Greetings from Jim Crow, New Jersey:
Contesting the Meaning and Abandonment of Reconstruction in the Public
and Commercial Spaces of Asbury Park,
1880-1890
David Goldberg
History
On the night of June 28, 1889,
William Nelson, a black employee of an ice cream parlor, stood watching a
carousel ride inside the Palace, an indoor amusement arcade located on the
boardwalk of Asbury Park, New Jersey.
When a white security guard attempted to remove him from the facility,
Nelson fought back, prompting a physical altercation with the officer, John A.
Krause, outside of the Palace premises.
After both men were arrested and fined for the incident, Palace owner
Ernie Schnitzler responded by restricting entrance into the pavilion to season
ticket holders only, which, according to an account published in the town’s Shore Press, were sold and distributed
only to the Palace’s white patrons.
However, after immediate public protests from the town’s African
American community, Schnitzler reversed his decision and allowed the town’s
black citizens back into the Palace on a restricted and limited basis. Concluding its coverage of the altercation a
few days later, the Shore Press
predicted that “it is probable that no future trouble will result.”
For the summer
residents of Asbury Park,
the Palace served as the focal point of a shore community centered around
leisure attractions. However, for
Nelson—a black man in a resort town that increasingly sought to curb the public
presence of African Americans—the Palace became one of many new public and
commercial spaces that highlighted the emerging Jim Crow character of the Jersey shore after Reconstruction. In the Palace, as well as on the beaches,
pavilions, promenades, boardwalks, bathing houses, skating parlors, and amusement
arcades of Asbury Park,
white and black residents waged both vocal and physical contests over the
undefined and unreconstructed social landscape.
Using both the Press and active participation to assert their ideas
about public and private segregation, citizens’ written accounts of social
relations from both communities helped to highlight the undefined and unfixed
public and commercial boundaries that existed during the period between the end
of Reconstruction and the legal institutionalization of Jim Crow.
Over the past
few decades, literature on the subject of Republican-led Reconstruction has
successfully contributed to a more complete record of the tensions between
contested notions of political, social, and economic equality within southern
communities. There now exists, for
example, greater historical insight into how particular policies and struggles
were played out within specific regions, states, and communities of the South. Yet, aside from recent monographs addressing
the tensions between political leaders of the North, very few works have
addressed the equally contested nature of northern-style segregation by
ordinary citizens. These citizen sought
to revise the social boundaries of public and commercial space, particularly
along the shore. By examining the emergence of segregation in
Asbury Park, this paper explores how moral and social values among white
northerners influenced political policies toward African Americans, and how
conflicting memories of the Civil War and Reconstruction by both groups made
Asbury Park a battleground for social space, racial equality, and the
construction of historical memory.
Throughout the
late 1870’s and 1880’s, the social appeal of the Jersey
shore, as well as the revivalist sentiment of American Methodism, drew a
diverse crowd of Northern white and black travelers. The combination of cheap land and convenient
travel enabled businessmen like James A. Bradley, a brush manufacturer from New York and Asbury
Park’s founding father, to benefit from the untapped
land along the coast. Seeking a spiritual and rehabilitative escape from his
urban environment, James Bradley arrived in the small Methodist shore community
of Ocean Grove in 1869 with his black companion, John A. Baker. After consulting with the town’s Treasurer,
David H. Brown, who pointed Bradley towards an unsettled section of land,
Bradley and Baker proceeded to travel through a wilderness of shore brush that
grew upon the uninhabited beaches. Reaching the water’s edge and “desiring a
bath,” Bradley stripped off his clothes, and eagerly advised his reluctant
companion to join him in the sand of the cool evening surf. A devout Methodist, Bradley explained that he
found the cool waters of the Jersey surf to be “the best nervine for a man who
is not absolutely past repair,” and who “desires to break away from his calling
or greed and camp out in the sea shore.” After Baker eventually joined him by his
side, Bradley recounted later that he found the exercise reminiscent of
“Robinson Crusoe by his man Friday.”
Satisfied of its
spiritual and rehabilitative merits, Bradley purchased the area’s 500 acres
between Deal and Wesley Lake in 1871 with hopes of building a resort community
that would both honor the principles of Bishop Francis Asbury—the founder of
American Methodism—as well as provide a social outlet for similar groups of
northern citizens seeking an escape from late nineteenth-century urban
life. As Asbury Park’s founding father, Bradley
demanded strict compliance regarding temperance, spiritual renewal, and sexual
purity in all of its public spaces.
