Originally called Colored Town in the Jim Crow era of the late 19th through the mid-20th century, the area was once the preeminent and is the historic center for commerce in the black community in Miami and South Florida.

Northwest Second Avenue and the surrounding neighborhood, once-called the "Little Broadway" of the South,[5] by the 1940s hosted hundreds of mostly black-owned businesses, ranging from libraries and social organizations to a hospital and popular nightclubs.

The area served as a place of rest and refuge for black mainstream entertainers such as Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday, and Nat King Cole who were not allowed to lodge at prominent venues where they performed like the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc, where Overtown hotels like the Mary Elizabeth Hotel furnished to their needs.

Since the 1990s and 2000s, community gardens have been created, in addition to renovations to the historic Lyric Theatre and revitalization and gentrification efforts spurred both by the city of Miami and Miami-Dade County.

[14] These projects and other aspects of Overtown were featured in a short documentary The Ground under Overtown[2] centered on multi-issue multi-racial community organizing created around Florida protests against the FTAA with a focus on environmental racism, critiques of so-called "free trade" agreements like the FTAA, and positive community solutions such as permaculture.

[15] In 2015, David Beckham announced that he had secured land in the neighborhood for a future, since-named Major League Soccer expansion franchise in Miami,[16] although the team has since proposed a stadium at a different site in the city.