That I Was a McCartney
The last of eight children. A poet who worked behind the scenes. A man honored in Congress and by the City of Opa-locka in the same year — and who wanted only to be remembered by his name.
Born in Overtown
Lillian and Leon McCartney raised eight children in the Miami neighborhood then called Colored Town — later known as Overtown. Ralph was the last of them, born into a community that was, in the years between the wars, one of the most self-sufficient Black neighborhoods in the American South.
The family lived on the same blocks from the teens of the twentieth century until 1952, when the first waves of clearance and road-building began to pull the community apart. His father held many jobs — he was, among other things, the first Black driver for one of the Miami dairies, a man who worked with his hands and came home to a household full of children who would all graduate from the same school. In a house that full, you learned to listen. You learned to pay attention to the people older than you. And you learned, as Ralph would say decades later, that the whole neighborhood was a governance structure — every adult a parent to every child.
Overtown was not just where he lived. It was who he was. And he would carry it with him for the rest of his life.
The poet who worked behind the scenes
Ralph McCartney had a reputation. He could stand up and recite the great works of literature from memory — Shakespeare, Dunbar, the long poems that a man of his generation and place had been made to carry. People knew him for it. A friend called him Cyrano, after the swordsman with the poet's tongue, and the name stuck because it fit.
But the eloquence was the surface. The deeper work was quiet. He organized. He pressed. He showed up at school board meetings and highway department hearings and city council sessions where no one expected to see a man from Overtown, and he made the case, in a voice that carried, for the things his community needed. He did this for decades, before anyone called it community organizing, before it was a job title. It was simply what you did when the place that raised you was being dismantled around you.
When Congresswoman Carrie Meek rose on the floor of the House of Representatives to honor him, she said the thing that people who knew him already understood: his most outstanding contributions are from working behind the scenes.
Honored in Congress and in City Hall
On the first of February, 1994, Congresswoman Carrie P. Meek — the first Black member of Congress from Florida since Reconstruction — stood in the House chamber and paid tribute to Ralph McCartney. She named three things he had done that, in her words, would continue to have positive impacts on the people for years to come.
The first was the Edison Park Elementary I-95 Overpass. The interstate had been built through the heart of Overtown, and children who walked to school had to cross it. McCartney pressed relentlessly until an overpass was built — a physical structure of concrete and steel, so that children would not have to face what Meek called the death-defying temptation of taking a shortcut across a highway.
The second was the U.S. Department of Defense Race Relations Institute, which came through Miami and left those who participated with a deeper understanding of their role in making the country and the military a better place for all.
The third was the rebuilding of Booker T. Washington School — the first public high school for Black students in Miami, opened in 1927 on Northwest Sixth Avenue. McCartney, alongside the late Dr. Johnny Jones, the school board, and the community, led the fight to rebuild it. The school that had educated his brothers and sisters, that had educated him, would educate the next generation too.
Three months later, on May 25, 1994, the City of Opa-locka issued a proclamation in his honor. Its title was A Community of Brotherhood and Sisterhood. It recognized his tireless effort in improving the lives of everyone in the community, his unwavering love for humankind, and his active involvement in politics and civil rights campaigns. The mayor of Opa-locka at that time was Dr. Robert B. Ingram — a man whose own firsts ran deep in Miami: the first Black officer assigned to downtown Miami, the first elected mayor of Opa-locka, a leader whose motto was Keep on struggling.
Two honors, in the same year, from two levels of government. For a man who had never sought either.
The Overtown he grew up in
On August 14, 1997, a young interviewer named Devon Williams sat down with Ralph McCartney at his home on Northwest Forty-Sixth Street. The conversation was part of a project called Tell the Story — an oral history of Overtown, recorded by the Black Archives of South Florida in partnership with Florida International University, and preserved by the University of Florida's Samuel Proctor Oral History Program. It ran for fifty-eight pages.
McCartney talked about his parents, about the neighborhood where he grew up. He described a place that sounds, in his telling, like a world entire. There was the Harlem Theater, later renamed the Capitol, whose sign he wanted preserved. There was Pride Shoe Shop, where they fixed and shined shoes. There was Harlem Drugs on Third Avenue and Fourteenth Street, and Peck's Ice Cream Parlor, where Mr. Peck looked out for the young men who gathered there and would not let the police harass them without a word.
He talked about his teachers — people who gave them a rough time, he said, but rough in a good way, because they knew that for Black children in Miami, they had to be twice as good. His principal, Charles L. Williams, was a legend in the town. Busloads of former students went to his funeral in Jacksonville.
And he described the community itself — the thing that was lost when the highways came through:
“Never did a hungry person cross that door and leave out that same way.”
He called the highways the Big Monster. They came through in the fifties and sixties, and they tore apart a community that had been self-sufficient, that had governed itself, that had raised its own. What remained was scattered.
The interview closes with McCartney describing the Overtown he would like to see again — a place where you could walk to a bar and have a beer, where kids played in the park and everyone knew they were safe, where you could call out to a neighbor and go to a dance on Saturday and worship together on Sunday. A place where every child belonged to every adult, and every adult was a parent to every child.
“That's the Overtown I grew up in. That's what I would like to see again.”
Miami, 1980
Southern Labor Archives, Georgia State University Library
A photograph of Ralph McCartney, taken in Miami in 1980, survives in the Southern Labor Archives at Georgia State University. He is holding a newspaper. The word Miami is visible on its pages. Behind him, the city.
The image belongs to a collection of photographs from the Southern Conference Educational Fund, a civil rights organization that was a leading proponent of integration in the South. The folder it lives in is labeled Miami, FL Riot Aftermath — 1980. That was the year the city erupted after the acquittal of police officers accused of beating a Black man to death. McCartney was there. He was always there.
That I Was a McCartney
When Carrie Meek asked him — or when someone asked him, and the question reached the Congresswoman's desk — how he wanted to be remembered, Ralph McCartney did not name the overpass, or the school, or the institute, or the proclamation. He did not describe a legacy in the language of institutions.
He said: That I was a McCartney.
The name carries the family: the eight children of Lillian and Leon, the house in Overtown where they all grew up and graduated from the same school. It carries Miami and the American South, the teachers and the principals, the neighborhood that was a governance structure. It carries the Big Monster and what came after. It carries the behind-the-scenes work that Carrie Meek said spoke volumes.
It is the name of a man who stood in the path of a highway and would not move.
That I was a McCartney.