In 1890, a beachside resort in Maryland refused to admit Frederick Douglass’ youngest son, Charles Remond Douglass, on account of his race. 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. 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.
Though enraged when he left the Bay Ridge resort, Charles quickly found a new opportunity to vacation on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. He and his second wife, Laura Douglass, had a chance meeting with the Brashears, a Black family who owned land adjacent to Bay Ridge.
“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 divided this tract into 104 lots, which he then sold to friends, family and other Black elite. The resort community of Highland Beach welcomed its first visitors in 1893.
Before 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. To this day, many of the town’s cottages are owned by descendants of the resort’s original denizens.
But most Black Washingtonians never had the chance to visit Highland Beach during the Jim Crow era. 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. 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. In the decades since desegregation, many of these sites have been radically transformed—or have disappeared altogether.