In accordance with these demands, a host of strict ordinances were quickly
established to root out unruly and morally-unacceptable social behavior. Anti-liquor decrees were written into all
deeds issued to residential properties.
Strict rules on bathing, along with appropriate clothing and social
behavior, were posted in pamphlets along the boardwalk, and in accordance with
observing the Sabbath, all businesses within the community, including the
trains, the beach, and boardwalk, were closed on Sundays. However, while visitors to the neighboring
Methodist camp of Ocean Grove abided politely by their own strict guidelines, Asbury Park’s citizens
rebelled constantly and vocally against Bradley’s rules. Boisterous summer parties were put on by the
Salvation Army’s marching band; the black market of alcohol and other illicit
activities thrived despite Bradley’s watchful eye; and nighttime rendezvous
between patrons on the restricted beaches all served to highlight Asbury Park’s
contested social atmosphere.
The strict
standards that Bradley created did not, however, deter visitors from flocking
in droves to the Jersey shore in the
1880’s. As a result of Bradley’s
ambitious desire to increase both the physical and economic value of the town, Asbury Park became one of
the elite and premiere resort towns on the Atlantic coast. By the early 1880s, tourist pamphlets and The New York Times were actively
promoting Bradley’s resort by listing the elite residents who regularly
traveled to the shore community from their neighborhoods in New
York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. By attracting and accommodating 26,000 summer
guests and housing another 4,000 permanent residents, Bradley and Asbury Park fed the
region’s leisurely and moral impulses by creating an attractive mix of religion
and social enticements for the North’s urban white community.
However, at the
same time, white Northerners were not the only ones attracted to the
newly-established shore retreat. When white travelers entered Bradley’s
beach town, they were immediately greeted by Asbury Park’s other population—the
group of African American men and women who worked as hotelmen, laundresses,
waiters, and janitors in Bradley’s service economy. Arriving in Asbury Park
for employment, recreation, and spiritual reconstruction, the Asbury Park Press noted in 1882 that
outside of Bradley’s commercial and residential district, a second community of
black residents and other assorted working-class citizens had settled in a
community known as the “West End.” African Americans of the West End established
schools and churches, and served as hosts for black tourists who regularly
visited Asbury Park from Newark,
Jersey City, Philadelphia,
and New York as part of the African Methodist
Church’s annual sea shore
“jubilees.”
While white
tourists accepted the presence of African Americans as members of the working
service class, they persistently objected to sitting next them on trains,
lounging alongside them in the surf, and watching the men flirt with white
women. As a result, by the early 1880s
the physical and economic growth of Bradley’s beach town, along with the rapid
pace with which its secular and commercial identity outgrew its humble
spiritual origins, led to heightened racial tension within the community
described by the New York Times as
enjoying “greater social mobility than at Long Branch or at any other place
along the coast.”
In an attempt to purge the assembly of working
class and “average” persons who mingled about freely after working hours,
Bradley’s white guests began calling for permanently-enforced social and racial
boundaries for their public sphere. In
the town’s Daily Journal on July 7, 1885, an
editorial pointed out that the
“average man is easily distinguishable,” and insisted that the mass of
“curiosities that have taken their position under the pavilion (white as well
as black) be removed.” However, in a follow up article ten days
later, the Daily Journal narrowed
their objections to the black citizens of Asbury Park, who, according to the
complaint, “hang, intruding themselves in places designed only for guests,
monopolizing the promenade, pavilion, and seats, and not content with that they
come on excursions by the train load, and some days the whole beach is given up
to them.” A white visitor from New
York lamented to the Journal
that in his excursion into Asbury Park,
he confronted first hand the “evils” of black servants who served as waiters,
cooks, and dishwashers in Bradley’s resort community. The unidentified “Hotel
Man” observed that on trains from New York and
Philadelphia,
as well as on the benches and seats at train depots, a sizable black faction
had seemed to “regard themselves as owners of all below the sky and are
offensive and indecent.”
