College appeals ruling blocking Miami land transfer for Trump presidential library

The board of a South Florida college is appealing a judge’s ruling temporarily blocking officials from giving away a parcel of prime real estate in downtown Miami to be used for President Donald Trump’s future presidential library.

Attorneys for the District Board of Trustees of Miami Dade College filed a notice of appeal in Florida’s 3rd District Court of Appeal on Tuesday, challenging a lower court’s injunction that bars the transfer of the property — at least for now.

Last month, Circuit Judge Mavel Ruiz sided with a Miami activist who alleged that college officials violated Florida’s open government law when they gifted the sizable plot of real estate to the state. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and other top Florida officials then voted to transfer the property to the foundation for the planned library.

Marvin Dunn, an activist and chronicler of local Black history, filed the lawsuit arguing that the college board violated Florida’s Government in the Sunshine law by not providing sufficient notice for its special meeting on Sept. 23, when it voted to give up the land.

https://www.afrocubaweb.com/marvin-dunn.html

“The spirit of Cubans and Blacks working together comes to the forefront now that last month President Barack Obama decided to open up communications between the United States and Cuba. At the same time, panelists agreed that being Black should not be the thing that binds Blacks in America. “Skin color alone is not enough to bind a people together. We need to find cultural ties. We have to find ways to make that happen,” said Dr. Marvin Dunn, who authored “Black Miami in the Twentieth Century.” Understanding Afro-Cubans 2/4/2015 Miami Times

Dr. Marvin Dunn taught in the Department of Psychology at Florida International University for thirty-four years, retiring as head of the department in 2006. He was born in DeLand, Florida, and was educated in the Florida public school system. His family moved to Miami in 1951. In 1961, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. He began his career as a naval officer, serving from 1961 to 1967 aboard the aircraft carriers U.S.S Kitty Hawk and the U.S.S. Saratoga, and was the Commander of the 14th Battalion, U.S. Naval Recruit Training Command in Great Lakes, Illinois. While still on active duty he studied at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois and received a Masters degree in education administration and supervision in 1965. In 1972, Dr. Dunn earned a Ph. D in psychology from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

After receiving his Ph.D., Dr. Dunn became an assistant professor of psychology at Florida International University, in Miami, Florida. In that position he was a seminal influence on students working for positive social change. He began such innovative programs as the Cultural and Human Interaction Center, which addressed racially motivated violence in the Dade County schools of the early 1970s. During that same period he shaped and guided the Institute on Sexism and Racism at Florida International University. In 1981, he founded the Academy for Community Education, an innovative program which addressed the needs of youth at risk of becoming school dropouts. He served as the school’s principal for fifteen years while continuing his duties at the university. His first book, a co-authored work with Bruce Porter, The Miami Riots of 1980: Crossing the Bounds, is the definitive work on that event.

In 1999 he designed and traveled an extensive photographic history of blacks in Florida with a grant from the Florida Humanities Council. This exhibit is still being widely circulated in Florida. He has also developed Florida black history photographic exhibits for Florida International University and for Camillus House’s Brownsville Christian Community Center, which was Miami’s Negro hospital in the days of segregation. His book, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century, was published in 1997. It is the only comprehensive history of the presence of blacks in Miami. His lastt book, The Beast in Florida: A History of Anti-Black Violence was published in August 2012 by University Press of Florida.

Dr. Dunn has appeared on numerous national television programs including several appearances on the CBS, NBC and ABC evening news programs as well as on CNN, Fox News, the BBC, The Today Show, Good Morning America, Black Entertainment Television, The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, and Nightline. Dr. Dunn has also written articles for many newspapers including, the Miami Herald, the Orlando Sentinel, the St Petersburg Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. He has directed three documentary films, Black Seminoles in the Bahamas: The Red Bays Story, Murder on the Suwannee River: The Willie James Howard Story and Rosewood Uncovered. Dr. Dunn is currently serving as Scholar-in-Residence for Camillus House of Miami. He is also founder of the non-profit organization, Roots in the City, which hires indigent people to develop community gardens in Miami inner-city areas.

dunnfiuXbellsouth.net [X=@]

Dr. Dunn has long maintained an interest in AfroCuban issues. Already in 1998, he participated in a panel sponsored by the Center for International Policy at Barry University on “View of the AfroCuban Community,” as documented on AfroCubaWeb.

