The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South

Introduction: Bring Back My Yesterday

On Sunday June 28, 2009, they came back for one last dance on the beach. Except now it was the parking lot of Sam’s 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 Carr’s 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 Carr’s Beach Road bore testament to an earlier stage of coastal capitalism on the Annapolis Neck Peninsula.¹

But came they did, to, as George Phelps put it, bring back my yesterday. On this day, the persons old enough to remember Carr’s Beach shared their memories with the enthusiastic, mostly white residents of the private, gated community that emerged following the beach’s demise in the early 1970s. As they danced in the parking lot, they evoked a bygone era when, as a homeowner’s blog read, "people would pack into the pavilion to listen and dance to the music of Major R&B stars of the day, who’s [sic] voices and music could be heard throughout the area for miles."²

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 made—and ultimately unmade—both 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 sheriff’s office reporting loud noise and suspicious activity rather than a written tribute. The property’s 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, ‘that’s nigger land.’³ Back then, the sandy shores of Annapolis Neck Peninsula suffered from what real estate insiders euphemistically referred to as a stigma. Today, that stigma has become a selling point. The Villages of Chesapeake Harbour, a local real estate agency website reads, have a unique identity not found anywhere else in the Annapolis area. . . . In addition to Carr’s Beach, Sparrows Beach and Bembe Beach are adjacent to the property. All were popular in their day.⁴ 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 Carr’s 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.⁵ "[But] the children s[old] the damn land for nothing, and now they’re bawling that they ain’t got this and they ain’t got that and the other. They had the land. . . . Goddamn, they gave it away. . . . I don’t know, I get so frustrated."⁶

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 Gulfside’s 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 resort’s 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.⁷ On those dwindling finances, fellow Gulf Coast resident Pat Harvey explained, [After integration] we got caught up in the magic of ‘we can go to the beach down here,’ and we’ve been going to this same beach all our lives.⁸

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 wouldn’t live here because black people lived here and black people wouldn’t 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. They’d 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.⁹ Now [that] all those rich folks bought up all that property over there and built those million dollar homes on the land where the former black-owned Bay Shore Beach in Hampton, Virginia, once stood, Bill Carson commented, you would never know it was here, [that] they used to have dance halls, bars, a hotel, everything. . . . This place has changed since then, I’ll tell you. This place has changed.¹⁰

Indeed, it has. Fifty years ago, a wooden groin topped with a metal fence extended into the waters off Hampton’s shore, dividing white from colored sand and water and, perhaps fittingly, accelerating rates of erosion on both sides. Fifty years ago, the presence of a black man or woman on or near white sands in anything but a waiter’s jacket or pushing a white baby’s stroller would have, at the least, elicited hostile stares, and more likely, catcalls, threats of violence, and summoning of local authorities. Today, those visible signs of American apartheid are a thing of the past. In their place you will often find vacation resorts facing well-groomed sand beaches forcibly stabilized by beach nourishment projects aimed at halting natural and human-caused processes of erosion and beach movement. Along beaches where signs that read No niggers or dogs allowed once stood, you will instead find no trespassing signs erected by private homeowners and beach associations, or, as often, you will find the beach no longer there, washed away by the effects of decades of coastal real estate development and the endless, and hopeless, struggle to fortify and preserve coastal property. Also washed away in Americans’ rush to the sea are the mom-and-pop restaurants, do-drop inns, nightclubs, and seaside amusement parks that sustained black social life, nourished cultural traditions, and gave rise to forms of black business activity and struggles for economic empowerment throughout much of the twentieth century.

How did we go from a time when it was unremarkable for African Americans to own comparatively large amounts of property in coastal and waterfront areas but unthinkable for them to be seen among whites on public beaches except in a service capacity, to a time when racial but not class diversity at commercial resorts and beachfront communities is increasingly common and unremarkable, while black coastal landowners have become, as one African American native of the South Carolina Sea Islands described in 1982, an endangered species?¹¹ How did we go from a time when living by the beach meant living day to day, far from the main channels of commerce and power, to a time when sand itself is a valuable commodity, and living by the sand the pinnacle of success? How did we go from rural and sparsely populated to segregated shores, and from segregated to gated, overdeveloped shores? And how is the disintegration of black landholdings and small business ownership tied to the pursuit of reckless and unsustainable environmental policies?

