By Camille Reed | M•I•A MEDIA GROUP
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Betty T. Ferguson, a former Miami-Dade County commissioner who helped secure district elections and led efforts to establish the city of Miami Gardens, died Saturday morning, Nov. 14, while in hospice care. She was 81.
Twice, Ferguson ran for the Dade County Commission. Twice, she lost under a system that allowed voters across the county to decide who would represent her district. After her second defeat, she challenged that system in federal court. By her third campaign, the rules had changed. In 1993, northwest Dade voters elected her to represent them.
Ferguson’s campaign for district elections and her later work to create Miami Gardens grew out of a question she had confronted long before she held office. How much say did residents have in decisions about their own neighborhoods? Her work helped change the answer, first at the county ballot box and later through the creation of a city with its own mayor and council.
The stakes were personal. Ferguson was in the first class of first graders at Bunche Park Elementary in 1951. Her family was among those displaced from Overtown by the construction of Interstate 95, according to Miami Gardens’ official history. Years later, when plans for Joe Robbie Stadium emerged, she saw another major development moving forward in a predominantly Black community with little input from the people who lived there. The stadium dispute helped draw her into county politics.
After losing her second race in 1990, Ferguson joined a federal voting rights lawsuit challenging the countywide election system. In 1992, a federal judge ruled that the system diluted the voting power of Black and Hispanic residents in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Under the district system that followed, voters could choose their own commissioner. Ferguson won the District 1 seat in 1993 and was reelected twice without opposition. She served 11 years.
As commissioner, Ferguson pursued improvements residents could see on their own blocks. County records credit her with directing money toward drainage, sidewalks and safer routes to school. She helped secure funding for a community center in Carol City and backed sewer improvements along Miami Gardens Drive.
The effort to form a city took years. An initial incorporation vote failed in 1995. In 2002, Ferguson appointed members of an advisory committee that moved a second effort forward. On May 13, 2003, residents approved the charter establishing Miami Gardens as Miami-Dade County’s 33rd city.
Ferguson spent much of her working life in classrooms. A graduate of Florida A&M University and Ohio State University, she taught at Howard University and Florida Memorial College before spending about three decades at what is now Miami Dade College. She also founded the Unrepresented People’s Positive Action Council, a Saturday breakfast forum where residents could discuss community problems. Miami Dade College later named an endowed teaching chair in her honor.
Her name is also on the Betty T. Ferguson Recreational Complex on Northwest 22nd Avenue, where residents can swim, play basketball or use the running track. Another part of her legacy is on the ballot. When District 1 residents vote for their county commissioner, the decision belongs to the people who live in the district. That is the power Ferguson went to court to secure.
