50 years of Haitian migration to South Florida

MIAMI (AP) — They arrived 50 years ago, fleeing dictatorship and death. Along the treacherous, three-week ocean journey, the seafaring Haitian asylum seekers traded their shoes for food and water in Cuba, and were briefly jailed in the Bahamas before being asked their final destination.

“Miami,” they all said.

When their leaking, 56-foot wooden sailboat finally made landfall 40 miles north of Miami in Pompano Beach on Dec. 12, 1972, there was no family or Haitian community to welcome them, or protesters lining the shorelines demanding their freedom.

“They arrested us, put us in jail,” recalled Marie Bernard, who was among the 65 passengers, including two children, aboard the Saint Sauveur, the first documented boat of Haitian refugees to arrive in South Florida.

“They said there were others who would be coming behind us and they didn’t want them to ask why they were detained and we were not,” she said. “So we accepted to be jailed.”

Bernard left Haiti on Nov. 23, 1972, after her first husband, an army officer, was killed by the Duvalier regime. Fear of a similar fate led her to board a stolen wooden boat and set sail for Florida.

Ultimately the Haitian migrants banded together with a group of Black Baptist ministers, Catholic priests and Haitian exiles in New York and began challenging U.S. immigration and detention policies. In the process, they also gave birth to a new South Florida community of mostly Black, Creole-speaking refugees with French-sounding surnames.

When the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service denied Bernard’s claim for political asylum, she became a plaintiff in the first challenge by Haitian “boat people” of U.S. government policy.

Then known as Marie Jean Pierre, she and 215 other Haitians who had fled to the U.S. on boats between 1972 and...