Through a series of thematic case studies set along the coasts of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico and their related estuaries (see Maps 1 and 2), this book excavates the histories of African American beaches and traces the evolution of what I label coastal capitalism—characterized by the commodification of the beach as a commercial asset, exploitation of natural resources and environmental engineering of coastal zones and bodies of water for aesthetic and recreational purposes, and the transfer of public lands to private entities.¹² In this story, the shore itself—that liminal, mercurial, and volatile space dividing land from water, where the boundaries separating public resources from private property become indistinct and highly contested, and where the limits and consequences of humans’ historic quest to tame unruly environments are laid bare—earns its rightful place as a dynamic historic actor in its own right. The shores that persons of color owned and frequented during the first half of the twentieth century highlight the pivotal role of landownership and development strategies in shaping and giving spatial definition to African Americans’ performance of class, pursuit of pleasure, and struggle for economic empowerment. Conversely, the shores that African Americans steadily lost over the course of the second half of the twentieth century (and continue to lose at alarming rates today) demonstrate the inextricability of environmental and human exploitation—power over lands and power over persons—and force us to reassess the familiar story of America’s triumph over segregration, its achievement of civil rights, and its slow, painful, but nevertheless inexorable progress toward a more just and equitable future.

Map 1. Atlantic seaboard

Map 2. Gulf of Mexico

The history of African American coastal landownership begins in the decades following emancipation. By the time General William Tecumseh Sherman completed his march to the sea in 1864 and his victorious campaign northward in early 1865, the South’s Atlantic coastal region, once home to some of the largest and most profitable plantations in North America and richest cash crops on the global market, lay in ruins. Sherman administered the coup de grâce, but the region’s economic ruin was also a casualty of, to various degrees, unsustainable farming techniques, unmanageable labor regimes, and the inherent environmental limitations and vulnerabilities that, quite literally, came with the territory.¹³

In the decades following the war, coastal regions that once constituted the heart of slave power in the United States witnessed a profound transformation. As railroad lines linked farms to factories, and the agricultural Black Belt to the industrial cities of the North and the textile mills of the Piedmont, the region’s political and economic power shifted to the interior. Coastal lands that once generated considerable wealth for the South’s slavocracy and sold for upwards of $5,000 per acre before the war could, by the 1870s, be fetched for $50 an acre or less. Other stretches of southern coastlines remained, as they were before war and emancipation, forsaken and forgotten—the land of mosquitoes, predatory animals, dense forests, and sandy, nonarable soil. As a result, coastal zones became ripe for black landownership during an era when, as the historian Manning Marable notes, the development of a strong black land base became an ideological imperative of black thought.¹⁴ For many freedmen and women, living by the sea promised an opportunity to realize propertied independence and a deliverance from the coercive labor arrangements that emerged in the wake of slavery’s demise. By 1910, African Americans owned over 15 million acres in the South, with coastal counties exhibiting some of the highest rates of black landownership.¹⁵

It was here where a different South took shape during an era that historians and the public alike referred to by way of the racist minstrel character Jim Crow. To venture into many of the small towns and villages situated on barrier islands or peninsulas was to venture outside of what was—and remains—the archetypal Jim Crow South and into places characterized by high rates of religious and ethnic diversity, social practices and cultural sensibilities that shocked, horrified, and piqued the curiosity of visitors, and more fluid relations of power. Recounting a visit to Plymouth, North Carolina, a remote river town near the Albemarle Sound, in 1921, Bruce Cotten, a tobacco planter’s son, speculated that the inhabitants had partaken too heavily of the Lotus Plant[s] that lined the waterways leading into town. A motley crowd of whites and blacks [crowded] the sidewalks and . . . streets . . . [giving] the impression of an Oriental Market Place. . . . There was plentiful signs of bootleg whiskey, as well as intimacies between black girls and white boys, which were openly going on and jested about. . . . My first impulse was to inquire my way to the American Consulate.¹⁶The black landowning families who carved out remote compounds along shorelines proved no less curious to African American outsiders. Black Carolinian Evelyn Williams described the striking contrast between the black families who lived in the town of Wilmington, North Carolina—and who labored in whites’ homes, worked as schoolteachers and in other professions, and preached habits of frugality, sobriety, and respectability—and her ancestors, the extended Freeman family, who shared in common several hundred acres of land along the Atlantic coast and Myrtle Grove Sound and were notorious for their clannishness, hard drinking, and economic independence derived from fishing, farming, and operating illegal moonshine stills . . . [and who] reciprocat[ed] the disdain in which they were held by Blacks in the city.¹⁷ Like the land itself, the people who lived by the sea lived in what the marine geologist Orrin H. Pilkey describes as a state of dynamic equilibrium resistant to legal definition and political categorization.¹⁸

