Andrew W. Kahrl - The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South

2012 Andrew W. Kahrl

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Manufactured in the United States of America
Originally published as The Land Was Ours:

African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South
by Harvard University Press in 2012.

University of North Carolina Press edition published in 2016.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member
of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: Jennie Brown and Vinnie Drake lounging on
Bay Shore Beach, outside Hampton, Virginia. (Rare Book, Manuscript, and
Special Collections Library, Duke University)

ISBN 978-1-4696-2872-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-2873-8 (ebook)

Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition of this book as follows:
Kahrl, Andrew W., 1978

The land was ours: African American beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South/
Andrew W. Kahrl.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-674-05047-1 (alk. paper)

1. African AmericansLand tenureSouthern StatesHistory. 2. Land tenure
Social AspectsSouthern StatesHistory. 3. CoastsSouthern StatesHistory.
4. CoastsSocial AspectsSouthern States. 5. CoastsEconomic
AspectsSouthern States. 6. Real estate developmentSouthern StatesHistory.
7. Real estate developmentSocial AspectsSouthern States. I. Title.

E 185.8. K 215 2012

333308996073075dc23 2011029761

Excerpt from The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson. Copyright 1955 by
Rachel L. Carson, renewed 1983 by Roger Christie. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, all rights reserved; and permission
of Frances Collin, Trustee, and Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Rachel Carson.

All copying, including electronic, or redistribution of this text is expressly forbidden.

And so, walking the beach, we become aware of a most fascinating problemthe colonization of the shore, and especially of those islands of rock (or the semblance of rock) that occur in the midst of a sea of sand. For whenever a seawall is built, or a jetty, or pilings are sunk for a pier of a bridge, or rock, long hidden from sun and buried even beneath the sea, emerges again on the ocean floor, these hard surfaces immediately become peopled with typical animals of the rocks. But how did the colonizing rock fauna happen to be at handhere in the midst of a sandy coast that stretches for hundreds of miles to north and south?

Pondering the answer, we become aware of that ceaseless migration, for the most part doomed to futility, yet ensuring that always, when opportunity arises, Life shall be waiting, ready to take advantage.

RACHEL CARSON , The Edge of the Sea (1955)

On Sunday June 28, 2009, they came back for one last dance on the beach. Except now it was the parking lot of Sams on the Waterfront. Some might have looked in vain for the cavernous, open-air pavilion where James Brown, Lloyd Price, Dinah Washington, Etta James, and others performed before sweat-drenched crowds. Instead they found tennis courts, boat slips, and clusters of luxurious, air-conditioned, waterfront condominiums. For the persons who passed the security gate leading to the Villages of Chesapeake Harbour that afternoon for the First Annual Carrs Beach Historic Music Festival, there was little visual evidence to remind them of the past they had come to commemorate. Only a country road recently rededicated as Carrs Beach Road bore testament to an earlier stage of coastal capitalism on the Annapolis Neck Peninsula.

But came they did, to, as George Phelps put it, bring back my yesterday. On this day, the persons old enough to remember Carrs Beach shared their memories with the enthusiastic, mostly white residents of the private, gated community that emerged following the beachs demise in the early 1970s. As they danced in the parking lot, they evoked a bygone era when, as a homeowners blog read, people would pack into the pavilion to listen and dance to the music of Major R&B stars of the day, whos [sic] voices and music could be heard throughout the area for miles.

By the first decade of the twenty-first century, this and similar attempts to commemorate the world African Americans made under segregation proliferated and became woven into public history narratives, public policy debates over the persistence of racial inequality, and real estate redevelopment strategies both in the city and along once-rural, now-exurban shorelines. And they came to hold a mirror on an America striving to become postracial and color-blind. Magnified is the heroism and creativity that emerged from black spaces and institutions on the colored side of the color line; obscured are the larger forces that madeand ultimately unmadeboth the color line and places behind it. Here on this summer afternoon in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, few seemed to note (or want to note) the irony of a corporately owned condominium developer paying tribute to a black cultural institution whose demise proved so essential to their own rise, and to a place that, while it still lived, proved more a nuisance to neighbors and an obstacle to waterfront real estate developers. Back when those voices could be heard for miles, they were more likely to inspire a call to the county sheriffs office reporting loud noise and suspicious activity rather than a written tribute. The propertys history of black ownership was more likely to be mentioned by those seeking to direct development elsewhere than touted by real estate agents as a marketable piece of history. Back then, one African American Chesapeake property owner remembered, if you had flown over the Chesapeake and pointed down [there], whites would have said, thats nigger land. And all were, at one time, part of the approximately 246 acres owned by African Americans on the peninsula; today, only 6 of those acres remain in blacks possession.

Though he came to the Carrs Beach Music Festival, and accepted an award for his lifetime of community service, George Phelps seemed in no mood to celebrate. That was a very important piece of land [and] African Americans owned just about all of it, he later told me. Indeed, properties on the peninsula are some of the most expensive in the mid-Atlantic region, with homes routinely sold at the height of the housing bubble between 2003 and 2006 for over $1 million.

Most conversations with African Americans old enough to remember this and other separate black beaches and resorts that once dotted the shores of the Chesapeake and the Atlantic and Gulf coasts similarly veer from nostalgia to frustration, from before to after integration. It was just like being in heaven, Juanita Doris Franklin said of the black Methodist resort, Gulfside Assembly, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. When you got on Gulfsides grounds, your whole everything changed.... If you went down and stayed a week, it was just like medicine.... It was truly a spiritually uplifting place. Asked to describe the resorts three-decade-plus struggle to survive in the face of dwindling finances, malignant neglect from public officials bent on coastal redevelopment, and, finally, the destructive winds of Hurricane Katrina, Franklin added: It hurts me to my heart to even think about going down there.

Others shared similar stories. When I moved to [the African American summer community] Arundel-on-the-Bay in 1971, John Moses remembered, the houses were very, very inexpensive... because white people wouldnt live here because black people lived here and black people wouldnt live here because black people lived here. After integration, Ray Langston said of the neighboring African American summer village, Highland Beach, this was the last place in the world [young African Americans] wanted to go. Theyd been coming here since they were children.... It was very dead, very few people here on the weekends. And then sometime shortly after that came an awakening period where people came to realize what they had and how valuable this property is and... that, of course, was around the same time white people wanted to buy back waterfront property.