With the generous support of a community grant from Florida Humanities, the WPHL and FIU Libraries’ Digital Collections Center completed the digitization of select issues of Miami Life in Summer 2021.
For decades, this alternative weekly newspaper had been thought entirely lost to researchers. While conducting his research on Miami’s LGBTQ past, Julio Capó, Jr. tracked down a descendant of the newspaper’s last known owner, Reubin Clein. That process, in part, helped Capó complete his first book, Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (2017).
Select bound copies of the newspaper were in the descendant's possession and have since been digitized by this initiative.
They have been made text-searchable with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and the following issues are now freely available on FIU Libraries’ public-facing digital repository, dPanther: January–December 1927; January 1928–October 1929; September 1934–September 1935; and January–December 1949.