The coasts of today's American South feature luxury condominiums,resorts, and gated communities, yet just a century ago, a surprising amountof beachfront property in the Chesapeake, along the Carolina shores, andaround the Gulf of Mexico was owned and populated by African Americans.Blending social and environmental history, Andrew W. Kahrl tells the storyof African American-owned beaches in the twentieth century. By reconstructingAfrican American life along the coast, Kahrl demonstrates just howimportant these properties were for African American communities andleisure, as well as for economic empowerment, especially during the era ofthe Jim Crow South. However, in the wake of the civil rights movement andamid the growing prosperity of the Sunbelt, many African Americans fellvictim to effective campaigns to dispossess black landowners of their propertiesand beaches. Kahrl makes a signal contribution to our understanding of AfricanAmerican landowners and real-estate developers, as well as the developmentof coastal capitalism along the southern seaboard, tying the creation of overdeveloped,unsustainable coastlines to the unmaking of black communitiesand cultures along the shore. The result is a skillful appraisal of the ambiguouslegacy of racial progress in the Sunbelt.

The story of our separate and unequal America in the making, and one man's fight against it During the long, hot summers of the late 1960s and 1970s, one man began a campaign to open some of America's most exclusive beaches to minorities and the urban poor. That man was anti-poverty activist and one-time presidential candidate Ned Coll of Connecticut, a state that permitted public access to a mere seven miles of its 253-mile shoreline. Nearly all of the state's coast was held privately, for the most part by white, wealthy residents. This book is the first to tell the story of the controversial protester who gathered a band of determined African American mothers and children and challenged the racist, exclusionary tactics of homeowners in a state synonymous with liberalism. Coll's legacy of remarkable successes-and failures-illuminates how our nation's fragile coasts have not only become more exclusive in subsequent decades but also have suffered greater environmental destruction and erosion as a result of that private ownership.