DeNeen L. Brown, Washington Post, August 25, 2009
{snip}
Oak Bluffs, an integrated village on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, has been called the Black Hamptons, a place where for generations black people have owned cottages and pastel Victorian houses with wide porches and screen doors that slap in the wind. And fine retreats perched on cliffs with panoramic views of the blue coast where Washingtonians gather, invited to exclusive dinner parties where ice clinks in cocktail glasses. And philanthropic meetings of the famed Cottagers, an exclusive group of black female property owners who require members to summer here for at least four weeks consecutively. “Once you sell,” one woman says, her makeup perfect, “you are out.”
Here, a choppy one-hour ferry ride from Providence, R. I., America’s black privileged class has come for at least four generations to find respite. Doctors, lawyers, artists, writers, business owners, professors and now a president. Those who have risen to the top of their professions come to escape the stress of breaking glass ceilings. Get away from the sting and splinters. That feeling of being the only black person on the job, or in a meeting or in a neighborhood. Get away from translating blackness in a majority culture. Rest for the upwardly mobile.
“We have all the opportunity to vacation anywhere else, but when I have my two or three weeks I come to the Vineyard where I can relax with other African-Americans,” said Louis Baxter, a doctor from New Jersey.
He was sitting on the seawall overlooking the Inkwell, which some say was named by Harlem Renaissance writers who found inspiration near the water and thus named the beach that was once segregated from the white beach. Some people don’t like the name and its connotation, but it’s lasted all these years.
“It gives us an opportunity to network with other upwardly mobile African-Americans,” Baxter said. “We love bringing our children here. They can see if you work hard, get a good education, you can partake of the American dream.”
This is a picture of black America few people see: moneyed black families at leisure.
{snip}
Oak Bluffs, once a Methodist summer retreat where anti-racism sermons were preached, has drawn blacks since the 1800s. Some came as family servants; others worked in hotels. Eventually, elite blacks from New York, Boston and Washington retreated here for summer vacations, many buying houses in an area they called the Oval or the Highlands, which Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West wrote about in her 1995 novel, “The Wedding.”
“They formed a fortress, a bulwark of colored society,” West wrote. “Their occupants could boast that they, or even better their ancestors, had owned a home away from home since the days when a summer hegira was taken by few colored people above the rank of servant.”
Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York owned a cottage in the Oval where Arctic explorer Matthew Henson was a guest. Down the road is Shearer Cottage, an inn built by Charles Shearer, the son of a slave and a slave master who wanted to provide lodging during segregation for blacks including self-made millionaire Madame C. J. Walker; singers Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters and Lillian Evanti; and composer Harry Burleigh.
Edward Brooke, the first black senator elected since Reconstruction, and Martin Luther King Jr. summered in Oak Bluffs, which still encompasses one of the country’s oldest circles of black wealth and power. Summer visitors now include White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and Vernon Jordan, former adviser to President Clinton. Filmmaker Spike Lee owns a house here.
{snip}
Original article
(Posted on August 25, 2009)
Comments
That vacation colony has been around since the time of the Civil War. It has been the home of pre affirmative action high achieving blacks for more than 100 years.
Gee, blacks are allowed the normal human desire to be among one’s own. Yet whites are considered racist for wanting the same.
This has been going on for decades as the author stated. I posted here a few weeks ago on another blog that discussed the vineyard. I discussed how my late parents were summer visitors for decades. I would have loved to have seen the Obama’s!
Another blogger (one who is denial I guess) accused me of being White. Huh? Well to set the record straight, I am Black, I am an upscale Black person and I do vacation on Martha’s vineyard. In fact, I was there for three weeks last month.
Yes. Black people do vacation on Martha’s Vineyard despite what some of you may think.
Good for them. They earned the money (presumably) fair and square, and deserve to vacation wherever they please. This should also be observed as a case study demonstrating that minorities will often self-segregate, even when the financial, legal and social barriers are removed.
A grossly underrported story was a few years back when organizers tried to bring “Freaknic” to the Vinyard, after the annual gathering of Black college students was invited never to return to Atlanta.
The folks in this article were some of the biggest proponents of rules to make sure the event never returned to the Vinyard, either. (I don’t remember exactly what they did, but it had something to do with not allowing promoters to reserve ferries without having the tickets already sold. Since most the attendees were walk-ups, requiring an early committment killed the event.)
And these are the same ones that demand the precious little black kids be shipped to the swimming pool where they were not invited, I just wonder how they would feel if those black kids (and about 5,000 more) were “boated” to the island during their vacation.
