Free the Beaches by Andrew W. Kahrl

Author:Andrew W. Kahrl [Kahrl, Andrew W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

Ned Coll and children from Hartford coming ashore at the private Madison Beach Club. Photo © Bob Adelman. Courtesy Bob Adelman.

Ned called up to the clubhouse and asked whether the members assembled on the front porch preferred to “stand up there like kings or come down and have a positive weekend and an afternoon of friendship.”44 He got no response except for a few muffled, half-hearted heckles from people not accustomed to being on either side of a public protest. He asked if they cared to join in the singing of “Our Country ’Tis of Thee.”45 He got no takers. The children seemed oblivious to the standoff on the shore. They came to have fun. Their pleasure was their protest.

It was not only disorienting to see poor people of color in this setting, but it was also, for the club members, deeply unnerving to see them so carefree, at leisure, picnicking on their beach, enjoying themselves, even inviting them (and their children) to join. The Boston Globe described a bizarre scene. As black children played and laughed in the water, white parents and “club personnel tried to keep members[’] children away”—from doing what they ostensibly brought them there to do: play in the water with other children.46 By exposing the club members’ cowardice, the protest, Ned believed, had achieved an important objective. The black children who had come from Hartford’s housing projects that day saw, as he put it, “whites who are powerful running their asses into the [club]house, and we’ve taken over their beach for the afternoon.” They got to see that “the emperor has no pants! . . . Activism is empowering!”47 As they prepared to leave, Ned asked Hooper if he could at least allow the children to walk through the property to the road, where the vans were waiting to transport them home. Hooper refused. They exited through the Pignatellis’ property instead.48

“Coll has surpassed himself in the art of staging spectaculars,” the editorial page of the New Haven Register remarked the following day.49 Indeed, Ned got the press coverage he wanted. He succeeded, as one report later noted, in “embarrassing members of the country club set, who want to sit comfortably under beach umbrellas and discuss—not observe—the poor and oppressed.”50 He succeeded, too, in further alienating the communities whose beaches (and whose people) he hoped to be made more welcoming to the urban poor while giving town officials in Greenwich and Fairfield added incentive to pour their resources into fighting the CCLU’s impending lawsuit. Critics lambasted Ned for “adding heat where light is needed,” for “spread[ing] confusion and consternation when understanding is called for,” and for wasting money that could have been “expended . . . on some needy youngsters” on ego-gratifying “hijinks.”51 Ned, his critics charged, seemed intent on upending the laws and traditions that had shaped the culture and society of the Connecticut shore for nearly a century.

To these criticisms Ned replied: guilty as charged. As he drew closer to the bastions of real

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