Water as A Divider: When Beaches Were Not For All

Water is the symbol of many things — renewal, rebirth, life itself. But in the Jim Crow South, it was a stark physical reminder of an enforced separation.

Parting the Waters

In the bleak years of segregation, Florida beaches and pools were symbols of a great divide — and of rising up through persistent struggle.

By Audrey Peterman

As a Jamaican woman who developed a passion for nature at the stream in my backyard, I was fascinated when my American husband shared stories of growing up in Florida in the 1940s and ’50s, when he could have been jailed for attempting to swim at the beach less than a mile from his house.

While time at my local waters meant solace, tranquility and an escape from the tropical heat, Frank was blocked as an African American from the beautiful stretch of sandy Florida beach in Dania that attracted people from all over the world.

Growing up near Fort Lauderdale in the age before air conditioning, Frank and his friends learned to get by, though their method for cooling off wasn’t without its dangers.

“Me and my friends learned to swim in the Dania Cut-Off Canal on the edge of town, where the railroad tracks crossed the canal,” he remembers. “We used to dive off the train trestles into the cool water.”

Granted, they had to keep a keen eye out for the occasional alligator or water moccasins lying on the banks. And if a manatee went by, they learned to wait before leaping into the water, as inevitably other manatees would follow. “Oh, we managed,” he laughs, before adding with more seriousness of those days of segregation:  “You have to remember, we weren’t just sitting back and taking it. Community leaders kept pushing for change, wading-in at the beaches to force the authorities to integrate them.”

The idea that government could restrict its own people from the largesse of nature and cause them to risk their lives to enjoy the most basic amenities boggled my mind. Coming from a country that is predominantly Black, and reared in that proverbial “village” it takes to raise a child, the idea of separation by race was completely foreign to me until I came to America in 1978.

So it was with great appreciation that I learned how the Black community in Florida resisted the enforced separation from nature with success and eminent joy.

Using active resistance, ingenuity and entrepreneurship, they secured their own places in the sun, while continuing to push for an end to segregation. The necklace of historic Black beaches strung around the Florida peninsula — from Escambia County in the northwest across to Nassau County in the northeast and south to Miami-Dade County — tells that story.

I saw this story from the inside — both from Frank’s experience as a child growing up in South Florida and as a result of our work in the environmental sector. As newlyweds, we drove around the United States in 1995 to see places such as the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Yosemite. We were shocked to learn that as part of the National Park System, they were once as segregated as Florida beaches had been at the height of segregation. In the mid-’90s, the parks still reflected little diversity of employees or visitors. To Frank it was “déjà vu all over again.” To me it was an intolerable affront to humanity. To both of us, it bespoke a need to help change it.

Together, we created Earthwise Productions, Inc., offering consulting services to the National Park Service and other land management agencies interested in engaging more Americans of color. We organized park tours from the Everglades to Yellowstone so people could see what they were missing. We helped build upon a nascent movement, which today includes hundreds of groups around the country, to introduce people to the wealth of public lands, for recreation and employment. And we advocated in local government and the U.S. Congress for stronger protection and funding  for public lands. In 2009, we published our  book, Legacy on the Land: A Black Couple Discovers Our National Inheritance and Tells Why Every American Should Care.

At the turn of the 21st century,  the tributaries flowing through our lives met up with those of other African Americans also striving to share the stories of Florida’s Black pioneers. In South Florida, our friend, historian Dinizulu Gene Tinnie, with whom we were working to heighten connections between South Florida’s Black and Hispanic citizens and the Everglades and other national parks, invited us to a reunion on Virginia Key, site of Miami’s first “colored beach,” designated by authorities in 1945 for the exclusive use of Black citizens.

While Frank fondly remembers his dad driving him and his mom and younger brother to frolic on the beach in the 1940s and 1950s, we learned a much fuller story about the courage, resilience, and ingenuity it had taken to secure the beach.

Black community leaders had repeatedly challenged the county government to establish the bathing beach they’d long promised the “colored” population, according to Tinnie, founding member and chair of the Virginia Key Beach Park Trust.

