Part I: This Used to Be…

– Memory and the Mourning of Place

This is the beginning of a 3-part series titled This Used to Be—a reflection rooted in sacred memory, grief, and truth-telling from the heart of Overtown. These words came to me during Good Friday and Easter Sunday, 2025—a time marked by fire, remembrance, and unexpected revelation.

It feels like I’m always saying,
“This used to be…”
“Just a couple of weeks ago…”
“Right here, there was…”

Every walk through Overtown feels like a quiet procession of grief.
A corner once sacred, now sold.
A mural once breathtaking, now painted over in blank, dead gray or just whitewashed.
A porch that held stories…Gone.

And I find myself speaking eulogies for places that I haven’t even had time to properly…
See.
Know.
Appreciate.
Experience–Overtown.
Not the version being sold back to us with high priced brunch menus.
Not the one being curated solely for elite tourists and investors.
Not the one that allows the blaring music to agitate our elders & keep our babies awake on school nights…
And definitely not the version where business owners who don’t live here believe their right to comfort–somehow trumps the right of the people who actually live here to:
Gather. Walk.  Breathe.  Exist.

…without being displaced.

Some of the places I mourn, I didn’t even get the chance to fully fall in love with—not the way I know my soul would have liked to.
I was still trying to learn their stories, still trying to allow my fingers the space to trace the essence of the names of those who once lived behind the walls.
And then… they disappeared.
As if the second I reached out in reverence, someone had already hung them up on a cross– to be crucified.

On Good Friday 2025…

A fire broke out on 11th Street near the train tracks– the dividing line.
The fire trucks came, I guess taming what was scorched.
Apparently on the surface it didn’t seem to be that big of a deal to most…it was just trees and trash.

What if it was deeper?

What if it was memory… history… reverence.
What if it was our collective peace?

And as I smelled the fire…
I couldn’t help but wonder if it was symbolic.
A mirror. A metaphor. A message.
Because it isn’t just this block that’s burning—
everything feels like it’s on fire.

The air.
The policies.
The trust.
The truth.

And yet… people pass by as if the smoke isn’t rising.
As if the ash in the air isn’t coating our lungs and suffocating the life out of us.
As if they can’t smell the slow unraveling of what once held us.

Maybe we’ve gotten used to the smell.
Or maybe pretending not to notice feels easier than naming what’s really happening.

But I noticed.
I seem to always notice.
Every word,  every action,
every whisper that says:
“This is not okay.”
Yet, they are too scared to hold the ones who should be…
Accountable.

Yet when the sacred is burning,
Silence is complicity. Isn’t it?
The fire can’t go unnamed. Can it?

I also saw that another mural was gone.
The one with Marcus Garvey and
The Black Madonna and child…

on Good Friday…?

Now covered in industrial charcoal gray.
As if paint could erase presence.
As if this precious memory could be scrubbed away.

I remember though…

Then a memory of the Birth justice mural from months ago jolts me.

They said it was just a window.
But to those of us who see with spirit, it felt more like surgery—
one botched from the very beginning.

They cut into the birth justice mural
with the steadiness of entitlement, not reverence—
right through the Gye Nyame Adinkra symbol. That means…the omnipotence of God.

What was meant to honor Black midwives, Black Mamas, and Black sacredness
was left with a gaping wound that doesn’t breathe.

It isn’t a window.
It doesn’t offer light or air.
It doesn’t allow us to see through.
It only reminds us of what was removed…
And then washed in white…

Like so many procedures on Black bodies and Black communities—

A pretend window where we’re meant to believe there’s transparency—when in truth, there is none. Then it was perfectly whitewashed with the permission of Black and Brown hands.

It feels symbolic.
A lie dressed as pure intentions.
Just like so much of what’s happening around us.

Still, we remember.

To be continued in Part II: Altars, Not Buildings…