So it’s okay for “rich blacks to vacation with other rich blacks” but heaven forbid a bunch of rich white (men) want to have their own country club!
Black success can ONLY occur within an economic system propped up by whites. Without us, they’re nothing.
3 — Black Person Who Vacations At Martha’s Vineyard wrote at 7:15 PM on August 25:
“Yes. Black people do vacation on Martha’s Vineyard despite what some of you may think.”
> And they’re movin’ on up, to the Vinyard! Heh, heh…!
> One thing that can never be changed….. they appropriated all this within a white cultural structure and at the forebearance and extra privileges rendered to them by whites. Obama because president because of a white mother and white grandparents and starry-eyed liberals who read too many super hero comics as kids. I would like to see this happen somewhere in Africa, where no white caused system exists to propel them up due to over-compensation and reverse race privilege. And then I would like to see them open it up to less privileged whites and make them sucessful in turn. It will never happen. Blacks are parasites and mimickers.
By all means let them have a vacation haven for themselves, with others of their social station and race. They earned it and more power to them. Now if they would just allow whites to do the same, everyone would be happy.
Spare me. Its just like in Haiti. The light skinned blacks didnt really like the idea of dark skins taking over but they cooperated because they found that they were average ,at best, among whites but masters among blacks. Its always this way. The pull of sympathy towards the darker skinned inevitably pulls everyone down. Your choice if its only affects you. But when it affects your neighbor…
This is a very badly written article.
“pastel Victorian houses with wide porches and screen doors that slap in the wind.”
Imagine the neighborhood on a windy day. How charming.
“invited to exclusive dinner parties where ice clinks in cocktail glasses.”
At ‘ordinary’ parties ice does what in cocktail glasses? Just melts I suppose.
“Once you sell,” one woman says, her makeup perfect, “you are out.”
Duh.
Oh and how amazing! A woman with perfect make-up! I don’t think I’ve ever seen one!
These were all in just one paragraph. Classic mistakes - the kind that should be gone before a student writer reaches sophomore year of high school. And this is the Washington Post.
An answer to #5. If they bussed, ferried, or flew in even 10 black kid’s from the hood the elite of Oak Bluffs would go nuts. The problem is we would never hear about it in the main stream media and those black kid’s would never ever get anywhere near the Vineyard. Just contrast that to what the outcry would be if that happened in a similar White area. Black Elite’s may claim they love other black’s, they just don’t want to be around them, wonder why?
Even the ” black wealthy ” show their own anti-black racism; they prefer the company of Whites , who are the majority and control this island; unlike most of America.
Can we assume that these rich blacks will push for cheap, Section 8 housing to be built on the island? After all, the average poor, opressed minority cannot afford to live there, so the government must do everything in its power to make housing available in this area.
What would happen if I wanted to move there? Would they practice racial profiling? Would they refuse to let me in? Would they show their racism?
This is a prime example of the human desire to self-segregate…and no where does it manifest itself than when on vacation. It is obvious that they feel most comfortable when around each other…the same as me and my family. This right to self-segregate should be enjoyed by ALL Americans, but I think that most of the “vacationers” mentioned here would be for the opposite.
“Those who have risen to the top of their professions come to escape the stress … Rest for the upwardly mobile.”
Yes, just like the white people have been doing for many years, not just on Martha’s Vineyard but in other summer vacation places in that area and across the USA.The black professionals and elite earned this, so good for them. I have no grudge concerning that. From the description of the black property owners in the first paragraph, clearly the black property owners/renters can afford the vacation.
However, why are whites who have likewise earned this privilege often portrayed as arrogant or elitist, or racist? To me,the author of the article makes it sound as if the black vacationers are somehow more entitled due to their on-the-job fight with racism (debatable,in my opinion, but that would be another post entirely) to their rest and relaxation than the folks who have been living and vacationing there for years.
Newsflash-most white people couldn’t afford a 3 week stay there,nor could we own property there. I know, I was born and raised in New England on the mainland shore, near this area.
I think this article is a litmus test for whether you are a “race realist” or a “bigot.”
A race realist would understand that despite blacks having IQs that are lower than whites ON AVERAGE, there will always be some who are ABOVE AVERAGE compared to whites.
If you cannot accept the idea that there will always be some blacks out there who are smarter, harder working, more disciplined and better parents than you, then you are not a race realist. You’re a bigot.
15 — Anonymous wrote at 9:25 AM on August 26:
“What would happen if I wanted to move there? Would they practice racial profiling? Would they refuse to let me in? Would they show their racism?”