As blacks came to the coast seeking refuge from the South’s unique brand of racial capitalism, a broader economic and cultural revolution began to transform the political economy and ecology of the coastal South.¹⁹ Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, small pockets along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts emerged as summer playgrounds and winter havens for the nation’s monied elite. Following completion of a railroad line connecting the port city of New Orleans to the bucolic, undeveloped shores of neighboring Mississippi in 1869, a steady stream of planters and merchants fled from the humid city, frequently host to yellow fever epidemics during the summer months, to newly built second homes by the sea. Offshore, large yachts owned by deep-pocketed pleasure seekers floated past flatboats and skiffs manned by black, Italian, and Eastern European fishermen. Places of labor became places of pleasure. On the Georgia coast, the collapse of long-staple cotton and the rise of black subsistence fishing and farming were soon followed by the development of exclusive winter resorts owned by prominent families of the nation’s Gilded Age aristocracy, where, as one writer later described, Rice fields became duck ponds for hunters [and] field hands became guides and caretakers.²⁰

By the 1920s, this trickle of pleasure seekers and second-home owners already showed signs of becoming a flood. The emergence of the field of coastal engineering, the mass production of the automobile, investment in roads and infrastructure development on the state and federal level, and the rise of a white-collar workforce with weekends off, paid vacations, and disposable incomes led to an infusion of capital investment in coastal real estate and the rise of leisure-based economies, fed the notion that coastlines could be stabilized and made habitable on a mass scale, and increasingly made protection of coastal property a matter of state and federal concern.²¹

As witnessed most spectacularly in South Florida (and repeated elsewhere on a smaller scale), a speculative fever descended onto America’s shores in the 1920s, and a culture of coastal capitalism took shape and spread. There were fortunes to be made from these unproductive sands and volatile shores, and it required little effort—just lots of guile. America’s coasts gave birth to some of the most outrageously corrupt and fraudulent investment schemes imaginable, and witnessed some of the most epic collapses.²² Privatization of formerly common-use lands accelerated, as did the conversion of environmental amenities into capital. As early as 1918, rural sociologist Charles J. Galpin observed, The rural picnic spot has been turned into a commercial amusement park; the sylvan retreat into the private estate; the swimming place on the lake into the bathing beach; the fishing grounds into the private game reserve; the quiet lake with its rowing parties into the center for the private launch parties or public regattas. It is either ‘no trespass here’ or ‘pay as you enter’ there.²³ In early 1920s South Florida, John Kenneth Galbraith commented, an inordinate desire to get rich quickly with a minimum of physical effort²⁴ drew in trainloads of speculators and led to a remarkable period of environmentally reckless development and unfathomable appreciation of waterfront real estate—followed by a storm that temporarily washed those dreams of quick and easy profits out to sea. Surveying the wreckage of a busted speculative real estate market in South Florida in 1928, Henry S. Villard reported, Dead subdivisions line the highway, their pompous names half obliterated on crumbling stucco gates. . . . Gaping structures, tragically uncompleted, are mute reminders of ambitious schemes for apartments, casinos, [and] country clubs. . . . All the extravaganza of picture cities, all the fantastic hokum of lot-selling and lot-buying, all the hypnotism of get-rich-quick—which used to transform the most unsuspecting tourist into a frenzied financier—has vanished like a soap-bubble.²⁵

Reports of coastal capitalism’s demise were, to say the least, greatly exaggerated. Nature’s devastating assaults on coastal zones and burgeoning vacationlands did not hasten a flight of capital, but instead brought it under the protection and subsidization of the state. In 1926 the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association, a group dedicated to furthering state and federal governmental involvement in the economical development and preservation of beachfront property, was formed. Its efforts to draw legislators’ attention to the growing importance of these coastal natural resources in a more mobile, consumer-driven economy quickly became apparent with the passage, in 1930, of the Rivers and Harbors Act, which led to the creation of the Beach Erosion Board (BEB) within the Army Corps of Engineers. Prior to the formation of the BEB, the Army Corps of Engineers’ involvement in the fortification of coastal zones had remained strictly limited to federally owned lands and in the interests of national security. Beginning in the 1930s and accelerating in the decades following World War II, the Corps’ interests in shoreline protection veered from protection from invasion to protection of coastal leisure economies and real estate markets. In 1936, Congress passed the Act for the Protection and Improvement of Beaches along the Shores of the United States, which (albeit vaguely) made the protection of all shorelines against erosion a federal responsibility and elevated the role of the BEB from that of adviser to administrator. That same year, Congress also passed the Flood Control Act of 1936, which established protection of property from flooding as a federal responsibility and led local administrators of New Deal agencies in burgeoning coastal zones to use the threat of coastal erosion to justify embarking on massive, and often ecologically disastrous, measures of fortification.²⁶

