By John Dorschner
Miamiwebnews.com
Nine days after the formal ceremony celebrating the road — and more than four months after the Harriet Tubman Highway became a legal entity on state roads in Miami-Dade — the name of the great anti-slavery activist remains shrouded in black plastic on West Dixie.
Why is she forgotten by the Florida Department of Transportation, which is responsible for unwrapping her sign?
Perhaps it’s just bureaucratic oversight.
Perhaps it’s because West Dixie is a perpetually ignored road consisting of body shops and strip malls offering immigration, tax and cell phone services, along with Haitian churches, a…
By John Dorschner
Miamiwebnews.com
NOTE: See end of story for Miami Herald correction.
A week after a Harriet Tubman Highway sign was unveiled on South Dixie, the media continues to bungle and blur what happened.
That includes TV and print. A Herald editorial rightly congratulated those who pushed to get Tubman recognized but didn’t understand how limited the success was. The piece said the unveiling was “the first in a series that will replace the signs that have long tarnished our landscape” with the Dixie name.
The Dixie name has certainly tarnished history, but it’s not being replaced in this…
By John Dorschner
MiamiWebNews.com
More than FIVE days after Harriet Tubman Highway was formally dedicated, black plastic still covers the sign on West Dixie at NE 119th Street.
The dedication was Saturday at 11 a.m. by the Vizcaya Metrorail Station on South Dixie in toney Coconut Grove. About a dozen political leaders attended to celebrate adding the Tubman sign to the road that will still be called Dixie until the Republican-led Legislature decides to change it. A group removed the white plastic covering that sign.
Two Department of Transportation staffers said the other signs would be unwrapped after the ceremony…
By John Dorschner
Finally, four months after it became official, political leaders on Saturday did the formal unveiling of the Harriet Tubman Highway sign on South Dixie.
Several speakers talked about the “name change,” but in fact Dixie Highway still stretches for several dozen miles in north and south Miami-Dade, with dozens of South Dixie and West Dixie signs on the long sections where it’s a state road. Only the Legislature can get rid of the Dixie name, and that Republican-controlled body has yet to show interest in doing so.
Instead, a Harriet Tubman memorial highway was added to the…
By John Dorschner
Twenty years after 9/11, we have to ask: What the hell did America gain by its global wars on terror?
About 900,000 died in the global battles — mostly in Afghanistan and Iraq. That includes more than 350,000 civilians, according to Brown University’s Cost of War studies.
Why did the wars plod on for so long? American politicians always meant for them to be low-cost background noise that voters wouldn’t bitch about.
Not using the draft eliminated a lot of protests. While close to 50,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam, a “mere” 7,000 died in the post-9/11…
By John Dorschner
Here’s a way that Miami-Dade and many other urban areas can find a no-expense method of providing more affordable housing, create less traffic and build a more walkable city.
Earlier this month, St. Paul in Minnesota has become the latest to take the radical step of eliminating all requirements city-wide that developers need to provide minimum certain numbers of parking spaces for new projects.
It joins several cities — including Berkeley, Buffalo, Sacramento and Minneapolis — in doing away entirely with a concept that has been a mantra of many urban planners and politicians for decades. …
Why Afghanistan Reminds Me of Cuba
By John Dorschner
Of course, being a Miamian, I’m thinking of Cuba as I watch the Taliban take over Afghanistan.
The United States spent at least $82 billion in training the Afghan government army and giving it the best possible weapons. As the Washington Post has made clear in several stories, U.S. officials on the ground knew that the police and military were corrupt, that finding ways to enrich themselves was their main motivation. …
By John Dorschner
A tiny step in the biggest political battle in America happened in July in a shed-like building housing the Tap Rock Brewing Company in St. Croix Falls, Wis., population 1,943.
By John Dorschner
Long before this month’s mercenary attack on Haiti, other dumb dreamers/soldier of fortunes have believed that the nation was easy pickings for a take-over. The latest mercenaries killed the president, but … what were they thinking about taking over a country? It looks like police have been rounding them fairly easily.
Back in 1976, I wrote about other attempts by Miami-based soldiers of fortune dreaming of conquering Haiti, trying to overthrow the evil Papa Doc Duvalier. …
By John Dorschner
Miami Web News
While most Dixie highways in Miami-Dade are still in the midst of a struggle to be rebranded, a stretch of 3.5 miles in North Dade has officially been renamed Harriet Tubman Highway for more than a year — and almost no one knows it.
The reason: The signs from NE 163rd to NE 215th streets still read West Dixie. No mention of Tubman, the revered conductor of the Underground Railroad.
To make it more complex, West Dixie has already been named for others. In North Miami, just north of 125th, it’s the Phares Duverne…
