MIAMI (AP) — Amari Cooper’s football jersey hangs in the Coconut Grove Sports Hall of Fame.
A historically Black neighborhood of Miami that nurtured generations of accomplished athletes is under threat by rising costs and gentrification pressures. Anthony Witherspoon stands in the Coconut Grove Sports Hall of Fame in the Miami neighborhood of west Coconut Grove, Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024.
Witherspoon, known as “Spoon” by everyone in town, is a former college basketball player and coach who returned to West Grove in 2015 after nearly 30 years in Atlanta and found a neighborhood far different from the one that raised him. “I was here. I lived in the community. I felt the impact of sports,” Witherspoon said. “I came back from Atlanta, Georgia, and I ran into the gentrification. And this was in the back of my mind: We still need to preserve this history.”
The community’s reputation for athletics was birthed at George Washington Carver High School, a segregated Black school. Carver was a football powerhouse in the 1950s and 1960s, winning five state championships under Powell, who helped shape the landscape of Miami’s high school sports scene. Cole said West Grove still has youth sports programs, but since many families have moved out and kids have dispersed to other school districts, “it isn’t quite the same.”
“They’re knocking down homes that’s been in people’s families for years and they’re building townhomes,” said Denzel Perryman, a Coconut Grove native and former University of Miami star who is a linebacker for the Los Angeles Chargers. “So, it does affect the community because some kids who are from there, they end up going to different places, different parks because they don’t live in the Coconut Grove area.
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