November 15th 1950
Over the last two years I have been working with Elizabeth Virrick to bring plumbing and running water to the black community of Coconut Grove.
Elizabeth and her husband, Bobo, moved into an apartment house right next to the black area. At first, Elizabeth was annoyed by the noise, then she got to know the black people and found out they had no running water. She sounded the alarm that there were no sewers or water mains in the Colored Town, and then formed her own organization, the bi-racial Coconut Grove Slum Clearance Committee. I was put on the board. (1. pg174)
The first thing we did was to draw up a petition for a referendum requiring that all houses in Dade County should have indoor plumbing. We installed card tables outside grocery stores all over the city to get the required signatures. This took two years to pass. I suggested we set up a loan fund to enable black people to borrow money to build the bathrooms for themselves.(1. pg175)
While I believe this is a great step in the right direction, there is still much room for improvement. Poverty is a social problem with a long and unfortunate future in American society. (2. pg72)
1. Douglas, Marjory Stoneman, and John Rothchild. Marjory Stoneman Douglas: Voice of the River: An Autobiography. Pineapple Press, 1990.
2. Davis, Jack E. “Green Awakening: Social Activism and the Evolution of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s Environmental Consciousness.” The Florida Historical Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 1, 2001, pp. 43–77. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30149433. Accessed 6 Nov. 2023.
3. Plasencia, Alex. TigerPrints a History of West Coconut Grove from 1925: Slum Clearance, Concrete Monsters, and the Dichotomy of East and West Coconut Grove. Clemson University, May 2011.
Photo: “Changing Neighborhoods | Miami Housing Solutions Lab | University of Miami.” Affordablehousing.miami.edu, affordablehousing.miami.edu/housing-timeline/change-neighborhoods/index.html#:~:text=The%20Coconut%20Grove%20Committee%20for. Accessed 4 Dec. 2023.
