The Land Was Ours by Andrew W. Kahrl

Author:Andrew W. Kahrl [Kahrl, Andrew W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780674050471
Goodreads: 12854372
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2012-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6: Spinning Sand into Gold

Of the estimated seventy thousand persons who journeyed onto Maryland’s Annapolis Neck Peninsula on July 21, 1956, to hear Chuck Berry perform at Carr’s Beach, only eight thousand made it past the gates before the grounds were deemed filled beyond capacity. More than a few got in by swimming around or crawling under the fence that lined the property at the risk of apprehension and severe punishment by the team of African American special deputies hired by the beach’s black owners to patrol the grounds and maintain order. Others turned away that night headed toward the Clover Inn or Do-Drop Inn, two juke joints located a mile and a half down the road. Few made it home before dawn. The following morning, the Anne Arundel County sheriff’s department reported a five-mile-long traffic jam leading from the peninsula that did not empty out until nearly 4 A.M.1

By the summer of 1956, large numbers of African Americans streaming onto the Carr family’s beachfront property on summer weekends had become a common sight for area homeowners and a telling sign of the meteoric rise of a black seasonal entertainment industry in the years following World War II. Over the previous decades, the Carr family farm on the Chesapeake Bay had gone from growing fruits and vegetables for sale in local markets to providing boarding accommodations and hosting families and groups on the family’s beachfront property to becoming a lucrative corporate enterprise drawing in crowds (by car, bus, and foot) by the thousands from as far as New York City to play at the amusement park and midway, gamble at rows of slot machines, and watch a hot summer lineup of local and touring musicians and entertainers perform at the beach’s large, open-air concert pavilion.

The crowds gathered on the shores of commercially owned African American beaches on summer weekends reflected the role of leisure spaces in nourishing postwar black Americans’ dreams of freedom from Jim Crow and in transforming visions and expressions of black cultural identity. For a black kid growing up poor in Annapolis during these years, Carr’s Beach made summers “something to look forward to—a chance to be among ‘us.’”2 Drawing persons of color from different neighborhoods, cities, and regions into intimate contact and fostering cultural exchange, the beach also came to reshape the very meaning of what constituted “us.” For aspiring musicians and entertainers, the demanding audiences who crowded around beachfront pavilions made summers a chance to shine—whether as a contestant at a talent show sponsored by a local black-oriented radio station, as the opening act for a headline performer, or as one of the legion of touring musicians riding the coastal “chitlin circuit”—and made the beach a critical proving ground. For a growing web of white and black investors, proprietors, marketers, laborers, and regulators, Carr’s Beach and other commercial beach resorts made summers an opportunity for work, innovation, and capital accumulation, a chance for some to pursue alternative outlets for earnings and possible freedom from

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