Heritage, Tourism, and Race

The Other Side of Leisure

Antoinette T Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000048124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Heritage, Tourism, and Race views heritage and leisure tourism in the Americas through the lens of race, and is especially concerned with redressing gaps in recognizing and critically accounting for African Americans as an underrepresented community in leisure.

Fostering critical public discussions about heritage, travel, tourism, leisure, and race, Jackson addresses the underrepresentation of African American leisure experiences and links Black experiences in this area to discussions of race, place, spatial imaginaries, and issues of segregation and social control explored in the fields of geography, architecture, and the law. Most importantly, the book emphasizes the importance of shifting public dialogue from a singular focus on those groups who are disadvantaged within a system of racial hierarchy, to those actors and institutions exerting power over racialized others through practices of exclusion.

Heritage, Tourism, and Race will be invaluable reading for academics and students engaged in the study of museums, as well as architecture, anthropology, public history, and a range of other disciplines. It will also be of interest to museum and heritage professionals and those studying the construction and control of space and how this affects and reveals the narratives of marginalized communities.

1

Introduction

The major thesis of this book is that examining heritage and tourism in the United States through the lens of race exposes the ways in which the pursuit of leisure is denied to people who are not white. And yet, I demonstrate that in spite of legally and socially constructed obstacles, leisure and outdoor recreational activities were continuously pursued by African Americans. They did so in public spaces as well as in the privacy of Black-constructed spaces that were designed to welcome the Black community—often out of the sight of the white gaze, and in spite of racial segregation. This book posits that the pursuit of leisure is an assertion of humanity and an inalienable right. Efforts to defend this basic freedom in public and private spaces have historical roots with contemporary implications. The other side of leisure is a recognition that racial exclusion played as much a part in recreational activities as did the refusal to accept it.

This dynamic of exclusion and resistance is epitomized by the circulation of what was known as The Negro Motorist Green Book, or The Green Book. The Green Book was a travel guide series for African Americans published between 1936 and 1964 by Victor H. Green and his wife Alma D. Green. It provided African American motorists and tourists with information about safe places to eat, sleep, tour, have fun, go to the restroom, and get gas during the era of segregation. The Greens’ book explores the other side of leisure and provides solutions to the problem of segregation faced by African American travelers during the U.S. period of Jim Crow segregation. The establishment of safe spaces for recreation and leisure by and for Black people was a show of resistance and also a site of power.

The very need for a resource of this kind is key to my book, which sheds light on the stories and histories of people and places you may visit that perhaps you never knew had such histories. These places—parks, churches, stores, cafeterias, and concert halls—were viewed as off limits to Blacks by whites, a sentiment highlighted in a much-discussed 1948 speech by then U.S. presidential candidate Strom Thurmond. He adamantly declared that the U.S. Army could not force white Southerners to allow Black people into white leisure and social space.¹

In a December 2002 newspaper column Bob Herbert reminds readers of that speech and writes:

Strom Thurmond was screaming and the crowd was going wild. “There’s not enough troops in the Army,” he said, “to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our schools and into our homes.”

(Herbert 2002)

Thurmond’s speech demonstrates how demands by whites for racial segregation often included leisure activities and not just political enfranchisement (Phelts 1997; Kahrl 2012; Wiltse 2007). A prevailing sentiment among those holding racist ideas about Black people was that Black presence in white spaces was offensive no matter how “well behaved” Blacks were (Candacy 2016). Similarly, when the whites-only Pontchartrain Beach was being established in New Orleans in 1928, white citizen groups protested against Black presence—claiming that the mere presence of Black swimmers would depress property values.²

Working from such examples, my book suggests that the reality of the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath, specifically segregation, remains embedded in the construction of social place in America (Baker 1998; Jackson 2012; Kendi 2016; Orser Jr. 2007). My goal is to craft new ways of thinking about the historical reality of slavery and segregation in the context of leisure, and to make the resulting dialogue part of the public discussion—no matter how uncomfortable.