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https://cabaonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/CABA_Briefs_Summer_2020_digital.pdf

Judge Mavel Ruiz is running for re-election in MiamiDade Circuit Group 67.
Judge Ruiz was first elected in 2014 and formerly served
as an Assistant Public Defender in Miami-Dade County.
Born in Santa Clara, Las Villas, Cuba, Judge Ruiz was
forced to leave Cuba and fly to Miami in March of 1966
after communist soldiers evicted her and her parents
from their home. She would never see her grandparents
again.
Judge Ruiz’s inspiration to become a judge arises from
the first day she walked into Courtroom 2-5 before
Judge Thomas K. Petersen in the Juvenile Delinquency
Division. She recalls how he was thoughtful and
inspiring to the children and treated the respondents
with kindness and respect.
It is that experience which has driven her to be a judge
- one who does not humiliate litigants or humiliate each
other. She has appeared before at least 100 different
judges in her career and considers the Hon. Judge Marc
Schumacher, who is now retired, to be one of the most
inspirational judges she has appeared before because
of the respect he provided to litigants and because he
conducted himself in a serious, fair, level-headed and
patient way.
Judge Ruiz also considers Chief Judge Bertila Soto,
Judge Peter Lopez, and retired Judge Stanford Blake as
role models.
Judge Ruiz recounts a lesson from her time as an
Assistant Public Defender as one of the most inspiring
experiences in her career—a lesson that people can
change. A former client of hers who was acquitted of
felony murder, robbery and armed battery, and had
accepted a plea and a long probation period in other
open cases, surprised her in her chambers. She learned
he had been released from prison, gotten a job as a
dishwasher and subsequently promoted to cook at a
sushi restaurant. He also had a significant other and was
living a peaceful life.
Judge Ruiz also has very high praises for the Cuban
American Bar Association. She said she would not be
a judge if it were not for CABA’s work throughout the
years and that there would be less diversity on the
bench without it.
She also recalled a story she heard once of when
Osvaldo Soto, one of the founders of CABA, witnessed
an elderly judge ask a young female attorney why
she was not home rearing children. Mr. Soto told this
attorney that such was not acceptable, explained that
CABA was an organization addressing such issues, and
invited her to become a member. That young woman is
now a judge in Miami-Dade County.
For those who wish to one day try to attempt to
become a judge, the advice Judge Ruiz has is make sure
it is something you truly want because the road is long
and difficult.

* * *
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article248455680.html

. . .Osvaldo Soto was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1929. One of five children, he attended law school alongside Fidel Castro, and was part of the revolution to oust Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. But when Castro became a murderous dictator, Soto became disillusioned and left Cuba for exile. In Miami, he joined the Assault Brigade 2506, which took part in the failed 1961 invasion at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. His boat never landed and Soto returned unharmed, and undeterred in efforts to advocate for a free Cuba. Soto later became a teacher in Wyoming, then Virginia, before ending up as a tenured professor at Iowa State. He returned to Florida in the mid-1970s, where he later earned his law license. Miami was a much different place back then. In 1976, the Dade County Commission declared the county bilingual and it was common for government documents to be published in Spanish and English. But in 1980, the Mariel refugee crisis brought tens of thousands of Cubans to South Florida, with many white residents blaming them for rising crime and societal ills. Voters that year passed an ordinance declaring English the official language,
prohibiting county funds for translating documents and offering non-emergency services in Spanish or any other language.

