D. A. Dorsey House
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Miami’s first black millionaire, Dana Albert Dorsey, built this white frame vernacular home for his wife in 1915. Dorsey amassed a real estate empire while developing Overtown as the center of Miami’s Black community—helping to organize South Florida’s first Black bank and Miami’s first Black high school, and donating the land for the city park and the first Black library in the city.
Dorsey even owned the land that is now the wealthiest community in Miami: Fisher Island. Timothy Barber, executive director of the Black Archives, spoke to WLRN’s Nadege Green about Dorsey’s experience with the property in a 2019 interview:
“He wanted to build a colored resort because during this time of Jim Crow, blacks were not allowed to even swim in the beach, get in the water. So his whole purpose was to establish a black resort because he knew that, just like there were wealthy white people, there were wealthy black people. And I’d like to thank the Miami Daily Metropolis for putting it on the front page and it says, “Negro Buys 1/3 of the Keys To Erect A Colored Resort.”
And that was the alarm sent out to let them know, “Hey while you’re sleeping, there’s a wealthy black man that’s about to change the face of our area”—or their area at the time. There were some issues where he could not build and expand Fisher Island. One, I know notably, was that it was on the east side of a railroad tracks and we know that [Henry] Flagler designated the east side of the railroad tracks for white people on the west side for black people.
And I think it was very difficult for Dorsey to get the people and the manpower that he needed to get over to the island on a regular basis to get this island prepared for a resort that he then sold the island to Carl Fisher.”
The Dana A. Dorsey House was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. The Black Archives History and Research Foundation of South Florida, Inc., founded in 1977 by Dr. Dorothy Jenkins Fields, is a nonprofit manuscript and photographic repository for the legacies of Miami’s black community. As owners of the D.A. Dorsey House, the group completed a restoration of the House to serve as a community resource center in 1995.
References:
//www.historicpreservationmiami.com/dorseyhouse.html
//www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/downtown-miami/article233377687.html