I focus on the role genealogy, oral history, and ethnography of the everyday play in making African American experiences of leisure visible. I examine the other side of leisure by prioritizing African-descended family histories and genealogies in ways that showcase how African Americans pursued, critiqued, and expanded representations of leisure outside a white-only frame. Specifically, this approach creates other ways of interrogating heritage, tourism, and leisure; and experiences of African-descendant people in the era of segregation that are not indebted to white notions of citizenship and accessibility. Rather, these other ways of knowing are indebted to expressions of resistance, refusal, and the inalienable right to create safe places for fellowship, fun, and exploration unbounded by the limits of racial exclusion.

Locating Exclusion and the Shaping of Place in the Americas

What is at issue is the erasure of historical context and the complex narratives of leisure and place occurring outside of a white normalizing perspective, particularly at national sites of history and heritage authorized for public consumption. Questions such as “Who is allowed to define, create, or enter designated sites of culture and heritage?” and “Who is allowed to partake in leisure activities and where are they allowed?” are central to this discussion.

In a 2013 article entitled “The Civil Rights Movement and the Future of the National Park System in a Racially Diverse America,” Joe Weber and Selima Sultana—both geographers—grapple with a question that has become more pronounced and more insistent in recent years: why are there so “few” “minority” visitors (i.e. African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and Native Americans) in the National Park System? Utilizing data from the National Parks Second Century Commission Report (2010), they write,

Visiting parks has long been a family tradition for Americans and during much of the postwar era visits to parks grew at a faster pace than the population, leading to problems of overcrowding. However, the vast majority of national park visitors are white.

(Weber and Sultana 2013a, 444–445)

Weber and Sultana find the predominance of white visitors disturbing because it runs counter to the ideal of the national park system as being built on principles of democracy and freedom. They state, “The future of America’s National Park System, as with many valued cultural institutions, requires the increased support of a multicultural population” (Weber and Sultana 2013a, 446). In other words, they propose that attracting underrepresented visitor groups to the park is a social imperative that will save and preserve the system for everyone.

The situation as outlined by Weber and Sultana is certainly compelling. However, I question the need to focus on the number of “minority” (non-white) visitors at national parks as an issue of primary concern. Nor do I think that simultaneously tying the underrepresentation of non-white “minority” visitors at national parks sites to a crisis in the future economic stability of the national park system is an appropriate focus. In both instances the articulated problem—decreasing visitor numbers and the future economic stability of the park system—rests squarely on the underrepresented groups or “minority” communities, which are characterized and labeled as both the problem and the solution to the problem. Instead, processes of exclusion should be more firmly addressed, especially in context with the U.S. national park system and associated histories of discrimination, segregation, and removal of non-white visitors and stakeholder communities.

The case of the Ahwahneechee Indian communities, in what is now recognized as the state of California, is a stark reminder of how expulsion and exclusion shape space in the Americas. Policies and practices aimed at regulating Indian populations in designated Anglo-American spaces have been in effect in California since it became a state in 1850. In 1851, U.S. soldiers expelled the Ahwahneechee Indians from their lands and renamed their valley “Yosemite” (Cronon 1995; Jacoby 2003; Spence 1999). In 1864 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Act, making Yosemite one of the oldest designated public lands set aside for conservation. In 1872 Yellowstone National Park was created. In these events, a widely repeated, sequential narrative of national parkland was born and institutionalized: set aside public land; grant federal ownership; remove local or existing inhabitants; and finally, remove usage rights on the land such as for hunting or fishing to preserve the landscape in “pristine” condition—as it was assumed to have existed prior to European arrival.

The same power dynamics in this narrative of Yosemite and Yellowstone are found in the ways in which African American leisure and access to recreation has been structured through a practice of exclusion since transatlantic slavery. National parks practiced segregation based on U.S. laws that upheld racial separation. In their 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned racial segregation as the law of the land. Until passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, freedom of movement and the ability to utilize resources in both public and private facilities was legally denied to anyone identified as Black. Spaces such as hotels, swimming pools, public parks, gas stations, and restaurants were designated as white-only spaces.