For the northern
white elite, Asbury Park’s
racial division, particularly the distinct ways in which it visibly and vocally
flaunted its emerging Jim Crow persona, became one of the town’s main
attractions and its primary selling point to prospective tourists. Observing
the town’s social relations in 1892, Stephen Crane, the famous literary critic
and resident of Asbury Park, remarked that the guests of Bradley’s resort came
not for the “sea nor the cacophonous brass bands,” but rather “the people come
to see the people, for there is joy in the heart of the crowd.” Documenting the persistence of racial
segregation in twentieth-century Atlantic City, historian Bryant Simon has
similarly pointed out that while white northerners may have “objected to legal,
southern-style segregation, when it came to public space—their public
spaces—they demanded seclusion.”
Thus, the problem that the Journal
termed “Too Many Colored People” did not represent an objection by white
northerners to the political or legal enfranchisement of black citizens, but
rather to the social intermingling of African Americans in the public spaces of
white patrons. “We allow them to vote, to have full standing and protection of
the law,” the Journal instructed,
“but when it comes to social intermingling then we object most seriously and
emphatically.” As one white resident more succinctly explained, “This is a
white people’s resort and it derives its support from white people.”
Bradley and his
summer guests sought to create pubic space by clinging to pre-war notions of
racial and class separation.
Uncomfortable with the way that the post-war political and social
climate had diverged into a program for black Civil Rights, Northern society
reminisced fondly over a time when political, social, and racial unrest had
been muted by slavery and more oppressive forms of class subordination. Thus, by stripping the town of its former
spiritual and rehabilitative identity, Asbury
Park’s summer guests created social and racial
barriers that helped fight back the socially contested spaces of their own
northern towns. Moreover, by
constructing a distinct brand of social seclusion based on race and class, they
also helped create a commercialized system of division in which social and
moral values informed and sustained both political and economic decisions on
appropriate forms of public space.
Northern white
visitors to Bradley’s beaches attached commercial value to the public spaces of
the Jersey shore by adding or subtracting
economic value based on the public presence of African Americans. As the New
York Times wrote during the summer of 1887, the majority of summer
vacationers in Asbury Park “object[ed] to the mere presence even of well
behaved and well conducted colored people to any considerable number, on a
beach to which they go for recreation.” Responding to a question from the Daily Journal as to whether or not black
citizens possessed the right to enter into the public spaces occupied by white
vacationers, Bradley explained that “people who make their living out of Asbury
Park” are excluded from the rights of those whose presence is paid for, because
as both “colored citizens” and as “servants,” their presence lessens the
attraction to white tourists and therefore threatens the economic value of the community.
“The question of color or rights,” Bradley informed, was not “to enter
into consideration.”
To prove his point, he provided the example of several families who left the
park, because they could not “endure the crowds of Africans infesting every
promenade and public space, day and evening with their presence.” In their cities and in their homes, Bradley
pointed out, “they do not associate with their servants and they do not desire
to do so when they arrive at the seashore.”
John Coffin, who took over for Bradley as editor of the Daily Journal in 1885, responded to those who criticized the paper
for inflaming racial tension by insisting that “perhaps people who have not
been troubled with such a disagreeable monopolization of both private and
public places by Negroes will think our action harsh and unjustifiable.” Yet,
Coffin warned, “something must be done or we cannot induce visitors to come
here.”
However, there
was not just the question of class to consider, but also of the black tourist
population who lobbied for consistent access to Asbury Park’s public accommodations. In order to appease these black tourists who
regularly visited Bradley’s beaches, white citizens persistently called on
Bradley to erect public spaces and establishments that would cater solely to
the interests of its black residents.
Criticizing the “colored invasion” of its space, one objector in the Daily Journal asked whether “Mr. Bradley
could be persuaded to build a pavilion for their use and locate it in the
immediate neighborhood.” Offering up a similar solution, the Philadelphia Call in 1887 published a
lengthy article, calling on the black proprietors of Asbury Park and neighboring black businessmen
to open up a resort of their own.
Remarking that it was “strange that the colored people of the North have
not taken hold of this color question in a practical way,” the paper instructed
potential black entrepreneurs that there was “money as well as dignity in the
scheme if properly managed.” The article explained
that of “course the color line will be obliterated in time,” but that blacks
should not wait for its transformation to occur.
