When Moonlight won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, we were all happy to see an honest and relatable story filled with people of color receive its just due.
The people of Miami, Florida, where the story takes place, saw the recognition of this film as a win for their entire city, so much that a stretch in Liberty City will now be named “Moonlight Way.”
According to the Miami New Times, the city’s commissioners held a ceremony where a strip of about six blocks were renamed to immortalize the significance of the film:
“This movie — at least what I got from it — really depicts the life of how a lot of us were raised and what we had to go through and endure as children in the inner city,” says Commissioner Audrey Edmonson, who is sponsoring the item. “This goes out to children still living here in the inner city that are told they’ll never amount to anything. It shows that it doesn’t matter how you were raised or where you grew up; you can still turn out to be someone.”
Miami-Dade to Rename Liberty City Stretch “Moonlight Way” https://t.co/378nV8sQmF pic.twitter.com/IL7eKD2veR
— Billy Corben (@BillyCorben) April 18, 2017
For those who don’t know, the film’s director Barry Jenkins, and playwright, Tarell Alvin McCraney (who wrote the play that inspired the movie) both grew up in the Pork’N’Beans projects of the Liberty City area, so this a full circle moment for everyone involved.
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