The Miami Carol City High School band performs at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the opening of a new Walmart Neighborhood Market store in Miami Gardens on Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2015.
WALTER MICHOT
MIAMI HERALD STAFF
When some of the older alumni look at Miami Carol City Senior High School, they see a loss of pride.
Maybe it was because the neighborhood lost a bit of its identity at the formation of Miami Gardens. Maybe it was local children now having more school options outside of Carol City. Maybe it was the school’s renovations that demolished the building where the beloved Chief Hall was located. Regardless, it was something that needed to be addressed.
“A lot of the kids now don’t have school pride,” said Tracey Vincent, a 1998 graduate of Carol City. They need to see “school pride, where we came from and how we’re doing now. A lot of people who came from Carol City are really big.”
That desire led to the Chief Hall Picnic, an annual gathering to celebrate all things Carol City. After a two-year hiatus due to COVID-19, the festivities will return Saturday in Carol City Park with a concert, electronic giveaways and free food.
“People from Houston, Alabama, North Carolina, people from New York — they all fly down to reunite with their classmates who they haven’t seen in years, sometimes decades,” said Moses Washington, a 1998 Carol City graduate.
The origins of the picnic can be traced back to Washington, Vincent and Lee “Freezy” Prince who, in the mid-2010s, began to discuss how they could bring their hometown of Carol City together. At the time, they felt that neighborhood pride wasn’t the same as it used to be. So they created a Facebook group called Chief Hall, a popular meeting place in the old building, began adding graduates and encouraged everyone to represent their class. Then the idea of picnic was raised.
“We wanted to ensure all the children in the community see that we went to a school, we come back and we pour into the community,” said Vincent, now a mental health counselor for Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
The first picnic occurred in 2016 and has grown in size ever since. Thousands of people attended the 2018 and 2019 events. City officials began to pop in, including then-Miami Gardens Mayor Oliver Gilbert in 2018 whose dance skills were still a hot topic nearly five years later. Even the class competition got a little more fierce.
“Each class will come up with their theme” for their tent, said Prince, a 1996 graduate. “For instance, Class of ’98, their tent was resembling a football field for the year they won states. Class of 1990, they had Zamunda — from the girls to the dancers to everything. Class of 2007, they had a whole candy shop where they were feeding all the kids in the building. ’96 had a club, like the Pac Jam, like a nightclub with music, DJs and everything.”
Myrticia Gray, a Carol City native who graduated in 2011, had been attending similar alumni picnics for some time. But the Chief Hall Picnic was unlike anything she’d ever seen. Part of the allure had to do with what Gray described as the “energy” — alumni from classes as far back as the 1960s have been known to come — but also the significance of the real Chief Hall.
“It was a place where ancestors have been, the legacies formed, the amount of opportunities produced inside those buildings — it was something you’ll never forget,” Gray said. “Chief Hall was a very special place. The whole structure — we had art, paintings, quotes all over the walls — was something amazing. I would definitely say it was a piece of art.”
Added Prince: “It’s a badge of honor to actually walk through Chief Hall. So when you say ‘Chief Hall Picnic,’ it reignites the whole community.”
Although the 2022 picnic might not showcase the flare of years past on tent decorations, the concert lineup — which includes Trina, Major Nine and Kiddo Marv — surely will bring the community out. And if the picnic’s return is not a reason enough to celebrate, perhaps the circumstances that necessitated its hiatus is, says Washington.
“It’s going to be big,” Washington said. “With us being quarantined and with COVID hitting us so hard, we lost a lot of loved ones. This is a great time for us to get around our friends.”
C. Isaiah Smalls II is a reporter covering race and culture for the Miami Herald. Previously, he worked for ESPN’s The Undefeated as part of their inaugural class of Rhoden Fellows. He is a graduate of both Columbia University and Morehouse College.
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