For example, throughout Southern national parks, including Shenandoah and Great Smokey Mountain, segregated facilities were present (Shumaker 2009; Young 2009). In 1939, Lewis Mountain Negro Area opened at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. It was in operation as a Black campground through the 1940s. Additionally, the master plan for the Great Smokey Mountains National Park located on border of Tennessee and North Carolina designated “colored” campgrounds in the 1930s. At the Mammoth Cave site in Kentucky there was segregated lodging and separate tours based on race, as well as efforts to remove an early African American presence (Algeo 2013). At Little Talbot Island in Florida, formerly a state park, now part of Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, there were “colored beaches” and white-only lodging (O’Brien 2012). Finally, in Arkansas at Hot Springs Reservation (established in 1832), later renamed Hot Springs National Park (established in 1921), nearly all bathhouses had been segregated by the early 1880s with the establishment of Jim Crow laws. However, around the start of the twentieth century, African American organizations were allowed to build places specifically for Black bathers at Hot Springs National Park. Black-designated sites were located in less prestigious areas of the park, and today sit outside the recognized “Bath House Row” Historic Landmark District (Shumaker 2009). Eventually, in December 1945, the Washington office of the National Park Service issued a general bulletin to all parks that mandated that all facilities in national parks be desegregated.

Meanwhile, the efforts by Blacks to claim spaces distinct from whites often came under scrutiny, censure, ire, and sometimes even sabotage by whites. Although places such as Pitt County, North Carolina, Rosewood, Florida, and Tulsa, Oklahoma boasted leisure activities such as amusement parks, theaters, churches, eating establishments, and swimming for African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s, each of these places were completely destroyed by white fear of Black agency (Ellsworth 1992; González-Tennant 2018; Kahrl 2013).

It is evident from these limited examples that even cultural institutions such as state and national parks, founded on ideals of democracy and justice, faced challenges with respect to race. Today, far too many interpretive narratives of park and heritage sites fail to reflect the complex story of American history, which includes the challenges of segregation and desegregation. Rather, they focus on heroic stories of white settlement of North America. These heroic stories privilege pilgrims, pioneers, and homesteaders; plantation owners; military heroes and presidents; freedom seekers and explorers. They neglect the technological, cultural, moral, gendered, and racial histories and tensions of engagement with diverse communities (Jackson 2011a, 2011b, 2014; Finney 2014; Shumaker 2009). At issue, however, is not only a need to focus on the history and heritage of African Americans within the national story but also the fact that U.S. policy and legal codes were based on exclusion, which was manifest even in sites like the national parks, designated for public use. And yet this book demonstrates that African American resistance, refusal, and agency in the face of racism and exclusionary laws are underrepresented experiences and knowledges that can significantly enhance interpretive narratives at cultural institutions and heritage sites.

Leisure Scholarship Through the Lens of Race

A wealth of critical scholarship has focused on heritage, tourism, power, and related issues of interpretation, representation, and preservation (Battle-Baptiste 2011; Bruner 2005; Chambers 2010; Handler and Gable 1997; Finney 2014; Jackson 2012; Leone and Potter Jr. 1998; Otero 2010; Polanco 2014; Shackel 2002). One challenge is to learn from and engage with scholarship that shifts public dialogue from a singular focus on those groups who are marginalized and disadvantaged within a system of racial hierarchy to those actors and institutions exerting power over racialized others through practices of exclusion.

Applying a cultural anthropological perspective and looking at social and systemic processes that perpetuate and reproduce racial hierarchies and disparities in travel, leisure, and tourism experiences is one way to proceed. I situate myself alongside other scholars concerned with a critical racial orientation such as Michael Ra-Shon Hall (2014), who interprets The Negro Motorist Green Book series as a postcolonial record of power and disenfranchisement; Perry L. Carter (2008), who argues for a mixed method approach to racialized leisure travel; Rashad Shabazz (2015), who examines racializing spaces as Black; Michelle Alexander (2010), who examines race and social control post-Jim Crow; and lastly, the analytical thinking of Katherine McKittrick (2006), Mabel O. Wilson and Rose (2017), and Mario Gooden (2016). These authors have developed a useful body of scholarship around the ways in which Blacks shape geographic and architectural space through labor, knowledge, and movement.

