The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South by Andrew Kahrl (review)

The Land Was Ours is an excellent book that advances scholarship on African American history and the history of recreation and leisure in important ways. In particular, Kahrl adds economic and environmental analysis to the usual blend of social, cultural, political, and legal history. By doing so, he provides a more nuanced and at times highly insightful account of the economic interests and power relationships at play in determining what sort of beach-related recreation opportunities would be available to black Americans in the South and how that recreation would be socially structured. Kahrl’s approach also enables him to show how the environmental character of the sites where African American beach recreation occurred affected the users and, contrariwise, how the use and development of the beaches affected the environmental quality of the areas.

The Land Was Ours examines the development and use of “African American beaches”—by which the author means beaches that were accessible to black Americans—in the South during the twentieth century. Some were privately owned resorts; others, public beaches. While the book covers a long temporal span, it does not provide a clear chronology to the history. Rather, it utilizes case studies to highlight and examine significant themes and developments. Chapter 1 recounts two failed attempts by black entrepreneurs to operate steamboat excursion businesses in the Washington, D.C., area early in the twentieth century. Chapter 2 examines the challenges African American Methodist minister Robert E. Jones faced in purchasing and operating a large property on the Mississippi Gulf Coast named Gulfside Assembly. Chapter 3 focuses on the efforts of Frederick Douglass’s grandson Haley Douglass to develop an elite black summer cottage community on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay in the 1920s and his subsequent efforts to prevent nonelite blacks from accessing the community and its shoreline. Chapter 4 details the discrimination faced by black Americans in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Norfolk, Virginia, as they sought to gain access to public beaches during the interwar years. Chapter 5 uses two examples to show how difficult it was for extended black families who owned coastal property to develop it into commercial resorts due to inheritance practices, legal mistakes made by the landowners, and unethical legal maneuvers by whites. And yet as chapter 6 shows, there were many black-owned beach resorts along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. These resorts offered black Americans not just recreational opportunities but economic ones, as well. According to Kahrl, they created many desirable jobs for black workers and “played a formative role in the making of black-oriented cultural industries” (179). The book’s final chapter, evocatively titled “The Price We Pay for Progress,” shows how and why, in the wake of desegregation, Jim Crow beach resorts in the South were typically redeveloped into private homes and private beaches for whites.

Through these case studies Kahrl develops several key arguments. One, not surprisingly, is that southern African Americans faced many forms of discrimination by whites that excluded them from beaches set aside for whites, relegated them to undesirable and frequently unsanitary Jim Crow beaches, and hindered efforts by black entrepreneurs to develop pleasurable and safe private beach communities and commercial beach resorts. Kahrl also uncovers many instances where black Americans engaged in discriminatory practices. The African American elites who owned property at Highland Beach in Maryland, for example, went to great lengths to prevent blacks lower on the social ladder from invading their recreation space. They erected a barbed-wire fence around part of the community, stationed police officers at the town’s entrances to turn away anyone lacking a formal invitation from a property owner, and were likely responsible for a fire that destroyed a hotel that enabled non–property owners access to the beach. In New Orleans middle-class black residents cooperated with local officials in establishing the...