In a temporary
measure initiated in 1885, Bradley responded to the objections voiced by his
white patrons by relocating the black population to facilities set up
exclusively for their own recreation.
W.H. Dickerson, an outspoken critic of the town’s racial dialogue and a
citizen of Asbury Park’s black neighborhood, lamented to the Daily Journal that in skating parlors
and other amusements, blacks were barred from white establishments through the
creation of “colored facilities,” which were run, Dickerson remarked with
anger, for the interests of only “Asbury Park’s colored population and vicinity.” By 1887, however, Bradley responded by
officially restricting all African Americans, both those who worked as well as
those who sought to vacation in Asbury
Park, from the beaches and other shore
facilities. By posting signs throughout
the community and stationing officers at pertinent shore locations, Bradley
prohibited all black citizens from the beaches, bathing houses, pavilions, and
promenades.
Securing
compliance from Asbury Park’s
black residents, however, proved troublesome for both Bradley and his guests
when black residents used their lack of access to the elite white spaces to
actively resist new forms of exclusion.
By rejecting the restrictions imposed against them, as well as calling
for the creation of an independent black resort, African Americans insisted on
their inclusion in Asbury Park’s
public life through both vocal and physical resistance. Guided by the leadership of the A.M.E. Church
of West Asbury Park, the community’s indignant parishioners helped lead and
organize continuous rallies, demonstrations, and public meetings. Objecting to the ways that the white members
of the community linked the public presence of black residents to indecent
social behavior, African American leaders spoke predominantly to the moral and
social responsibility of the resort town to allow free and uninterrupted
integration.
At a large
meeting held at the A.M.E. Church of West Asbury Park in the summer of 1887,
Reverend J. Francis Robinson called on his congregation to attack “all class
legislation and race distinction where the statutes of citizenship and of good
behavior introduce the common right.”
Robinson declared that the “man who advocates the separation of whites
and blacks from the equal enjoyment of civil prerogatives solely on the grounds
of color places himself in a position to be questioned as to his patriotic
proclivities and the genuineness of a Republic form of government.” Reflecting on the “color question” and the
idea of moral responsibility, Reverend J.H. Morgan also asked whether the moral
and civic lapses by a few people of a given class could be held against an
entire race. Morgan commented that,
It does seem
strange that so many of our friends on the other side do not seem able to
distinguish any difference between colored people as regards to moral, religion
or the right of manhood; and those of them who admit it seem to view it in the
same light as the boy who visited the country fair and saw a cow that looked
for all the world like his father’s cow. You could not tell them apart, only
one was white and other black. ‘All
colored people are alike’ seems to be the maxim (especially if there is finance
to be considered) either by action against us or indifference for us.
Andrew J. Chambers of the Colored American also asked if the color
line could be drawn on the basis of conduct, and pressed as to why then white
people did not object to the presence of colored servants as servants. As G.W. Johnson, a waiter in Asbury Park’s Sheldon House, instructed, “If
a white man acts boisterous, rude, or ungentlemanly, he is arrested and/or
fined.” Yet, Johnson attested, “the
white people as a class are not blamed for the actions of one man.”
To bolster their
support from the town’s white citizens, the black ministry also called on
community members to be vigilant in enforcing superior moral and civic behavior
of black citizens. They appealed for
Bradley to restrict the behavior of both the white and black citizens whose
actions betrayed Asbury Park’s
code of conduct. As W.M. Dickerson
instructed, the “right thing to do is to weed out all bad characters, whether
they be covered by a white or a black skin.”
In response to the forms of commercial exclusion instituted by Bradley,
Dickerson also made it a point to discredit the notion that economic status
defines an individual’s morality. “Let
the necessity of labor never take away a persons claim to respectability. Ones financial ability to board at a hotel
and dress well is not criterion of ones moral worth.”
