Rocky Road For The City of Progress

My first thought was to write about this City of Progress brochure that the City of North Miami's Department of Economic Development put together to attract new business to the community. We did the brochure about 15 years ago, with lots of my photos inside depicting the city's parks and other amenities.

We've had progress over the years in many ways, including becoming a multi-ethnic community where everybody seems to get along with one another and most everyone speaks decent enough English even if they speak Espanol or Kreyole at home, where whites date blacks in high school and later get married and have children together. It's a far different place than the segregated North Miami where I went to high school. In this brochure I have a photo of my son Jonathan fishing with my Jamaican girlfriend Vivette's two boys, Craig and Xavier. They wouldn't have been allowed in the park forty-five years ago. Hell, they wouldn't have fished together forty-five years ago.

A few years ago the city hired a black city manager, and he in turn hired a black woman to be police chief. Our first woman chief and our first black chief! Yup, we're making progress here, for sure! So you can imagine my surprise when I got an email earlier this evening stating that the city manager had fired the chief "with cause". I've been trading emails with several people all evening trying to get more information, but a short piece in the on-line edition of the Miami Herald had the most information, and that mostly consisted of stating that the chief was so shocked at being fired that they had to call the paramedics to revive her. Tomorrow should be a very interesting day around here, and maybe a bit of a challenge for our City of Progress.