Free the Beaches

Ed Ayers: Today on BackStory, we’re taking a trip to the seaside. We’ll talk about the flood of European colonizers who came to the beaches of Florida and the indigenous people who lived there, we’ll visit American children recuperating in seaside hospitals, and we’ll talk about our own experiences of the beach as a weird, magical place.
The state of Connecticut has 253 miles of coastline but, in the early 1970s, just seven miles of it were accessible to the public. That start figure goes some way to explain why the state became the focus for a sometimes bitter political battle for access to a heavily restricted shoreline.

Speaker 12: The Greenwich Beach, restricted by local ordinance to residents and their guests, was invaded today by three dozen Hartford area ghetto children and a handful of adults who call themselves the Revitalization Corps. Armed with a Supreme Court ruling that all the nation’s beaches, from the low-water to the high-water mark, belong to everyone, the group staked its claim to a patch of sand. Its leader, Ned Cole, claims that, out of 250 miles of shoreline in Connecticut alone, only six miles are open to the public.

Ned Cole: It’s not just the Greenwich Beach you’re talking about, you’re talking about that whole shoreline, where a small percentage of wealthy people control that shoreline and the average factory worker gets on the highway and tries to go to a Connecticut state park on a Sunday afternoon and it closes very early, like on Fourth of July, and he can’t even bring his children in to use the shore. That’s wrong.

Speaker 12: Cole was issued a summons after some local residents [crosstalk 00:12:26].

Ed Ayers: Spearheading the protest was Ned Cole, a radical young activist whose campaign to free the beaches combined political theater with provocative direct action.
The tale is told in Andrew Kahrl’s new book, “Free the Beaches: the Story of Ned Cole and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline.” I asked Andrew how Connecticut’s beaches had become so inaccessible in the first place.

Andrew Kahrl: We began to see, in the early 20th century, up and down the shoreline, developers who were creating these private beach associations, which were sort of a kind of forerunner of the modern gated community. Groups of homeowners banded together and very much sort of restricted access to their beaches. They restricted membership on the basis of race and religion, they often were governed by a racially restrictive convenance, and they were very explicit, restricting access to their beaches to members only.
Now, combined with private beach associations, you had local town beaches that were really public in name only because many of these communities along the Connecticut coast restricted access to town beaches to residents only. These communities oftentimes had their own discriminatory housing policies.

Brian Balogh: What would happen, let’s say, if I wanted to just use the beach at a private beach association?

Andrew Kahrl: Well, as a white man, you might not have that big of a problem.

Brian Balogh: Uh-huh?

Andrew Kahrl: In fact, one of the things that I found throughout this history was that these laws were often selectively enforced. They were on the books and could be certainly used in situations when an undesirable person or group was seeking to access a beach. They oftentimes could be ignored if, say, a person sort of fit the profile of the desired segment of the public that would be welcomed there.

Brian Balogh: The protagonist of your story is Ned Cole. Tell me a little bit about Ned Cole and how he became involved with beaches.

Andrew Kahrl: Yeah. Ned Cole was a young Irish Catholic recent college grad who, in 1964, quit his job in an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut, his hometown, and founded what came to be known as Revitalization Corps. He described it as a domestic peace corps. He said that he was waging a war on apathy, and he thought that the emergence of these all white suburbs in places like East and West Hartford had a real damaging effect on white people. He understood, on an instinctual level, that the problem of racial inequality in America was a white person’s problem, many of whom saw themselves as open-minded, tolerant, racially liberal, yet, in their day to day lives, had very little contact with African-Americans, had a variety of structural barriers that sort of ensured that their communities would remain racially exclusionary.
In the summer of 1971, he and the group of African-American mothers who he worked alongside decided to lead a bus trip down to the state shoreline to provide children, most of whom had never seen the ocean, who had never sort of really sort of ventured outside of the city much at all, giving them an opportunity to enjoy what had become sort of a rite of childhood for most Americans, a day at the beach. When they got there, they discovered that there was nowhere they could go.

Brian Balogh: Was that a shock to them? Did they just assume? There was no planning in advance, they weren’t trying necessarily to disrupt things?

Andrew Kahrl: No, this did not originate as a protest. Ned kind of naively assumed initially that they would be welcomed there, that towns would, say, welcome a group of adorable young children with open arms who were seeking nothing more than to just enjoy a day at the beach, but that was certainly not the case.

Brian Balogh: What, in fact, happened when they arrived?

Andrew Kahrl: There was a great deal of hostility. Local police were summoned. Then, you also saw, after the fact, towns hastily met and tightened their beach access laws even further to ensure that this didn’t happen again.

Brian Balogh: Now, Cole goes on to capitalize on that reaction as a method of protest. Could you describe some of these protests?

Andrew Kahrl: He quickly began to engage in very inventive and high-profile forms of protest. One of the sort of most inventive protest tactics he used was amphibious invasions of these very elite country clubs and private beaches along the shore, commanding boats and coming ashore and playing on the wet sand portion of the beach, which was their legal right because, legally, the wet sand portion of the shoreline was public property.

Speaker 12: Cole was issued a summons after some local residents accused members of his group of trespassing on private property on their way to the beach. Many of the townspeople were angry and outraged.

Speaker 15: So what are you going to do? Every time it’s low tide, trudge in?

Speaker 16: Yeah, [crosstalk 00:17:14].

Ned Cole: We should have an access road to get to this beach that goes up to the high-tide land.

Speaker 16: Really? I feel sorry for the poor kids that you’ve dragged with you.

Speaker 15: You’ve got playing in the state parks. [crosstalk 00:17:21].

Ned Cole: The state parks up there are crowded.

Speaker 15: You’re just trying to get in because it’s private.

Ned Cole: No, that’s not it at all.

Speaker 15: You’ve got to make your little point.

Speaker 17: Here, the only people who have paid for the beaches are the citizens of Greenwich, so we feel that the beaches belong to the citizens of Greenwich.

Brian Balogh: Given the ferment of the 1970s, given the movement to get rid of Jim Crow in the South, where does this leave the beaches today in Connecticut?

Andrew Kahrl: A law student at Rutgers who, in 1995, was jogging along the shoreline of Greenwich, Connecticut, and was stopped at the guardhouse and told he couldn’t jog onto the beach, he sued the town of Greenwich. It was actually the first lawsuit filed against Greenwich over its resident-only beach ordinance. He won in 2001. The Connecticut Supreme Court struck down Greenwich’s resident-only beach law on the basis of free speech, saying that you cannot sort of have public spaces that are restricted to one segment of the public.
There are dozens of these beach associations and they’re as restrictive as ever. Public beaches remain, in a practical sense, very inaccessible. The one example I give, Greenwich actually … A non-resident can buy a beach pass but they have to drive to the other side of town and purchase it at a city office building that is only open from 9:00 to 5:00 on weekdays.

Brian Balogh: Was there anything particularly wise or stupid about picking beaches as one of the sites in which to carry this out?

Andrew Kahrl: We associate them with openness and freedom. These are sort of quintessentially public spaces, open to everyone, and yet, in practice, they have been some of the most exclusionary spaces in America and places that have been hotly contested. I think he identified the sort of contradictions there.

Ed Ayers: Andrew Kahrl is an associate professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Virginia. Earlier in this show, we heard from Christine Schmidt, a research fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.