Along with making beaches seemingly more stable, New Deal–era programs helped to make the beach more desirable to an increasingly mobile American public through funding of research and development of pest control chemicals and local efforts at mosquito control. In burgeoning vacationlands federal grants and work programs allowed cities to construct ditch drainage systems and establish mosquito control districts.²⁷ At the tiny resort town of Virginia Beach, Virginia, workers in Civilian Conservation Corps camps, and later, German prisoners of war, drained wetlands that bred mosquitoes (and sustained marine life and migratory populations) as part of a broader effort to stimulate the region’s severely depressed economy by enhancing its recreational appeal.²⁸

The rise of coastal capitalism played a vital role in the broader transformation of the South from what President Franklin D. Roosevelt labeled in 1938 the Nation’s number one economic problem into the nation’s fastest-growing region by the turn of the twenty-first century. On the beach, the ethos of growth liberalism that grew out of the New Deal and came to characterize post–World War II federal economic policies succeeded beyond its wildest imagination. By 1954 the National Park Service called the spectacular acceleration of private and commercial development of seashores nothing short of a business phenomenon. In 1936 a thirty-mile stretch of undeveloped seashore recommended (unsuccessfully) for designation as a national seashore was worth roughly $9,000 a mile; two decades later, the nine remaining undeveloped miles of that shore could be fetched for no less than $110,000 a mile, a 1,100 percent appreciation in value.²⁹

As southern shores steadily moved from the periphery to the center of the region’s economy from the 1930s to the 1950s, the difference that race made on the beach, in planning and zoning board meetings, and at real estate offices, changed. On the shores of Biloxi, Mississippi, for instance, racial segregation remained indistinct and negotiable prior to the completion of a massive flood control and coastal property stabilization project in the early 1950s. As black Biloxian Lee Owens described:

And we’d go out there and take our baths in there. Women used to go out there and take baths out there with towels on them and everything else. And later in the evening, that beach would be full. . . . Anybody could go down there and sit on the beach all night long, because I used to sit down on that beach, water used to slap all over my feet down there. Fish down there. White and black used to sit down there together.

But after the Army Corps of Engineers dumped over 7 million cubic yards of sand on the coast, giving Mississippians the longest manmade beach in the world, those white folks went stone crazy. ‘That’s our beach. This ain’t no nigger beach.’ . . . We got along good, until that beach come in down there.³⁰ On miserably hot summer days in the years that followed, Gulf Coast resident Eva Gates remembers, black children wanted to go on that beach so bad and get in that water, but we knew if we went on the beach, white people didn’t care whether or not you were a child or not, they would kill you, beat you, or do anything that came to their mind.³¹

Instead, many took their chances in dangerous, polluted waters. In Charleston, South Carolina, black children often resorted to swimming in Horse Hole, a ditch filled with water from street runoff. Mamie Garvin Fields recalled that, when she was a child, her parents warned her to stay away from the place. But, as she put it,

the law said no, you children mustn’t swim in the Cooper River, and no, you mustn’t swim in the Ashley River or in Colonial Lake. If you do, the cop will arrest you, and you never know where the cop will carry you off to. But the summertime gets very hot, and very humid, so the bolder ones would disobey their parents and cool off in one of the rivers, or they would go on into the dirty water of the Horse Hole.