Finally, they decided to put their bodies on the line to affirm their rights as humans and citizens. According to contemporaneous reports Tinnie cited from the Miami Herald,  community leaders — including attorney Lawson E. Thomas, Dr. Ira P. Davis,  Judge Henderson of the International Longshoremen’s Association, and others — met at Davis’ home in Miami’s historically Black Overtown neighborhood to plan the event.

Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement’s earliest “sit-ins” to protest and challenge the system of segregation, the group came up with the idea of staging a protest “wade-in,” in which Black swimmers would wade into the waters of a segregated white beach to “test the waters” of the law.

As law-abiding citizens, they alerted the county sheriff to their intent. If they were arrested, the case would be seen as a challenge to existing segregations laws. Either they’d win their rights or the resulting news reports would draw important attention to their cause.

On the day of the wade-in, May 9, 1945, attorney Thomas carried a bag of cash for bail in case of arrests. The group had no idea if they’d be met by repressive law enforcement or the Ku Klux Klan.

Thankfully, there was no violence, but the wade-in, at all-white Baker’s Haulover Beach, showed county leaders that Black citizens were not going to settle for business as usual. There were no legal repercussions; instead, county authorities called for a meeting with the wade-in organizers. Less than three months later, on August 1, 1945,  the county opened Virginia Key Beach as a segregated park “for the exclusive use of Negroes.”  The new beach featured amenities including a bathhouse, concession stand, and amusement rides. It became a hub for Black South Florida’s social, cultural, and political life.

Tragically, the dangerous ocean currents in that area cost several lives. And county leaders established a waste dump and sewage treatment plant nearby on the island.

By 1982 the County transferred the park to the City of Miami, which closed it, citing high operating expenses. But Virginia Key Beach never lost its place in the heart of the Black community.

When word came in 1999 that the City of Miami planned to lease the site to private developers to build an exclusive upscale campground resort, they rallied and resisted it. Today, its history and future are determinedly protected by the Virginia Key Beach Park Trust. The area once considered undesirable by some is now poised to address the existential problems of our time, including climate change and sea level rise, as an indoor/outdoor historical and environmental museum.

Those early wade-ins became a frequent tool of protest in the 1950s and early ’60s. Miami’s Crandon Park was successfully, if unofficially, desegregated in 1959, after a wade-in by members of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE).

The “colored beach” in Dania, established in the early ’50s, still had no promised access road by the summer of 1961.  So businesswoman and then-president of the local chapter of the NAACP Eula Johnson and physician Von D. Mizell organized  a series of wade-ins on whites-only Fort Lauderdale Beach.

The group included students from Fort Lauderdale’s historically Black Dillard High School and visiting college students. They were met by opponents, including axe-wielding Ku Klux Klan members, though no violence ensued. The city of Fort Lauderdale lost a lawsuit filed against the NAACP to stop the wade-ins, and by 1962, the county’s beaches were desegregated by law, if not, in practice.

And in 2016, in tribute to the fearless and groundbreaking struggle they waged for equality, that “colored” beach was renamed the Dr. Von D. Mizell-Eula Johnson State Park.

In the summer of 1964, St. Augustine was a national flash point in the struggle against segregation. Local civil rights activists, such as dentist Robert Hayling — who had been beaten and kidnapped by the Ku Klux Klan  — were joined by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., C.T. Vivian, and other national leaders.  The temperature rose as the summer unfolded with a series of marches, restaurant sit-ins, and wade-ins.

One such event — captured in horrifying photographs — took place on June 18, 1964 at the waterfront’s Monson Motor Lodge. A week before, Martin Luther King Jr. had been denied service by the lodge’s owner, James Brock, when he sought to order lunch in the Monson’s dining room. King was arrested for trespass and jailed.

The following week, six bathing-suit clad young people, four Black, and two white, entered the Monson’s pool. When the swimmers refused to get out, Brock emptied a jug of muriatic acid cleaning fluid into the water. An off-duty police officer jumped in to pull the swimmers out, beating them in the process. All this was captured by assembled news photographers, and these brutal images made their way onto newspaper pages around the world.