Viewing the shifting racial landscape
throughout the nation, Asbury Park’s
black leaders saw the resort’s emerging Jim Crow character as part of a
disturbing nationwide trend toward racially-defined pubic and commercial
boundaries. In recounting the unofficial
means by which skating parlors were segregated in 1885, W.H. Dickerson insisted
that blacks should look cautiously towards their allegiance with Northern
Republican leaders. “When we are called on as ‘our colored friends’,” Dickerson
explained, “there is always a purpose to serve as tools or instruments. We
would ask those who for many years have been using us to further their plans
and fill their coffers, if they think we will always remain docile subjects to
their dictation and the plain minions of their selfish interests.” Mirroring the complaints expressed by black
protesters throughout the nation after emancipation, Reverend Robinson reminded
the town’s white audience of the achievements and struggles of African American
men who fought to preserve the Union. “We are
here,” he exclaimed, “to defend our citizenship and our manhood.” He reiterated
to the white members of the audience that:
We colored
people fought for our liberty some year ago, and we do not propose to be denied
it at this late date. We will not be
dictated to in this manner by Mr. Bradley or any other man. The colored man contributes largely to the
wealth of this country, including the town of Asbury Park, and we are here to stay. We
fought to save the Union as the white man did.
This country is for the whites and blacks alike, including even the beach of Asbury Park.
Through the black community’s national appeals
for racial justice, interested Americans (white as well as black, Northern and
Southern) used the events of Asbury
Park as justification both for and against racial
separation in their own communities. The
New York Times, the daily periodicals
of Philadelphia, the opinions of the African American press, and those as far
south as Georgia intensified their coverage of the events of Asbury Park as a
result of the publicity created by Asbury’s black residents. The New
York Times in particular took a growing interest in the local issues of Asbury Park. After interviewing the town’s white and black
residents, the Times commissioned
several correspondents to cover the debate between the two communities
throughout the decade. Asbury’s white
residents, however, denounced the appearance of the Times reporters for intruding and unequally siding with the
“indignant colored ministry.”
Likewise,
debates over public space also prompted those in the south to consider whether
their protests against racial integration were particular to their region. A white southern congressman protesting
public school integration in Georgia
in 1892 routinely referenced the passions expressed by black and white citizens
in Asbury Park
to support a bill legalizing segregation in public schools. In a particularly revealing argument, he
noted that the “loudest protests against the infraction of this law have come from
the North,” which was proven, he explained, by the “Asbury Park matter.” The comparison was not lost on Asbury Park’s black
leaders, who took care to point out the similarities of the debate within both
regions. In a short speech protesting
the emerging segregation in Asbury Park,
Robinson spoke of the discriminatory language of the Daily Journal, whose resentment and prejudice, Robinson noted,
commissioned “one to think it was edited in Georgia.” Robinson explained that “at a place set apart
for temperance and religion we witness a spectacle that should shame the
boasted civilization of the North. Let us devote ourselves to stripping off
false religious sentiment and hypocritical philanthropy, that we may expose
before the people just how far race hatred can go in New Jersey.” Fellow A.M.E. Minister, Rev. H.H. Monroe of
St. Mark’s Church similarly remarked that talk of exclusion and separation
“would be bulldozing if it was reported from Texas.”
He insisted that if the black population was not provided with equal and
sustainable access to the same public facilities as whites, including the
beach, that in the post-war North, “the ante-war spirit of race distinction
still prevailed. Every act of
intolerance,” Monroe
pointed out, “has had its match in the North.”
As Bradley and
his white citizens proved in Asbury
Park, it was not just white southerners who objected
to racial equality. Instead, the
conversation about Asbury Park
not only became a referendum on Northern prejudice, but among white residents
it represented a broader rejection of Black Civil Rights and a forceful
repudiation of the Radical Republican agenda.
David Blight has insightfully recounted that “during Reconstruction,
many Americans increasingly realized that remembering the way the war was
fought, even the hatreds and deaths on a hundred battlefields—facing all those
graves on Memorial Day—became over time, easier than struggling over the
enduring ideas for which those battles had been fought.” In 1887, one Asbury Park resident left little doubt as to
his interpretation of the events in the post-war era. Writing in the Daily Journal, this patron of Bradley’s
resort stated that the effort to provide political and legal aid to black
citizens was a paternal and “generous aid” provided by the “Christian spirit of
right-minded white men.” The Constitutional amendments which followed
Emancipation and the Civil Rights Acts extended by the Republican Congress were
soon replaced, the individual explained, by the ungrateful attitude of African
Americans who clamored for social equality. “There were those among the colored
race,” he insisted, “who were not
satisfied with what had already been done, but wanted more. It was not enough
to possess all the rights and privileges as white citizens, but those rights
must be insolently demanded.” The
citizen lectured that by such a
course “respect and equality can never be gained.” He concluded that only through passive
acceptance of the current social standing could the cultural stereotypes accompanying
black grievances be eliminated.
