Ernest Hemingway lived on Bimini from 1935 to 1937, staying at the
Compleat Angler Hotel. He worked on
To Have and Have Not and wrote a few articles, but mostly he fished aboard his boat
Pilar,
trolling the deep blue offshore waters for marlin, tuna and swordfish. Hemingway was attracted to Bimini by tales of the incredible fishing available in the
Gulf Stream, the legendary “river” of warm water that rushes north past the Bahamas. While not a resident of the islands,
Martin Luther King Jr. visited in 1964 and worked on his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech while there. South Bimini was home to
Joseph C. Mackey, the founder of
Mackey Airlines, which was later bought by Eastern Airlines. He built a home on the southern tip of South Bimini. This structure would become the
Sunshine Inn and is currently a bar and restaurant, though the hotel was damaged by a hurricane and was subsequently demolished.
Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who was excluded from the U.S. House of Representatives because of allegations that he misappropriated committee funds for personal use, stayed in Bimini from January 1967 to April 1969 in self-imposed exile until the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the House had acted unconstitutionally when it excluded Powell, a duly elected member. In 1972, Powell died of cancer in Miami. Following his funeral in New York, his ashes were taken to Bimini and scattered in the waters surrounding the islands. There is rumor of the famed Chicano civil rights lawyer,
Oscar Zeta Acosta, of
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas fame potentially meeting his end after returning from the island of Bimini to Key Biscayne in 1974 during a failed attempt to smuggle drugs. According to the story told to Hunter S. Thompson, upon their boat nearly reaching the shoreline of the southern tip Key Biscayne, Acosta and his companions were ambushed when they suddenly found themselves surrounded by bright lights from boats that "appeared out of nowhere". Gunfire erupted and one of Acosta's companions was immediately killed by being shot in the head. Acosta, acting quickly, floored the boat's throttle and plowed into and over one of the ambusher's boats and, upon making it to shore, he grabbed a small suitcase likely containing drugs and ran off inland into the island. The veracity of this story was deemed questionable by Thompson, as he had heard it secondhand from the individual whose boat Acosta had borrowed for the smuggling attempt. This came to represent one of a number of possible Acosta sightings that Thompson had been told of, which he would term "buffalo sightings", from all around the world following Acosta's official disappearance in 1974 under suspicious circumstances. In May 1987, Colorado Senator
Gary Hart's presidential bid was derailed after media reports exposed a relationship with model
Donna Rice. A well known photo of Rice sitting on Hart's lap on one of Bimini's docks was published by the
National Enquirer after Hart suspended his presidential campaign. Jody Weech, Miss Commonwealth Bahamas 1992, was from Bimini. She made the Top 10 in the
Miss World contest in Sun City, South Africa. She received the title Miss World Caribbean.
V. J. Edgecombe, current
National Basketball Association (NBA) star for the
Philadelphia 76ers, was born and spent his childhood in Bimini. Edgecombe described himself as "[coming] from nothing", living off a generator due to limited electricity. He migrated to the United States when he was in ninth grade, originally settling in Florida. ==Bimini Bay Resort controversy==