Part II: Altars, Not Buildings – What They Can’t Whitewash

This is Part II of the 3-part series titled This Used to Be. These reflections emerged over Good Friday and Easter Sunday, 2025, as a prayer and a call to remember. If you missed Part I, we invite you to begin there.

But none of this was new.
Purvis Young—prophet, visionary, artist—saw it coming.
He painted it decades ago, on the side of the Gibson Park library.
Buildings rising looking like tombstones.
Horses racing across the sky.

Those horses weren’t decoration.
They were scripture.
Revelation.
A warning.

A call to awaken to our better angels—before it’s too late.

Because what they’re tearing down, painting over, and cutting through?
These are not just buildings.
They are altars.
They are sacred text—hieroglyphics written in brick, pigment, sweat, tears, and blood.
They are the very memory-holders of our community.

And here’s the part I struggle with the most:

Sometimes the grief is heavier when it comes from those who say they love this place too.
Those who say, “I was born and raised here.”
Those who carry the names, the stories, the soil in their bones.

Maybe they do love this place deeply—just differently than I do.
Maybe their love has had to shape itself around survival.
Around strategy.
Around grabbing what they can before it vanishes again.

Still… I long for more than preservation through profit.
I long for protection through purpose.

I want the kind of love that plants seeds, that builds without burying, obliterating, and displacing– without supremacy.

The kind that remembers what made this place holy long before it became “historic.”

Here’s my truth:
I’m not even from here.
I moved to Miami in 2004 and Overtown in 2011.
I didn’t grow up walking these blocks.
I didn’t sit on these porches as a child.

And yet… the ancestors chose me.
They grabbed hold to me.
They still shake me awake and won’t let me go until I listen.
Until I speak.
Until I’m obedient.

Some days I wish I didn’t care.
Because most days, caring the way I do…

hurts.
It’s heavy.
It’s bleak.

Is that the truth? I guess not.

The truth is—I’m grateful that I care.
I’m grateful that God chose me.
Even when the grief is thick.
Even when my voice trembles, the butterflies refuse to stop fluttering in my stomach, and my knees wobble.
Even when the tears flow.
Even when the remembering feels like way too much.

Because there’s something sacred about being trusted by the unseen.
Something holy about being asked to keep the story alive.
Something powerful about saying: “This used to be…”
And knowing that just by speaking it,
I am keeping the spirit of this place from disappearing.

To be continued in Part III: We Still Rise…