Four leading theoretical perspectives for explaining low numbers of non-white participation (or lack of “minority participation”) in recreational activities, particularly outdoor recreational activities such as visiting national parks, have been developed by scholars. They include: 1) marginality hypothesis, 2) subculture or ethnicity hypothesis, 3) assimilation hypothesis, and 4) discrimination hypothesis. Each hypothesis provides differing explanations of a narrowly defined problem of non-white participation in leisure and recreation activities and different understandings as to whether or how it should be addressed. Taken as a whole, these explanations consistently lack an ethnographic and ethnohistorical methodological perspective. Nor do they engage the resources of critical race theory. For example, the marginality hypothesis focuses on socio-economic constraints or lack—such as lack of money; lack of information; or lack of awareness, about places to visit or to travel (Washburne 1978). The subculture or ethnicity hypothesis argues that different cultural groups have different values and interests. (Washburne 1978). Consequently, these different interests, pursuits, and ideas about leisure are innate and independent of socio-economic factors.

Additionally, the assimilation hypothesis—much like the subculture and ethnicity hypothesis—says that different cultural/ethnic/racial groups pursue different activities with respect to leisure and recreation; however, activities pursued by whites are characterized as the norm and the standard to which other groups (non-white others) aspire. In general, this theory posits that as “minority” groups move to simulate characteristics of the majority group they will come to “appreciate” and assume the values around leisure expressed by the majority group, such as visiting parks (Floyd 1998; Weber and Sultana 2013b).

Marginality, subculture, and assimilation hypotheses typically do not critique the systemic impact of race and racism historically. Nor do they critique differential access to activities and leisure options based on race even though differential access has dominated travel, tourism, and leisure pursuits in the past and continues to do so in the present. Avoidance of race is also evident in advertising campaigns that exclusively associate particular groups with enjoying or engaging in specific activities regardless of a diversity of narratives countering those fixed representations.

This leaves the discrimination hypothesis. This theory primarily focuses on how past discrimination influences current associations for particular groups in terms of activities and approaches to travel and leisure. In short, it addresses the legacy of discrimination and associations with place, access, and mobility. In terms of application by scholars, emphasis is disproportionately placed on those marginalized by discrimination vs. on the construction and maintenance of systems of exclusion—i.e. construction of the notion of the idea of outdoor parks and wilderness as getaway spaces for whites often at the expense of or exclusion of others (Philip 2000). I challenge both the marginalization theory (Blacks lack sufficient resources, income, and information) and the ethnicity theory (Blacks have fundamentally different travel interests to whites). Instead, I agree with Myron F. Floyd (1998), who states that more work needs to be done in advancing the discrimination theory vs. the ethnicity and marginalization theories. It is by placing greater emphasis on a critical race perspective and expanding research to include qualitative and quantitative studies focused on African American travel, tourism, and leisure that the current dialog on issues of underrepresentation will be advanced.

Active Exclusion: Addressing the How and the What of It All

Discussions about African American leisure experiences in the U.S. require a critical race orientation. It is impossible to discuss the failure of parks and other public institutions to attract “minorities” and non-whites in isolation of the impact and implications of Jim Crow segregation. Centuries of American legal policies and social practices have been constructed to deny, exclude, and discourage access by non-whites to full citizenship rights in all spheres of American life and leisure. In order to exp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Please Mention The Green Book: Traveling While Black
• 3. Plantations as Leisure?: Timucuan Ecological and Historical Preserve Jacksonville, Florida
• 4. Unexpected Sites, Destination Kentucky: Mammoth Cave and Shake Rag
• 5. Exceeding Segregation Limits: Welcome to the Marsalis Mansion Motel in New Orleans
• 6. Creating Leisure on Five Streets and the River: Tampa, Florida’s Spring Hill Community
• 7. Conclusion
• References
• Index