For many years,
scholars of the Civil War era marked the end of Reconstruction in 1877. As a result, historians approached the
involvement of the North by questioning how and why Republican rule ultimately
failed in the south. However, most of these studies fail to
consider how northern communities adjusted to black emancipation after the war,
and how they, like the South, used the divisive years of congressional
reconstruction to reject racial and social equality. The situation in Asbury Park thus offers historians the
opportunity to consider how conflicts over memory paralleled the emerging
dialogue over access to public space. In
his recent study on the South’s remembered past, historian Fitzhugh Brundage notes
the emergence of Southern historical tourism as a vehicle through which the
South recreated the history of race and politics. He points out that “the tourist South became
a stage on which southerners presented the South both as they wanted to see it and
as they imagined tourists wanted to experience it.” In addition, Brundage explains that the
region’s “stable, harmonious, time honored racial order that properly fixed
whites and blacks in their appropriate place” only drew attention “when it
achieved the northern and transatlantic standards of beauty that obsessed its
tourists.” In Asbury
Park, Northern travelers justified their social order
by fixing it within a pristine national environment unscathed by the
inconvenient memories of the town’s black residents.
Brundage’s
arguments regarding the ways in which Southern tourist attractions were modeled
after Northern resort communities also contributes to scholarship regarding
issues of race and class in the northern urban or built environment. Since the
South observed the Northern resort towns’ example as a model for its own
tourist attractions, Asbury Park helps then reveal the origins of the twentieth
century’s racially and ethnically excluded urban profile that took root in the
late nineteenth century. As elite white
citizens sought a retreat from new forms of urban living, Asbury Park’s racial
exclusion, class conflict, moral elitism, and commercialized decadence,
resulting (as Jackson Lears argues) from an anti-modernist impulse, all found
their forms within the melting pot of conflicting political, social, and
economic ideologies that emerged throughout the North during and after
Reconstruction.
At the same
time, for the African American men and women of Asbury Park, various forms of social protest
provide poignant examples of how their citizens and assorted black tourists
opposed, reacted, and sometimes successfully resisted their seclusion from the
beaches and other public domains. While
many narratives stress the overarching power of white citizens in trumping the
political rights and social privileges of African Americans, blacks living and
working along the shore made sure that the policies were loudly contested. Despite the presence of signs prohibiting
their access, Reverend J. Francis Robinson informed a congregation of black
protesters in 1887 that they should continue to resist their seclusion by
flocking to the beaches after hours.
After many blacks heeded his calls, Robinson found that African
Americans mingled freely with each other, as well as with other working class
citizens of the town. As Robinson informed the Daily Journal in 1887,
“The fact is that neither the paper nor Mr. Bradley can keep us off the
beach. I went down there last night and
saw some elegant colored ladies. There were Chinamen there too, and
Italians.” Through these displays of
civil disobedience by the black community, Bradley was forced by 1890, as
Schnitzler was pressured to do in 1889 after the Palace incident, to allow
temporary and restricted access to the beaches for African American tourists.
As the uneasy
period between the end of Reconstruction and the legal enforcement of Jim Crow
style segregation proved in Asbury
Park, disputes over public space set the stage for a
prolonged battle over both the regions’ social space and its historical
memory. Whites and blacks created and
contested public and social life in Asbury Park as they synthesized the broader
meaning of emancipation and the terms of equality—two key concepts that had
been inadequately addressed in the wake of the Reconstruction’s collapse. Since Asbury
Park served as a Diaspora for the North’s
geographically-diverse white citizens, their protests against integration
highlights the racist and unreconstructed sentiment of the North after
emancipation. As Jim Crow became permanently enforced throughout the North and
the South after 1896, these tensions would prove central to African American’s
struggle for “integrated leisure,” which became an important part of the fight
for racial equality and social acceptance.
The rhetoric of equality and moral superiority was thus abandoned by
white politicians and northern citizens, who, in the aftermath of
Reconstruction’s collapse, sought to publicly and commercially separate
themselves from their fellow black citizens.
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