For some people, it is a matter of money and to them money = class, and this may be in some ways an issue of class perceptions, not race. I really think it is for the blacks, who seem to think that money has made them equal. So while race may not be the motivation, the perception of money = class may.
But there is more to class than money and a bought PhD. I like the quote regarding the cash poor Scottish out in the remote Hebrides Islands in the 1945 film, “She Knows where She is Going,” wherein the principal’s escort when asked says of the local islanders, “They don’t have money, but they’re not poor.”
Having a rich culture and heritage is part of being a complete person in a community. Whites in North America have been robbed of theirs through the promotion of pop-culture beyond reasonability (and for money, don’t miss that) and the assertion of all non-white culture as a sort of mark of moral consciencous (PC double-think). And now in the British Isles and the Continent. It is the loss of folk culture to organized religion, imperial expansion, and the subsequent importation of foreign culture and then strangers to folkways that eroded the folk until there is nothing but pop-culture, pop-politics, and yes, even pop-religion. The heart of what makes a people wealthy, their real roots, selected and destroyed, allows the notion of money equaling class and culture to assert itself. Once eliminated, the now culturally lost people are more easily eliminated in actuality. But it is those remote areas of Europe, where May Day is still celebrated with a May Pole dance, and All Hallows Eve (the Celtic New Year) celebrated with Wheels of Fire, that holds my attention. Those are truly our last indigenous examples of white cultural wealth.
Well, it looks like the demise of Martha’s Vineyard will happen someday after all. I did a search on Oak Bluffs, and found oak-bluffs.ma.us. Look to the menu on the left side of the page, and open “affordable housing”. Looks like the PC crowd has a foothold there on Martha’s Vineyard! They are looking for affordable housing for the low income people! Yet, look to the statistics for the imcome on the island on the same site. There are very, very few poor on the island!!
The fact is that there is a fair amount of racial mixing among the younger Blacks and Whites and Hispancis on the vineyard. I also see such behavior in the Hamptons.
“Black Person Who Vacations At Martha’s Vineyard” made some remarks (#3 above) that beg for discussion.
He (or she? doesn’t matter; I’ll assume BP is male) gave us this snide quip:long-established community there, like a mirror image of their melanin-challenged neighbors’!—who knew? Not me—not us—it seems, but why? I’m an educated 50-plus follower of world and national events, and I sure knew that well-to-do white people have had a nice little racket there for over a century. But an equally-pampered and equally-established paradise of the melanin-blessed, just down the road? How did I miss that ?never told , deliberately. It just ruins the narrative orthodoxy of “oppression”, and makes it harder to play on white guilt, especially that of working-class whites (who actually work). God forbid they actually wise up to the scam—it could really complicate life for the “elites” of any and all colors who have been living the sweet life up there since my grandparents were kids, separated by many miles of ocean from da ‘hood. As to why it got out just now: Obama’s going there (or is there already?—whatever), and his and family’s whereabouts are bound to be reported on. Call it pre-emptive damage control.
Ooops, the brainwashing wore off:
I was not trying to play on anyone’s guilt, White or otherwise. I was simply stating the fact that are Blacks, I included, who vacation on Martha’s vineyard.
For the record,I am 61 year old Black female.
Anonymous wrote:
Affirmative Action at the Washington Post! Big difference.
“For some people, it is a matter of money and to them money = class, and this may be in some ways an issue of class perceptions, not race. I really think it is for the blacks, who seem to think that money has made them equal. So while race may not be the motivation, the perception of money = class may.”
I hope more and more blacks move to that island, that way the rich whites who have looked down their noses at us middle class and poor whites all their lives can get a healthy dose of diversity up close and personal.
Dear Black Person Who Vacations At Martha’s Vineyard,
Thanks for your note, and I apologize for taking so long to respond. Naturally I don’t visit this site at my workplace.
You said “I was not trying to play on anyone’s guilt, White or otherwise”.
Ma’am, I said nothing of the kind.
You continued: “I was simply stating the fact that [there] are Blacks, I included, who vacation on Martha’s vineyard.”
Here’s a simple statement in return, for you:
Someone, somewhere, right now, is eating a sandwich.
Can you understand that your statement has exactly as much news value as mine?
I have to wonder if you really think that any reasonably intelligent white American would be surprised at people of any color vacationing in a posh seaside community, if those people have the means to do so. I don’t mean to sound accusing, but there’s more than a whiff of condescension in your remark. Which one of us is really more naive?
Thanks for telling us “For the record, I am 61 year old Black female.” I also surmise that you are intelligent—from your command of the language—and sophisticated—people who choose to vacation at MV, in my opinion, tend to be in that category.
Again, my thanks for joining the discussion.