And, nearly every summer, Fields recalled, several children drowned there. Public officials ignored black parents’ pleas to cover Horse Hole, and instead blamed them for allowing their children to run wild. And Fields, just like her parents a generation earlier, was forced to instruct her children to also avoid Horse Hole.³²

It was no coincidence that the policing of blacks’ physical mobility during the summer months became a matter of constant vigilance as states and municipalities devoted greater attention and resources to enhancing the aesthetic value of urban shorelines, and as Americans’ growing thirst for the beach promised to breathe life into stagnant coastal economies. Though less examined than federal intervention into the housing market, federal, state, and local public recreational works and coastal engineering projects proved no less influential in shaping the spatiality and political economy of race in twentieth-century America. Because of the potential profits to be wrested from these fragile and migratory shores, combined with glaring liabilities (among others, a legal status as public versus private property that quite literally changed with the tides and the whims of judicial interpretation),³³ public and private agents of coastal capitalism engaged in some of the most determined efforts to inscribe clear racial categories onto the land, employed some of the most innovative, cynical, and revealing uses of race as a tool of profit and market control, and, not unrelated, embarked on some of the most daring, innovative, and often reckless feats of civil engineering ever witnessed. As cities engineered sections of shorelines for public recreation and real estate development, black populations were not merely excluded from the benefits that accompanied efforts to engineer coasts and waterfronts in the interests of recreation, commerce, and real estate, but invariably bore the brunt of its hazards.³⁴

Long before it was labeled as such, urban and rural black working poor experienced a seasonal form of environmental injustice, as rates of death and disease soared with rising temperatures, punctuated by the familiar screams of a mother forced to watch her child’s lifeless body pulled from a dangerous and polluted stream or a rock pit filled with runoff. Blacks mobilized against these more pernicious forms of environmental racism by writing to or speaking before local public officials who refused to clean or cover over the dangerous waters that lurked on the edges of black residential districts, or worse yet, designated them as colored bathing beaches. And blacks worked to overcome the deadly and humiliating dangers of summer through utilizing the means (and the land) at their disposal. Well aware that an afternoon of rest and play provided a tonic for the toxic environments that enveloped their daily lives, groups and individuals worked to force unresponsive public officials to provide black citizens safe, accessible, and equitable beaches and outdoor leisure spaces of their own. They then worked to turn the grossly inferior public beaches set aside for colored persons into vibrant community gathering places.

The same decades that witnessed the rise of coastal development and simultaneous descent of Jim Crow onto previously remote and undeveloped shores also witnessed the rise of independent and collaborative efforts to create and maintain separate black social spaces—and give spatial definition to a black public sphere—through coastal land acquisition and private development. Seeking to alleviate (and capitalize on) what W. E. B. Du Bois called the color problem of summer,³⁵ white and black investment groups and individuals sought, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, to acquire and turn existing waterfront properties into social institutions and entrepreneurial ventures for African Americans. Small, exclusive cliques of cultured and educated blacks collaborated to acquire beachfront property for the building of summer cottage communities. Existing black beachfront landowners, once on the margins, moved to the center of an emergent black leisure industry. A few passed as white to purchase property and circumvent the sand curtains that wealthy coastal landowners erected following the discovery of an enviable stretch of shore. Many converted their family properties into beachfront resorts and summer getaways that catered to and sought to profit from an increasingly mobile black middle class.³⁶ Other white and black capitalists worked (sometimes in competition, other times in collaboration) to acquire waterfront property and build wealth from the pennies of working blacks in search of moments of pleasure and relief. Others embarked on spiritual missions to uplift and transform the race through acquiring and developing coastal property.

Along African American–owned beaches and rural getaways, young and old came in search of what sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, writing on Bronzeville in Chicago, called rest from white folks as well as from labor.³⁷ While hard to quantify, it is not difficult to discern the significance of these places of retreat in the lives of the persons who came there. As the bus carrying impoverished black children from the darkest corners of rural Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico rounded the bend and passengers caught their first glimpse of the Gulf, mother and Gulfside volunteer Juanita Doris Franklin recalled, children leapt from their seats, tugging on fellow passengers’ shirts and shouting, ‘Ohhhh, ohhhh, look at that water!’ . . . They could not believe [what they saw]. When kids came to Gulfside for the first time, Pat Harvey added, they were in a sheer panic. They had never seen the vastness [before].³⁸

As these places grew in popularity and notoriety, so too did the numbers of monetary and cultural transactions. The search for rest from labor and rest from white people became, in turn, a form of work and an increasingly significant component of black urban and rural economies. During the summer, a truck owner became a shuttle driver, a mother and wife became a caterer or restaurateur; vice peddlers found a customer base and place to launder their earnings, and aspiring musicians and promoters acquired a venue from which to grow entertainment industries. Much like the leisure- and entertainment-oriented mass-consumer marketplaces of the black metropolis, for a few months each summer black beaches nourished cultural practices and cultural industries whose impact on black social, economic, and intellectual life resonated long after the crowds dispersed and the waters chilled.

