would be dislodged in Overtown by highway construction. By 1959, the Dade County manager's office had increased that estimate to ten thousand people, with still other thousands to be displaced by slum clearance and urban renewal. By the early 1960s, a local housing reform association was estimating that at least three thousand black families would be uprooted from Overtown by the expressway, and possibly as many as twenty-three thousand individuals by all forms on urban redevelopment. The Miami Herald starkly posed the essential question as early as March 1957 in an article entitled, "What about the Negroes Uprooted by Expressway?' No agency was planning for relocation of the uprooted blacks, the Miami Herald asserted, and blacks were already moving in to 'former white areas along the fringes' of the ghetto. By the late 1950s, even before the expressway tore through Overtown, black housing density was on the rise and pressure was building for new housing areas for blacks.

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The Urban League, the Miami Times, and others who spoke for the black community urged a major program of relocation assistance, new public and private housing, and federal mortgage programs to help dislocated blacks resettle in other areas. Jones [of the state road department] and [Florida Governor] Collins remained noncommittal, essentially maintaining the position that highway building and housing were two separate and distinct activities."

Raymond A. Mohl, "Race and Space in Miami", Urban Policy in Twentieth-century America (1992)