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  • The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South by Andrew W. Kahrl
  • Benjamin Houston
The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South. By Andrew W. Kahrl (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. 258 pp.).

In The Land Was Ours, Andrew W. Kahrl maps the social and spatial ramifications inherent in the changing patterns of African American landownership along the American South’s rivers and coasts. He documents the rise in landownership during the Jim Crow era, as blacks were motivated to “create and maintain separate black social space—and give spatial definition to a black public sphere—through coastal land acquisition and private development” (13). But these developments saw a corresponding reversal during the civil rights era and later. Carefully balancing African American initiatives with a forensic look at legal and market maneuvering from whites, he argues that, as a result of his study, “the shore itself—that liminal, mercurial and volatile space dividing land from water, where the boundaries separating public resources from private property became 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” (4–5). In this way, his account is representative of broader shifts in the southern political economy.

Kahrl carries out his project with a generally chronological timeline that uses “thematic case studies” drawn from Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts and estuaries but also populates the book with a number of intriguing personalities and stories. He starts with a discussion of black entrepreneurial efforts to establish “colored” recreational areas and excursion tours along the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay in a Jim Crow political and economic context. These efforts were frequently targeted by white competition, resisted by local whites, or constrained by a lack of black capital. The compelling story of Gulfside follows, the retreat near Waveland, Mississippi, founded as a center for leisure and black uplift simultaneously. Kahrl effectively contextualizes the efforts of African Americans to develop this area with Mississippi’s aggressive use of incentives to spur coastal development. He also discusses how the Army Corps of Engineers’ work cemented segregated lines in the name of coastal protection.

In subsequent chapters, Kahrl analyzes the social and economic implications of a diverse lot of black beach properties. These include Highland Beach, Maryland, a “privatopia” where black class divisions were particularly manifest and black elites had their own allegiance to the gospel of property rights in tightly controlling access to black beach property. Elsewhere, public beaches in New Orleans, Washington D.C., and Norfolk became focal points for activists, as the beaches were exposed to dangerous environmental hazards and witnessed common-place drownings. These themes, environmental and otherwise, are extended with studies of Shell Island, “Seabreeze,” and Freeman Beach (all on the southern end of the North Carolina coast), where black efforts to maintain land holdings were thwarted by a potent combination of hurricanes, legal treachery, and racial intimidation. Another chapter treats Carr’s Beach, Maryland, a black commercial resort that Kahrl identifies as straddling the shift between “the shifting sands of a Jim Crow marketplace … and a formative role in the making of black-oriented cultural industries and the unmaking of Jim Crow’s cultural and economic foundations” (179). The final sumnative chapter uses a “selective overview” of the [End Page 230] Sunbelt’s triumphant use of “new spatial strategies of race management” in coastal zones, thus bringing the book to the near present-day and uniting the preceding chapters.

Kahrl places his work at the junction of several historiographical literatures. His work naturally supports the “long civil rights movement” thesis, but he particularly emphasizes the “primacy of landownership” as central to understanding racial change in 20th century US history. He highlights black devotion to capitalism as one component of the black freedom struggle among the “oppositional visions of freedom that united and divided black Americans” (18). More definitively, he extends the burgeoning literature on the 20th century Sunbelt, which he notes is unduly focused on urban growth and white suburbs. Kahrl asserts...

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