The types of African American beaches that dotted the shores of rivers, lakes, and oceans reflected and gave expression to the diversity of black America and to the evolving spatial structure of Jim Crow. Some black beaches were places for high-toned, exclusive retreats where entry was restricted to a chosen few. Others were religious campgrounds where spiritual uplift took precedence over careless amusements. Bawdy, raucous beaches were where the sound of jazz and R&B drifted out onto the waters, where flasks of moonshine passed from coat pockets to hands, and where pairs of dice bounced off hard surfaces. As African Americans stepped up demands for access to whites-only public beaches or, at the very least, decent and equitable public places of outdoor leisure, public officials, working in concert with private developers and white landowners, designated remote, polluted, dangerous, and wholly inferior stretches of shore as suitable for colored people. So, in this respect, the places where African Americans were allowed to picnic, bathe, and fish along urban shorelines also served as mechanisms of social and environmental inequality that, in addition to endangering their lives, became another in a litany of self-perpetuating stigma[s] that served to justify blacks’ second-class citizenship and that wove notions of race into the land itself.³⁹

W. E. B. Du Bois captured the primacy of race as a legal category when, in 1940, he wrote that a black person was, quite simply, a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.⁴⁰ Similarly, the persons who owned, acquired, or fought to claim or maintain control over beachfront lands in the pages that follow were united only in their shared exposure to legal and extralegal forms of humiliation, exploitation, and expropriation that came with their lacking equal access to credit or protection from the state, and by the power of the state to determine the places black persons could occupy and who could profit from them. The legal history of race and real estate, though, cannot be understood without a close consideration of place. Macro trends in twentieth-century American law, such as the ascendance of a market-based valuation of real property in which the pressure to develop land and maximize individual and corporate wealth increasingly trumped considerations of land tenure and ecology, had a specific set of implications for coastal zones and the fortunes of the people who lived there.⁴¹

The Land Was Ours is also a chapter in the larger story of real estate in America—told through the experiences and perspectives of African American holders, investors, speculators, and developers of property in areas experiencing dramatic social and environmental change—that seeks to change how we understand that history as a whole. It is a story of hope, ambition, and initiative, often followed by devastation and disillusion. Working within discriminatory real estate markets and denied equal access to credit, African Americans with ambitions to own land and start businesses were often led to enter into dubious investment schemes, take out large loans on usurious terms, or engage in other necessary risks in order to achieve the American dream of landed and economic independence. Their struggles demonstrate one of the central ironies of black life in Jim Crow America: in pursuing the very markers and adhering to the basic principles that connoted success and equality, African Americans were not only more likely to be the targets of various forms of brutality and retaliation, but also—and more subtly—to be exposed to the most pernicious and exploitative extremes of American capitalism.⁴² As a result, possession of valuable property—and fear of losing it—accentuated and hardened class divisions among black Americans and gave rise to a defensive property politics that until now historians have almost exclusively examined through the lens of white suburbia.⁴³ Like the real estate markets they were excluded from, African Americans’ land-use patterns and practices reflected the possessors’ judgment of others, aimed to satisfy and protect their sense of status, and betrayed their own fears and anxieties.

Indeed, the exclusion of African Americans from public places of leisure under Jim Crow, and the exclusion of poor and minorities by income and residency on our modern, privatized landscape—a matter of urgent concern and, in recent decades, a subject of growing interest among scholars—demand an equally close consideration of the dynamic spaces that emerged out of these conditions, and how they came to shape (and frustrate) the long, unfinished struggle for freedom.⁴⁴

The Land Was Ours treats Jim Crow and the Sunbelt not as geographic descriptors but rather as representing a social and public policy ethos, or, as another historian aptly describes it, as stage[s] of capitalism that were not bound to any region but which took on certain characteristics within given environments.⁴⁵ To date, scholarship on the rise of the Sunbelt has remained tethered to the metropolis and focused primarily on the political culture that emerged in Sunbelt suburbs and the role of the federal government in channeling economic growth to the South and Southwest in the post-World War II era.⁴⁶ These works have identified a shared set of features of the Sunbelt political economy—among others, a capital-intensive and growth-oriented understanding of land and its best use, promoted and accomplished through a symbiotic relationship between law, public policy, and private, corporate interests; and, not unrelated, the construction and enforcement of racial and class privilege and segregation through space and the built environment rather than through Jim Crow laws and customs. In practice, the emergence of forms of race management and real estate development characteristic of the coastal Sunbelt—and coastal capitalism—led inexorably toward African American loss of land and, moreover, the unraveling of forms of community formation and familial ties through the land.⁴⁷

