Black life on Martha’s Vineyard

Black life on Martha’s Vineyard, a community residing on Martha’s Vineyard, the Massachusetts island known as a summertime haven for white, so-called “coastal elites” that is also the home of a thriving Black community. Since the turn of the 20th century, the year-round Black population and the number of Black vacationers has grown, and this island of the Atlantic coast has been a getaway destination for such luminaries as politician Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., singers and actors Lena Horne and Paul Robeson, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., director Spike Lee, scholar and television personality Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and U.S. Pres. Barack Obama. Many African American residents and vacationers are concentrated in the town of Oak Bluffs on the northern side of the island.

History

European colonization of Martha’s Vineyard began in the 17th century, and the first people of African descent to reside on the island were almost certainly enslaved. Their numbers were small and remained so after slavery was abolished in Massachusetts (1783). In the decades afterward, the Black population was transient, probably composed of fugitives from the South and laborers in the fishing and whaling industries. Many African American inhabitants married members of the Wampanoag people, the island’s Indigenous population. In the mid-19th century the fervor for religious revival meetings and the establishment of the Wesleyan Camp Ground (later the Wesleyan Grove) brought both white and Black settlers to Martha’s Vineyard and eventually led to the founding of Cottage City (later Oak Bluffs). Toward the end of the century, the white leisure class began to vacation on the island, and a small population of African Americans came as domestic servants or worked in the hotels. A few bought property or started their own businesses.

About the turn of the 20th century, the number of both Black year-round residents and Black vacationers began to increase, which historians trace to the arrival of Oscar Denniston, a Black missionary from Jamaica, and his wife about 1900 and to the establishment of Shearer Cottage by Charles and Henrietta Shearer in 1912. Denniston became a leader in Martha’s Vineyard’s Black community, and the church he founded, Bradley Memorial Church in Oak Bluffs, became a central hub. The Shearers, meanwhile, were early entrepreneurs on the island, establishing a laundry in 1903. They transformed their business into the first inn on Martha’s Vineyard catering to African American visitors. It became a destination for high-profile guests—thanks in part to the composer Henry T. Burleigh, who stayed there every summer and convinced his friends in New York to visit. By the mid-1950s Oak Bluffs had become a full-blown Black resort, drawing guests from all over the country. The town beach acquired the nickname “Inkwell” or “Inkwell Beach,” which may have started as a derogatory epithet but was later reclaimed by African American residents. In the 21st century a large number of African American retirees moved to Martha’s Vineyard, increasing the number of year-round residents not only in Oak Bluffs but also in such towns as Tisbury and Edgartown.

The attraction

Dorothy West, a writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance, spent the second half of the 20th century living on Martha’s Vineyard and wrote for the Vineyard Gazette. She described the leisurely delights of visiting the island as a child in the newspaper: “Every day, the young mothers took their children to a lovely stretch of beach and scattered along it in little pools. They made a point of not bunching together. They did not want the whites to think they knew their place.…The days were full. There were berries to pick, a morning’s adventure. There were band concerts for an evening’s stroll. There were invitations to lemonade and cookies and whist.” Jill Nelson, a former Washington Post reporter, described part of the appeal in her book Finding Martha’s Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island: “The weight of being race representative…was lifted.…The Vineyard was an ideal place to figure out who we really were underneath all the other stuff. Here, it was enough that you simply be yourself.” Journalist DeNeen Brown wrote in a 2009 feature for the The Washington Post: “Most people just say it is a magical island with down-to-earth people from all walks and tsk-tsk at all the talk about the Black elite,” but she noted that “it is a destination of the rich, whether they call it that or not.”

Culture

Martha’s Vineyard has also long been a destination for intellectual activity, especially during the summers. In decades past, major civil rights leaders lectured in Oak Bluffs under the auspices of the NAACP. In more recent years a number of festivals, including the Juneteenth Jubilee and the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, brought scholar Nikole Hannah-Jones (see The 1619 Project) and actors Michael B. Jordan, Yvonne Orji, and Jennifer Hudson to Oak Bluffs and East Tisbury, respectively.