By Bill Hirschman
Long before Hampton House was resurrected as a historic site in Miami—once visited by Martin Luther King, Muhammed Ali and Malcolm X—the local actor-director-playwright Keith C. Wade grew up playing in the rubble of that structure where his mother, father and much of his family once worked.
Now, the 48-year-old artist returns to the museum to theatrically track how the civil rights movement and other factors transformed yet undercut the thriving black Brownsville-Overtown neighborhoods—a journey seen through the memories of his parents and the many icons passing through.
Wade, who has been integral in Black theater here for 36 years, is preparing his latest play with music The Last Sun of the Hampton House to premiere Sept. 27 inside the restored property itself at 4240 NW 27th Avenue.
Described by publicity as “a foot stomping, hand clapping, emotional journey back to a time and a place wherein you didn’t really have fun until you walked in when the street lights were coming on, and you walked out when the sun was coming up.”
Keith C. Wade
He tried to pen the story several years ago, but “while plausible and passable, it didn’t tell the real truth of what I wanted to say, not only about my family, but about the city,” Wade said last week as he prepped to direct it and act as narrator.
“Now, in a real way, the piece is a love letter to Miami. But in the love letter, it tells a real unapologetic truth about what happened to not only the city in that particular area of Brownsville, but what happened to the people, how all those events in the benefit of integration really destroyed a community, at least economically and culturally.”
It tracks the Green Book motel from the 1950s when it was one of the best known local Black lodgings because laws forbade integrated hotels. Black entertainers performing in Miami Beach were banned from staying overnight on the beach, so they opted for the Hampton House until it shuttered in 1976.
The two-story, fifty-room inn featured a jazz club, a restaurant and a swimming pool where frequent visitor Dr. King once was photographed enjoying a swim. He delivered an earlier version of his I Have a Dream speech at the Hampton House in 1960 before the March on Washington in 1963. A meeting place as well, it hosted weekly sessions of the Congress for Racial Equality.
Guests included James Brown, Sammy Davis, Jr., Nat King Cole, Jackie Wilson, Althea Gibson, Ella Fitzgerald, Berry Gordy, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Josephine Baker. Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson. It was the site of the post-championship fight celebration of then Cassius Clay with footballer Jim Brown, Malcolm X and Sam Cooke memorialized in the 2013 play One Night In Miami.
Those figures and events appear as the play moves through the decades, but they are fused into stories involving his family.
“I just chronicled the biggest stories and the biggest times that my mother and my father and my family recalled,” Wade said. “So the play begins on February 25, 1964, the night Muhammad Ali won his championship. But this goes in a different direction (from the play and film) that while Ali is there and he’s a character, it focuses on my mother and father’s first meeting. They met there at that party.”
“They would sit around the card table and just reminisce, and I would sit at my mother’s feet and hear about, ‘Oh, you remember that time James came through.’ They referred to these people by first name like, James who? James. You remember James. Jimmy came through, and he had no shirt on, and he was running through the lobby.”
“And then (the play) takes you on a journey through time of some of the most pivotal moments in the civil rights era from the purview of the Hampton house like Dr. King’s first visit, the press conference Dr. King had there about the economic and cultural integration of the Cuban community and the Black community here in Miami.”
Wade eagerly described the social changes surrounding the play.
“That Brownsville/ Overtown area was what they called the Jewel of the South. And it had to be because nowhere else in Miami could people live and love and entertain themselves. When you went to the beach, you had to be gone after sundown if you didn’t have papers….. And north (Miami) was still really predominantly European. So the place that a lot of folks were dumped, black and Caribbean and Cuban, was in Brownsville and Overtown. So it became such a hub, such a safe place….not only economically, but culturally.”
From the 1950s, the house initially known as the Booker T. Terrace became a late-night hangout for upscale clientele on weekends and on Sundays after church.
Henry and Barbara’s wedding at the Hampton House where they worked
“My whole family worked there. My mother Barbara was (the owner’s) executive assistant, and she eventually managed and owned the restaurant there. He gave it to her as a wedding present. And my father Henry managed it with her. My grandmother cooked in the kitchen. My aunt owned a boutique there in the Hampton House. My uncles, when they weren’t in college or in jail, were there working at the Hampton House. My family lived there.”