On southern coastlines, both Jim Crow and the Sunbelt assumed distinct spatial forms that reflected changes in the geography and political economy of work and leisure and bore distinct implications for human societies and coastal ecosystems. In tracing the manifestation of the Sunbelt ethos on southern shores, and its constitution through leisure-based economies, I show how the Sunbelt was not simply a political and economic phenomenon, but also an environmental one, and how the changing landscape of opportunity and inequality that accompanied the collapse of Jim Crow and the rise of the Sunbelt was inseparable from changes in the land itself.⁴⁸

Second, this book complicates and enriches our understanding of what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall labeled the long civil rights movement.⁴⁹ Fundamentally, it reasserts the primacy of land ownership, and the right to the land for pleasure, amusement, community life, and commerce, in shaping and informing the twin struggles for civil and environmental rights. In coastal zones and along urban shorelines, the right to the land was synonymous with the right to enjoy one’s leisure without fear of harassment or humiliation, and the right to summers free of the specter of epidemic, injury, or death. Indeed, the struggle to integrate beaches, parks, and swimming pools in the 1960s emerged as one of many tactics in a broader assault on an unequal and hazardous landscape that annually subjected the urban poor to health crises and claimed countless numbers of black youth each summer.

For others, the right to the land meant the right to profit and build wealth from lands that were rapidly appreciating in value, and the ability to become co-partners in the making of Sunbelt shores. Just as some African Americans and their allies worked to dismantle a Jim Crow economy that other black Americans had learned to navigate with precision and gain a sense of power and influence within, efforts to make public shorelines truly public, and to chip away at the foundations of a privatizing nation, were counterbalanced by African Americans who sought to become partners in the corporate development of coastal and waterfront property, and who used their personal and familial ties to the land as a means of personal enrichment, often with devastating consequences for those fellow African Americans who found themselves torn from the land. The feelings of frustration and ambivalence, outrage and injustice, toward the decline of black landownership from the 1960s to the present (a crisis felt most acutely in coastal zones) do not merely underscore the unfinished work of the black freedom struggle, but call for greater attention to the diverse and at times oppositional visions of freedom that united and divided black Americans—then and now—and, especially in the wake of the subprime housing crisis, for greater awareness of forms of race-based economic exploitation masquerading as tools of empowerment.

Finally, this book builds on the works of those who have called attention to the ways that racism, as George Lipsitz put it, takes place—both in a figurative and literal sense. But in examining race and place-making from the shores that black persons owned, fought to acquire, or sought to protect, this book also calls into question the segregation-as-congregation paradigm that has so deeply informed studies of black life in Jim Crow America.⁵⁰ Despite its appeal, the notion that the experience of segregation necessarily gave rise to congregation among black Americans has become an overused—and under-analyzed—cliché whose reassessment is long overdue. Likewise, efforts to draw hard distinctions between a white and black spatial imaginary—the former associated with hostile privatism and defensive localism, the latter, privileging use value over exchange value, sociality over selfishness, and inclusion over exclusion—lead inevitably toward romanticizing black life behind the so-called color line and concretizing African Americans’ place in the American experience, while downplaying the dynamism and divisiveness that accompanied African Americans’ efforts to claim space in a capitalist society. In casting victims of oppression as exemplars of communalism, mutuality, and sustainability, we fail to fully appreciate what Lipsitz himself calls the pernicious power of the white spatial imaginary and tend to underestimate the role of land-based capitalism in shaping and giving texture to black struggles for freedom.⁵¹

Segregation at times produced congregation, but it also produced, among some, an even more pronounced dedication to harnessing the exploitative capacities of a capitalist order that had, for centuries, trapped them in an endless cycle of deprivation and ostracism. This book sheds light on some of the undemocratic, ruthlessly exploitative, and capital-driven features of African American life as witnessed in areas experiencing sudden and profound changes in their political economy and ecology—not in order to de-emphasize the devastating effects of antiblack racism, but to magnify them. For some