Chesapeake Beach Museum Builds Exhibit on Segregation and Black Resorts
A Maryland railway museum has created an exhibit examining segregation in Chesapeake Beach and the Black-run resorts, steamboats and beaches that offered recreation in its place.
A Facebook comment about the lack of photographs showing people of color has led the Railway Museum in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, to create an exhibit on segregation and the African American responses to it. The museum's curator said the work took almost two years of research and was built around a story that its collections alone could not tell.
The project began on November 16, 2023, when the Friends of the Chesapeake Beach Railway posted a throwback photograph of a pony ride behind the historic railway station, dating from the 1960s or 1970s. A commenter asked whether the group had pictures of people of color. The curator answered that, like many resorts of its time, Chesapeake Beach was segregated until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and that the museum knew African Americans had played an integral role in building the railroad and in the local service industry, but held very little documentation of it.
Working through the records, the curator found that the museum's holdings were too thin to support an exhibit on their own. Instead the research turned toward what the museum called the Responses to Segregation, an often forgotten part of the story. A starting point was the steamboat industry, one of the first forms of recreation where African Americans could enjoy themselves away from racial tensions. Research into the period led to Lewis Jefferson, a wealthy African American businessman who took over Notley Park, later known as Washington Park near today's National Harbor. He operated steamboats to and from the resort, and the boats were run by and for African Americans.
The research also identified other segregated leisure spaces. Suburban Gardens was the first and only amusement park in the District of Columbia where African Americans were welcome. Segregated beaches near Annapolis hosted well-known Black musicians, and offered entertainment that paralleled what Chesapeake Beach and other segregated resorts provided to white visitors.
The exhibit also turns to Calvert County. The curator described learning, through the Calvert County Historical Society, about Albert Irvin Cassell, a well-known and accomplished African American architect of the 1930s. Cassell planned a self-sufficient community near Dares Beach in Prince Frederick, Maryland, called Calvert Town, to be built by and for African Americans. The plan included schools, stores, farms, entertainment, boardwalks and a fire department. It was never realized, owing to a governmental shift affecting a WPA loan Cassell had hoped to obtain, as well as racial opposition to such a town.
Sea Gull Beach in Prince Frederick was a local segregated beach that operated from 1956 to the early 1970s. Popular Black musicians performed there, and it is still fondly remembered. A local historian, Michael Kent, helped the curator obtain family photographs of the beach, including images of The Hounds, a house band that often played there.
The curator said the research grew beyond what a small museum could display. The layers of complex history, she wrote, are difficult to grasp in full, let alone show in a modest exhibit space. The aim, she said, was to tell as much of the story as possible in a respectful and honest way, to acknowledge segregation and the responses to it, and to show how close those significant dates are to the present. The museum hopes the exhibit will contribute to a wider conversation about the community's history and the country's.
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