But the Civil Rights Movement including the Civil Rights Act of 1968 “culturally, economically, intellectually, spiritually, changed the community of Miami” allowing Blacks and Hispanics to live and socialize elsewhere in the county like North Miami and Miami Beach.
“Eminent domain and integration sliced that community open like a scalpel and poured out everything, all the culture, all the love, all the economic power, everything,” Wade said.
“The house that was created was left to just wither and die,” Wade said. His mother, who had come there in 1964, was still working there in 1976 when it closed.
It remained abandoned for 26 years until it was slated for demolition in 2022. At that point, an advocacy group led by preservationist Dr. Enid Pinkney rallied to save the historical site. Dr. Pinkney, who died last month, eventually arranged to purchase it from the county to become a museum enshrining the music and social history. In 2015, the Historic Hampton House Community Trust began a $6 million restoration.
This history has been part of Wade’s consciousness even as he pursued his own unique journey through theater that began when he was 13 years old.
His mother had been too ill to work and they were sleeping in a car. Then her friend Patricia Williams, founder of M Ensemble Company, offered her a job as executive assistant in arguably the oldest and still active Black theater in the state.
“I literally slept in that theater at the bake house many nights, and that’s how it became part of me. So literally, not only was the M Ensemble my home and my first job, but it became the life’s blood of how I sustained myself for the rest of my life.”
Since then, he has played 100 roles from Othello to August Wilson’s offbeat denizens. He has directed and written plays include the notable Hustle: Cause these @#%&* Ain’t Playin’
He enjoys setting productions in unique but evocative locations such as Hampton House itself. In a 2015 interview with South Florida Times, he said, “Readers should go to see Hustle because they will never, and they have never experienced a play like this. We are transforming the inside of the AHCAC into an outdoor basketball court. We’ll be playing live basketball right there in front of you…These stories, these characters, these men, these women that you’ll meet are people that you know in your life but you haven’t heard how
But it’s a challenge here for any actor wanting to commit to a local career, he said.
“The M Ensemble is the life’s blood of the Black actor here in South Florida. And outside that, it’s feast or famine. If you can’t go to that home, then you’re scrounging for scraps outside of it…. There’s a couple of commercials here that if you’re pretty, you can get every February, there’s a run of a show Once On This Island or a couple of shows that people run. But for the other 11 months, you are just scrounging, and it hasn’t changed from the time I was 13 to now I’m 48 years old.”
“The diversity, at least that’s what they call it, that has been created by several other theater companies is great. But you have to live a Mediterranean diet if you expect to eat off of it.”
So, Wade is planning to move to Los Angeles, encouraged by the success of local talents who have made a career there, such as Sheaun McKinney. He meant to leave right after the play closes but a heart attack late last month has postponed the exodus until the end of the year,
“I mean, if I didn’t have to leave, I wouldn’t, because I love being here. But at this point, I cannot reasonably and responsibly say I’m a professional that expects to pay rent and pay bills, doing what I love to do here in this city with the opportunities that are here.”
He warns, “M Ensemble, as much as they try to provide, can’t provide everything for everybody that’s here. There’s a wealth of talent…. all the kids that come out of New World (School of the Arts). Actually, the lead (in Hampton), the young lady, Shantelle Mendoza, who’s playing my mother, she came out of New World. As soon as she graduated, she immediately started going other places because they funnel them other places. There’s nothing. There’s this fertile ground here, but we can’t grow.”
Still, this temporarily last gift that he has been working on for years left his conscience no option.
“Oh, I got no choice, man. I got to do this for the people, for the city, man. I got to represent for the city.”
The world premiere of The Last Sun of the Hampton House will open with a red carpet, black tie gala on Sept. 27 at the Historic Hampton House Museum of Culture & Art, 4240 NW 27th Avenue. The show will then run for only five days September 28-29, and October 4-6 with evening shows at 8 p.m. and Sunday matinee shows at 5 p.m. Tickets at https://tinyurl.com/verk9y43
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