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  • The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South by Andrew W. Kahrl
  • Heather Ward
The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South Andrew W. Kahrl . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. 2012. 376 pp. Maps, photographs, bibliographical references, notes, and index. $39.95 hardcover. (ISBN: 978-0-674-05047-1)

Andrew Kahrl's The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South is a social and environmental history of the Jim Crow South played out by shrewd characters on top of contested coastal real estate. Generally about race and territoriality, its themes include greed, economic disenfranchisement and resistance, exclusion and confinement, capitalism and sustainability. Kahrl poses a multi-dimensional research question: How did the United States move from a time when African Americans owned large amounts of coastal property to a time when it became unthinkable for blacks to be seen with whites on a beach and finally to the modern era when racial diversity is increasingly the norm at commercial resorts and beachfront communities (p 5)? In his book, he addresses this by telling [End Page 350] true stories of African Americans struggling to hold on to coastal lands along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

Kahrl's introduction puts the reader on the shores of the Annapolis Neck Peninsula in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. This first case study is representative of others in the book, weaving together facts and analysis about race relations, coastal management, and capitalist real estate development. In the early 1900s, Frederick Carr purchased 180 acres (73 hectares) of cheap farmland along the Chesapeake Bay. Carr and other black farmers found their access to white and wholesale buyers limited by prejudice. Carr hosted picnics and took in boarders to supplement his restricted farm income.

As Kahrl explains, many popular beach resorts in the early 1900s began in the same way, initially as gathering places where black landowners sold food and drinks to workers or fishermen, provided picnic baskets for day-trippers, or rented cottages. Black venue operators, however, found it difficult to obtain capital for maintenance and improvements, making it difficult to stay in business. Further, in the years before passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and desegregation, many white-owned resorts began to move into the black resort business. Not surprisingly, they found it easier to secure loans and then improve accommodations and services for a growing black middle class (p 219). Black venue operators struggled to remain open.

This book's strengths are many. A sense of narrative draws the reader through thick text that explains in great detail how African Americans lost their coastal lands. Kahrl integrates individual accounts of racism with regional economic histories within a context of national public policy. Kahrl identifies pivot points and critical events, in addition to the Great Migration and Civil Rights Act of 1964, which upended the status quo or shifted economic prospects. For example, in 1890, the Louisiana General Assembly created twenty-one levee districts with broad powers to seize lands in the name of "flood protection" (p 119). Canals constructed in the 1930s, linking Wilmington, North Carolina to the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, increased erosion that subsequently compromised the shoreline of the African American summer community of Sea-breeze (p 165). Creation of the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968 encouraged development, increased coastal property values and taxes, and displaced many poor coastal black residents.

"Surviving the Summer" is the book's most moving chapter. Here Kahrl makes plain the sobering and shameful history of public colored beaches in New Orleans, Washington D.C., and Norfolk, Virginia between 1929 and the mid-1950s. Here, too, blacks were gradually displaced by whites from traditional swimming areas as shorelines were improved. According to Kahrl, New Orleans' 150,000 black residents shared a single swimming pool as late as 1953. As quickly as Lake Ponchartrain's shoreline was developed, blacks were excluded from previously informal gathering places. Poor black youth seeking relief from summer heat braved city canals and dangerous Mississippi River currents. Similarly in Washington, black residents were pushed to Buzzard Point, at the confluence of...

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