![]() ![]() Men dredging oysters in the Chesapeake Bay around 1905 By 1880, Black oystermen in one county along the Chesapeake outnumbered white oystermen by a ratio of four to one. In the 19th century, free and enslaved Black Americans alike dominated the region’s water-based industries, in part because they could obtain seamen’s protection certificates that served as proof of citizenship at a time when Black citizenship was subject to debate. as the seat of the federal government in 1790. Access to ports along the Potomac River, as well as the growing tobacco industry along the Anacostia, contributed to George Washington’s selection of what is now D.C. ![]() These ships also sailed up the Anacostia River through present-day Washington, delivering enslaved people to tobacco plantations. In the 17th and 18th centuries, ships carrying enslaved people from West Africa arrived at various ports across western Maryland. Eventually, these rivers empty into the Chesapeake Bay, a brackish body of water between Maryland’s Eastern and Western Shores that opens to the Atlantic Ocean.īlack history on the Chesapeake is as old as the United States itself. These waterways flow through major cities like Baltimore and Annapolis and include rivers such as the Potomac, the Patuxent and the Susquehanna. The Chesapeake Bay watershed is a network of over 100,00 rivers and streams spanning six mid-Atlantic states and Washington, D.C. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons The Black history of the Chesapeake Bay Still, as Kahrl tells Smithsonian magazine, the underlying reason for both Highland Beach’s establishment and the emergence of alternative relaxation spots was the city’s failure to invest in “any public beaches, public swimming pools or other outdoor spaces for African Americans.” This situation, in turn, led “families out other spaces for their own leisure and entertainment.”įrederick Douglass (left) and his son Charles Douglass (right) Highland Beach’s exclusivity reinforced divisions among Washington’s Black residents. In the decades since desegregation, many of these sites have been radically transformed-or have disappeared altogether. Instead, the majority of would-be Highland visitors spent their summer leisure time at other spots on the Chesapeake Bay, such as Carr’s Beach, Sparrow’s Beach and Oyster Harbor. At a time of severe restrictions on Black recreation in the nation’s capital, Highland Beach remained reserved for the upper classes, who took decisive steps to bar working-class guests from the resort. To this day, many of the town’s cottages are owned by descendants of the resort’s original denizens.īut most Black Washingtonians never had the chance to visit Highland Beach during the Jim Crow era. Map of a portion of the Chesapeake Bay regionīefore the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in public places, Highland Beach served as a refuge for some of Washington’s most prominent Black artists, politicians and activists, including poet Langston Hughes and suffragist Mary Church Terrell. The resort community of Highland Beach welcomed its first visitors in 1893. He divided this tract into 104 lots, which he then sold to friends, family and other Black elite. “Thinking about starting his own summer resort so that he would never suffer such an indignity again,” Charles purchased some 40 acres of beachfront property from the Brashears for $5,000 (nearly $170,000 today), writes historian Andrew Kahrl in The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South. He and his second wife, Laura Douglass, had a chance meeting with the Brashears, a Black family who owned land adjacent to Bay Ridge. Though enraged when he left the Bay Ridge resort, Charles quickly found a new opportunity to vacation on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. ![]() Little did he know that this respectful treatment was coming to an end with the introduction of Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation across the American South. The rejection came as a shock to Charles, a Civil War veteran and civil servant who’d previously enjoyed wide access to social spaces as an elite member of Washington, D.C.’s Black community. In 1890, a beachside resort in Maryland refused to admit Frederick Douglass’ youngest son, Charles Remond Douglass, on account of his race. ![]()
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