Well, right now it is time for our way Black History fact and today's way Black History Fact comes from NPS dot gov, that is the National Park Service. This is the history of segregation in the United States and how it extended into the oceans. All right, it's all share. We all love spending a warm day on a beautiful beach. However, there was a time when public beaches were not open
to all to enjoy. Public beaches, like many other public facilities such as schools, swimming pool theaters, and restaurants, were segregated. The segregation came in the form of local and state laws, as well as understood social norms. Collectively, these laws and social norms were known as Jim Crow in many places along the Gulf Coast. The rest the request by African Americans for access to public beaches often fell on deaf ears. Without access to public beaches, many were denied the joy
and safety of swimming and playing at public beaches. Many Black children drowned as they swam in unsafe and unsupervised bodies of water. In areas where African Americans were allowed to access public beaches, most were very remote, polluted, and hazardous areas. A rare exception to this was the eastern end of Perdido Key, which is preserved by the National
Seashore today as Johnson Beach. Similar to peaceful protests at restaurants known as sit ins, doctor Gilbert Mason Senior led a series of protests against segregated beaches called weade ins. He believed all Americans should have equal access to public beaches maintained with taxpayer dollars. For these wade in protests, Mason and his followers would wide into the Gulf waters
of Biloxi, Mississippi beaches. Those peaceful protesters were met in many cases with violence from white rioters, and many were also arrested. The Justice Department finally won a lengthy battle over these segregated beaches in Mississippi in nineteen sixty eight. The hard fought battle resulted in public beaches being open to all, regardless of color. Wade in style protests, like the ones in Mississippi occurred in other parts of the country as well. These protests provided a way for black
Americans to speak out against segregated beaches. The efforts of these brave advocates for change ensured the public beaches are open and accessible to all Americans to enjoy. Okay, now I'm going to shift gears here because that seems like a neat little story, happy ending or whatever. But I want to give you a little bit more insights, so I'm going to share a bit. This is from the Guardian. Okay,
summers have long been America's most segregated season. Nowhere is this more evident than along the nation's beaches and coasts, one of the chief destinations for vacationers and pleasure seekers,
and a perennial site of racial conflict and violence. The infamous nineteen nineteen Chicago race riot, which lasted seven days and claimed thirty eight lives, began on the shores of Lake Michigan, when white Youth gang members stoned to death a black teenager named Eugene Williams after he had accidentally drifted across a color line in the water. And its aftermath, African Americans learned to avoid the city's lakefront. As a child, black Chicago and Dempsey Travis remembers quote, I was never
permitted to learn to swim. For six years, we lived within two blocks of the lake, but that did not change my parents' attitude to Dad and Mama the Blue Scott the Blue Lake always had a tinge of red from the blood of the young black boy. In the decades that followed, local governments across the US and acted a host of policies and practices designed to segregate places of outdoor leisure by race and effectively exclude people of color from public beaches. In the South, those methods were
quite explicit. Coastal cities such as Norfolk, Virginia, Charleston, South Carolina, and Miami, Florida prohibited African Americans from stepping foot on any of their public beaches and for years ignored black's demands for public beaches of their own. White's indifference to the health and humanity of black communities often had deadly consequences. Throughout the Jim Crow era, shockingly high numbers of black youth drowned each summer while playing in dangerous and unsupervised
bodies of water. When the white officials did respond to Black demands for beaches and parks of their own, they invariably selected remote, polluted, often hazardous locations. In Washington, d C. Officials designated Buzzard Point, a former dumping ground located downstream from a sewage plant. It has a suitable location