Soto, as president of SALAD and a member of various other citizen coalitions, was outspoken against the ordinance. By the time the County Commission repealed the law in 1993, the body was a majority Hispanic. “Miami is now in reality the capital of the Americas. It doesn’t make sense to have an anti-bilingual ordinance,” Soto said at the time. SALAD, founded in 1974, was one of the first groups to focus on bettering immigrants’ lives in South Florida. Members lobbied for refugees, fought for money for English lessons and created voter registration drives. In the mid-1980s, Soto and the organization also spearheaded a campaign called English Plus, aimed at preserving the Spanish language in Dade County and the United States. “In the past 30 years I would be hard-pressed to find anyone with more passion for justice than Osvaldo Soto,” said David Lawrence Jr., the retired Herald publisher and now chair of The Children’s Movement of Florida. “He was as good a mentor on matters of decency and fairness and listening as anyone I can remember — indeed, in so many ways a treasure for the future of this community.” Soto was also active in legal circles, advocating for more Hispanics in the ranks of lawyers and judges. A former member of the Cuban American Bar Association, Soto in 1991 was among those who pushed the group to open its membership to non-Cubans. . .

https://wfhb.org/bring-it-on-september-2-2024-dr-marvin-dunn-teach-no-lies-rebroadcast/

Bring It On! – September 2, 2024: Dr. Marvin Dunn – Teach No Lies (Rebroadcast)
September 2, 2024

This is program originally aired on August 21, 2023:

On today’s edition of Bring It On!, hosts, Clarence Boone and Liz Mitchell, spend the hour with Dr. Marvin Dunn. Dr. Dunn is fighting against the potential miseducation of countless children and young adults in Florida. He is here to discuss his efforts to combat this miseducation and the current state of racial politics in Florida.

Last Wednesday, August 16, 2023, before the first day of school for the Miami-Dade County school system, he led a march to protest the new education curriculum standards instituted by the Republican Governor Ron DeSantis that affect the teaching of Black history. This is part of a larger effort by DeSantis to purge what he calls “woke” idealogy in Florida.

Earlier this year, DeSantis had rejected the College Board’s AP African American Studies course for high school students because it included lessons on diaspora reparations, Black LGBTQIA+ studies, and the Black Lives Matter Movement. He has also barred instruction in schools that suggests anyone is privileged or oppressed based on their race or skin color, according to a CNN report. The new curriculum teaches that some Black people benefited from being enslaved because they learned useful skills.

Dr. Dunn was joined by some members of the Teamsters National Black Caucus, who then were holding a conference in Miami. Tennessee state Representative Justin Pearson also joined the protest. Rep. Pearson, along with fellow representative Justin James, had recently been voted back into office, after being expelled for calling out state Republicans for failing to pass gun control laws after the Covenant School mass shooting in Nashville.

Marvin Dunn/Twitter (X)
The union representing around 150,000 Florida teachers, the Florida Education Association, called these new curriculum changes “a disservice to Florida students and are a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994.” One of the most controversial aspects of these new standards includes teaching that some Blacks benefited from chattel slavery by learning useful skills. Further, these new curriculum changes include teaching that the Rosewood massacre was instigated by when a black man shot two white men who came onto his porch, rather than that a white woman falsely accused a Black man of assault.

Dr. Dunn has been leading “Teach No Lies” tours that take teachers and young people to places like Rosewood, Florida. Officially, it is recorded that the Rosewood Massacre of 1923 led to the killing of six Black residents and the fleeing of the rest of its black residents. Many say, however, that the death toll was much higher. By the massacre’s end, all but one of Rosewood’s buildings had been burned down. No law enforcement agency ever did an investigation, nor were there any criminal charges.

Dr. Dunn is a professor emeritus at Florida International University, and the author of many books, including A History of Florida: Through Black Eyes, where he writes:

Almost all of Florida’s painful racial past has been whitewashed, marginalized, or buried intentionally. But I was born here. I know Florida’s flowers and her warts.

He is also a co-founder of the Miami Center for Racial Justice. He began giving his Tell No Lies Tours in response to the state’s escalating efforts to further whitewash Florida’s Black History.

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