FIU celebrates anniversary of Muhammad Ali's historic 1964 World Heavyweight Championship

By Rebecca Friedman

I first met Jacqui Colyer, chairperson of the Historic Hampton House, on the phone. It feels like moons ago, but it was probably in 2020. My colleague, Julio Capo, deputy director of the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab, and I called her to ask if she – and the Historic Hampton House – would be interested in partnering with us on a grant we were contemplating, a Mellon grant to digitize collections and collect oral histories: community data curation. We won the grant and that work is being done.

Historic Hampton House is one among eight cultural institutions in the Greater Miami and Broward areas with whom we work: interns hired; MOUs signed; technology purchased and work very much churning. It has been a ride building public humanities at FIU from the ground up. This journey has continuously brought us back to the Historic Hampton House, a site steeped in history.

One of Miami’s premier *Green Book hotels, the Historic Hampton House (HHH) is central in local, national and global conversations about America’s anti-Black past. The story is dialectical: it includes not only decades of violence and racism across America in the era of Jim Crow but also celebrates untold creativity fostered and community formed at the HHH. 

The Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab (WPHL) has been fortunate enough to partner with the HHH to help and highlight the centrality of this institution in our collective reckoning with that violent past.

Let me pause on the meaning of public humanities and why the Historic Hampton House has been — and continues to be — such an essential collaborator for us. At the heart of public humanities is the promotion of equity and justice among the communities that surround us in Greater Miami. Our mission includes not only hosting talks and discussions to increase informed public debate, but more centrally, building partnerships with individuals, institutions and communities that allow us to harness the vast resources of an institution like FIU in service of the communities that surround us.

We aim to do more than knock down the town-gown wall, we wish to move beyond our university and build relationships of trust with colleagues whose work ranges from Black preservation to the celebration of graffiti art to the archiving of LGBTQ+ histories. Our mission includes amplifying community voices and histories and engaging our students in this work — working together to document untold community stories, whether through oral history or artistic and other forms of creative expressions.

On the phone that day, Jacqui welcomed us into her world with the caveat that we would be in this together with no intention of a “one and done” extractive scenario. We listened, heard and assured her that we would work hard to earn her trust and have been striving to make good on that conversation ever since. This conversation with Jacqui, in fact, has structured all of our public humanities work since. We learned the centrality of actively pushing back against hierarchies of power that have too often led to exploitative university-community partnerships.

Learn more about our work and public humanities.

The Greatest Weekend

This leads me to The Greatest Weekend. The Historic Hampton House will host its inaugural annual event, commemorating the anniversary of the Clay (Ali)-Liston Championship Fight of February of 1964 with talks, exhibitions, music, food and more.

These events, like the physical space it occupies, encourage and insist on engaging conversations and understandings of the nation’s anti-Black past and today’s reckoning with that past. This is a quintessentially public humanities endeavor, and we are simply thrilled and honored to be co-presenting the weekend.

Come and join us as we learn about our communities through the eyes of Cassius Clay — from Allapattah to the Fifth Street Gym through the referees in the ring and the women around the ring, Finally, the knock out shot includes Bob Gomel, the photographer who captured Ali that night in Miami. Join us too for music on the patio and food trucks and more. It is going to be THE GREATEST WEEKEND.

FIU's Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion will be supplying shuttles for FIU students all day on Saturday, Feb. 26!

Weekend events and shuttle schedule.

RSVP to reserve your FREE ticket.

*The Green Book travel guide published during segregation identified businesses that would accept African American customers.