The Beaches Where Black America Learned to Exhale—and Why Preserving Them Means Preserving More Than Beautiful Houses

By Jarvus Ricardo Hester

There is a particular kind of photograph in the Black family album.

Someone is standing near the water.

The men are wearing trousers that seem far too elegant for the beach. The women are impossibly glamorous. Children are running somewhere just outside the frame. There may be a picnic table, a porch, a Cadillac parked nearby.

And everyone looks…

free.

Not historically significant.

Not revolutionary.

Not like they’re making a statement about race in America.

They’re simply on vacation.

And perhaps that is precisely what makes those photographs so powerful.

Because there was a time in this country when something as ordinary as putting on a bathing suit, packing the car and taking your family to the beach required Black Americans to create places of their own.

Places like Azurest in Sag Harbor.

Highland Beach in Maryland.

Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard.

These weren’t simply vacation destinations.

They were declarations.

We deserve somewhere beautiful, too.

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When Rest Required Real Estate

It’s easy to romanticize these places now.

The shingled cottages.

The porches.

The hydrangeas.

The linen shirts.

The bicycles leaning against houses.

The long summer evenings where nobody seems particularly interested in knowing what time it is.

But their existence came from something considerably less romantic:

exclusion.

Black families were routinely denied access to resorts, beaches, pools and property during segregation. Azurest’s own history describes how Black families needed a refuge from racial exclusion, and the community became part of the historically Black beachfront enclaves of Sag Harbor.

So Black Americans did what we have done repeatedly throughout American history.

When the door wouldn’t open…

we built another house.

Azurest was established in 1947, becoming a summer community for Black families in Sag Harbor. Along with Sag Harbor Hills and Ninevah, it eventually became part of a historic district recognized on the National Register of Historic Places in 2019.

And these weren’t simply collections of vacation cottages.

They became communities of Black professionals, intellectuals, artists and families who could temporarily escape a country that demanded they explain themselves almost everywhere else.

There is something quietly radical about that.

Not protest.

Not marching.

Not fighting.

Just…

resting.

The Black Hamptons Before the Hashtag

Long before anyone was curating a summer aesthetic for social media, Black families were building one in Sag Harbor.

And one of the people helping shape it was extraordinary.

Amaza Lee Meredith, the pioneering Black architect and educator, designed cottages in Azurest. Her work helped establish an architectural language for a community where Black families could own property, gather and experience leisure with dignity.

Think about what architecture means in that context.

A house isn’t simply a house.

A porch becomes a gathering place.

A bedroom becomes somewhere grandchildren return every August.

A dining room becomes the place where someone meets the person they’ll eventually marry.

Property becomes memory.

Memory becomes tradition.

And tradition, when you’re fortunate enough to hold onto the deed…

becomes wealth.

Suddenly the architecture of leisure is also the architecture of inheritance.

Frederick Douglass’s Family Wanted a Beach, Too

Travel south to Maryland and the story begins even earlier.

In 1892, Charles Douglass—the youngest son of Frederick Douglass—and his wife Laura were refused service at a restaurant at the Bay Ridge resort because they were Black.

So the following year, Charles helped establish Highland Beach along the Chesapeake Bay.

Imagine the audacity of that response.

You won’t let my family enjoy your resort?

Fine.

We’ll create our own.

Highland Beach would eventually become Maryland’s first incorporated African American municipality in 1922. Its history includes figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, Langston Hughes, Booker T. Washington and later Alex Haley.

And there’s another detail I love.

A home called Twin Oaks was built for Frederick Douglass overlooking the Chesapeake. He died before it was completed, but the house survives today as the Frederick Douglass Museum and Cultural Center.

The man who was born enslaved was supposed to have a summer house overlooking the water.

Tell me architecture isn’t political.

Then There Is the Vineyard

And, of course, there is Martha’s Vineyard.

For generations, Black families have gathered in Oak Bluffs, creating one of America’s most recognizable traditions of Black summer life.

The Inkwell became far more than a strip of beach.

It became community.

People swam.

Families gathered.

Friendships formed.

Politics was discussed.

Children grew up and returned with children of their own.

Black cultural life flourished there because leisure gave people something activism rarely could:

room to simply be.

Today, that cultural gravity remains unmistakable. Oak Bluffs continues to draw Black artists, filmmakers, political figures, executives and families, while events such as the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival turn the island into an annual gathering place for contemporary Black creativity.

But the glamour can obscure the deeper story.

These places mattered because Black Americans weren’t always welcome elsewhere.

Which means preserving them isn’t about nostalgia.

It’s about remembering why they had to exist.

What Happens When Everybody Wants What We Built?

There is an uncomfortable pattern in American cities and vacation communities.

A place is overlooked.

A community builds something there.

Culture develops.

Families establish roots.

The place becomes desirable.

And suddenly…

everybody wants in.

Property values climb.

Taxes rise.

Developers arrive.

Original families receive offers that become increasingly difficult to refuse.

One generation sells.

Then another.

And eventually the place remains physically beautiful…

but the culture that made it important has disappeared.

This is where preservation becomes complicated.

Because what exactly are we trying to save?

The buildings?

The architecture?

The beach?

Or the ability of the descendants of the people who created these communities to still belong there?

A historic plaque is lovely.

But a plaque explaining that Black families once lived somewhere is a rather poor substitute for Black families still living there.

Black Leisure Is Black History

We understandably spend enormous energy preserving the sites where Black people struggled.

Plantations.

Battlefields.

Civil-rights landmarks.

Churches where movements were organized.

Places where terrible things happened.

We should.

But Black history cannot only be a history of suffering.

Where are the places where we laughed?

Where did we fall in love?

Where did somebody’s grandfather burn the fish?

Where did children learn to swim?

Where did writers sit on porches doing absolutely nothing?

Where did Black women take off the expectations of the world and put on a bathing suit?

Where did Black men get to stop being responsible for everything for one afternoon?

Those places matter too.

Joy deserves an archive.

Rest deserves preservation.

Leisure deserves architecture.

The Most Luxurious Thing We Inherited

We often talk about generational wealth as though it exists exclusively on a spreadsheet.

Stocks.

Trusts.

Property values.

Investment accounts.

But inheritance can also be knowing exactly which bedroom is yours when you arrive every summer.

It’s knowing the neighbors.

It’s your grandmother’s chair still sitting on the porch.

It’s walking to the same beach your father walked to when he was twelve.

That’s wealth too.

Perhaps the most sophisticated definition of luxury isn’t having access to somewhere nobody else can go.

Perhaps it’s having somewhere you have always belonged.

A place your family fought to create.

A place they protected.

A place they handed to you.

And a place you’re determined to hand to somebody else.

Because Black Americans didn’t build these communities merely because we wanted beachfront property.

We built them because America once told us:

You cannot rest here.

And our answer was extraordinary.

We found another piece of shoreline.

We built the houses.

We planted the gardens.

We invited our friends.

We raised our children.

We poured the drinks.

We watched the sunset.

And we rested anyway.

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