Two weeks later, on July 2, 1964, the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

Even after integration, It wasn’t much easier for Black Floridians to cool off in public swimming pools. Our friend Bobby Henry, whose family has published the Black-focused Westside Gazette Newspaper in Fort Lauderdale since 1971, recalls how challenging it was to access the swimming pool on the “white” side of town.

”I remember once when I was coaching Little League swimming and we swam against a white team, the coaches exhibited so much prejudice to our team that we were almost kicked out of the pool,” he recalls. “But our team went on to win and one of our swimmers broke the record Mark Spitz held at that time. So I’d have to say segregation taught us to put forth the best effort we could and be proud of who we are, of our community and our families. I think we appreciated things more than others who were privileged, because we had to work so much harder for everything.”

Said to be Florida’s first Black millionaire, Lewis first acquired 33 acres including beachfront, and finally, with 216 acres, created a haven where Black people could enjoy themselves free from harassment and prosecution. Having modeled success as an entrepreneur, he invited affluent executives in the company to buy into American Beach.

For decades,  the American Beach resort, with affordable commercial lodging supplementing the accommodations Black residents offered in their homes, entertainment venues and water sports, drew Black Americans from across the country. Icons, including Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Ella Fitzgerald, Joe Louis and James Brown, frolicked alongside Black people of lesser means, all enjoying respite from the press of racism. A.L. Lewis described it as “recreation and relaxation without humiliation.”

The demand for its amenities fell off after integration. But walking down main street with the elegant, 6-foot tall MaVynee Betsch, who’d trained at the Oberlin Conservatory and wowed Europe as an operatic mezzo-soprano for more than 10 years, was like stepping back in time. She had come back to American Beach to care for her declining grandfather and stayed on after she learned that encroaching development was threatening to absorb the community.  With the help of the A.L. Lewis Historical Society, she strove to protect it. In 2001, she succeeded in getting American Beach listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Betsch, a striking presence on the beach with her long dreadlocks, introduced us to the huge sand dune across the street she called “NaNa,” where she’d played as a child. She spoke glowingly about the spiritual connection she felt when she watched lightning dancing on the dune.

For years, she worked to persuade the National Park Service to acquire the dune and protect it as part of the nearby Timucuan Ecological and Historical Preserve and Kingsley Plantation, a unit of the park system.

Nearby Kingsley Plantation had been home to Betsch’s great- great- great grandparents, Zepheniah and Anna Kingsley, the young West African woman Zephaniah purchased as a slave and subsequently married. In 2004, a year before her death, Betsch finally persuaded the Amelia Island Plantation, which had bought up much of the land around American Beach, to transfer the dune to the park service. The American Beach Museum, Betsch’s dream, was founded in 2014. Today it conveys the history of the area as a bridge between its past and future.

American Beach was but one example of Black entrepreneurship. On Florida’s west coast, a group of Black businessmen established the beachfront community of Money Bayou Beach in Port St. Joe, Gulf County, in 1951. The beach attracted revelers from as far as Tuskegee, Alabama, and Cairo, Georgia, and offered opportunities for entrepreneurs who provided bus shuttles and other amenities for the beachgoers. It thrived through the 1960s, until integration provided other alternatives.

The greatest irony of segregated waters in Florida might be best illustrated by the story we learned of the Jones family, who owned islands in Biscayne Bay, beginning with Porgy Key, purchased in 1897 for $300. Lafayette “Parson” Jones and his Bahamian wife, Mozelle, moved to the island with their young son, King Arthur Jones, with another, Sir Lancelot Jones, on the way. This Black family eventually owned Porgy and Rhodes Keys and half of another island. They coaxed a living from the limestone rock, growing pineapples and key limes. They also salvaged shipwrecks in the area.

Sir Lancelot and his brother continued to live on the island after the death of their father. Sir Lancelot became a favorite bonefishing guide for prominent white members of the Coco Lobo Club across the channel, including President Warren Harding, and scions of the Honeywell and Goodyear families.

After his brother died in 1966, Sir Lancelot resisted the blandishments of developers who wanted to buy his island as part of a plan to create another Miami Beach. Instead, he sold to the National Park Service in 1970, with the promise the land would be preserved. It is now part of Biscayne National Park, one of the largest marine parks in the National Park System.