What Is The Racial Makeup Of Nineveh Sag Harbor
The Great Read
On Long Isle, a Beachfront Haven for Blackness Families
In the 1930s, a group of trailblazing African-Americans bought plots for themselves in Sag Harbor, establishing a close-knit customs that's spanned multiple generations.
WHILE VACATIONING 1 summer in the late 1930s, Maude Terry decided to go angling. On her mode to Gardiners Bay in eastern Long Island, she came across a secluded, underdeveloped, marshy, wooded expanse that faced a beach. Immediately, she felt a sense of tranquillity in the sylvan space, surrounded past tall onetime oak and walnut trees. Greenish shrubbery and weeds grew amid the sand at her feet, and her skin turned sticky in the table salt air. It was heaven.
At the time, Terry was a Brooklyn schoolteacher who spent most summers with her husband, Frederick Richards, and her daughter, Iris, who were both doctors at Harlem Hospital; her sis Amaza Lee Meredith, the chair of the art department of Virginia State Academy in Ettrick, Va. (who was also ane of the first Blackness female person architects in the United States), would occasionally join them. The sisters had grown up in Lynchburg, Va., and lived most of their lives up and down the East Coast: Come summer, Terry would commonly rent a cottage in Eastville, an area on the outskirts of Sag Harbor, the beachfront village that — although information technology straddles the rich, mostly white enclaves of Southampton and East Hampton — has always remained a flake more subdued, at least compared to Long Isle'south other storied warm-atmospheric condition escapes, which begin at the eastern edge of Queens and stretch more than 100 miles out into the Atlantic Sea.
Simply over two square miles large, Sag Harbor had grown into a bustling port town by the tardily 1700s, after an influx of whalers, transport captains and their crews had settled in the area. Only until the mid-1900s, Eastville remained an outlier, several blocks that were singular in the region for their embrace of diverseness, welcoming Native Americans, manumitted Black people and European immigrants from French republic, Portugal's Azores and Cape Verde, Africa. The neighborhood was one of few places where Black and Native Americans could coexist without experiencing daily, virulent oppression. Eastville, in fact, had been a forerunner in welcoming Black men who were formerly enslaved, many of whom found work in oceanside towns as whalers, fishermen or shipbuilders. The women, meanwhile, worked as seamstresses, launderers or bakers to earn coin while their husbands were at sea for years at a time. Ofttimes, the wives were the belongings owners so that they could keep their home and family unit together in the event that a ship didn't brand it back, which offered these women unprecedented agency.
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Long Island'south Indelible Black Beachfront Customs
A brief history of how New York's Sag Harbor became a refuge for African-American families, with testimonials from some of the residents who've summered there for much of their lives.
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[SEAGULLS SQUAWKING] You could not learn to swim in Harlem if you didn't go to the Harlem Y. At that place was no effort to really encourage youngsters in Harlem and Brooklyn to larn how to swim. And then a lot of my friends never learned how to swim. And that'due south sorry, because 3/four of the world is water. So if you don't know how to survive around water, you're a little more in jeopardy. Merely segregation, that was another cost of segregation and discrimination. You couldn't even learn to swim in New York. I mean, New York is surrounded by water. [MUSIC PLAYING] When most Japanese [INAUDIBLE] it is not in the middle of a vast, smoke-chock-full, industrial metropolis, but in the tree-lined outskirts of a minor American town, the seaport community named Sag Harbor in the land of New York. The history of Sag Harbor, U.S.A., has been tied to the sea. A century agone, its name was known on virtually all of the 7 seas, for Sag Harbor was home port to some of the most famous of America's whaling fleet, ships that scoured the world for the near precious and largest of the ocean's creatures. [MUSIC PLAYING] Many of the African-American males that were here established their wealth through the occupation of whaling. Black folk learned how to sail. Now, we came here on sailboats 300 years ago, but we weren't running those boats. Here, you lot run your own sailboat. You're in command. African-American women were matriarchs in this community because of their husbands' occupation. They endemic land hither legally earlier women were immune to own land. They were head of households because of the wealth that they accumulated together. Sag Harbor was always a place, specially Eastville, where free Blacks lived among Natives and among working-class white people. And so the idea that all these people living together doing their thing in this community – and this is in the 1800s – was plain non common. This business firm has a history of having 3 families of Black ancestry living in it. Before SANS developed, the summer houses were mine and the three or four here and a few that are on Liberty Street. They were all summer houses. And information technology's basically from that grouping that SANS really got started. [MUSIC PLAYING] This wasn't desirable land back then because it was marsh. Information technology wasn't developed. And so it was attainable. [MUSIC PLAYING] Sag Harbor was a rare opportunity. And then, we live in the Azurest neighborhood. Azurest is the "A" in SANS. SANS stands for Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest, Ninevah, Subdivisions. The early on houses were small. There wasn't a lot of cash in the former days, and and so people congenital what they could beget. And at the time, African-Americans had difficulty getting mortgages. So they really were just building what they had in greenbacks on manus. [MUSIC PLAYING] The Black banks developed because Blacks couldn't get money from the predominantly white banks. African-Americans were not beingness offered beautiful, virgin land on the water anywhere in America. This is in the '40s, you know, and and so we were up against a lot of resistance. So we had to certainly employ our own people to get financing. [MUSIC PLAYING] Now, this tree is an old hickory tree. And it'southward famous on these grounds because this is a tree that Langston Hughes wrote poetry under in 1952. He was visiting the Pickens, and he came here, and he knew the Trotts, because all the families knew each other in the area. And he came hither, and he loved the tree, and he loved the demote, and he just sabbatum here and wrote verse. Well, when we were children, really you knew everybody. Back so, there were only nigh 14 or 15 houses in all of Sag Harbor Hills, then everybody was an aunt or an uncle. It was like a big, extended family. Our grandparents knew each other, our kids are now friends, and our grandchildren are friends. So nosotros've had v generations of friendships. I think places like Sag Harbor are very of import to the African-American community, considering it is really a safe haven. The discussion community has the word unity in it. And nosotros're united in the love and reverence for this place. In my family, I'yard the 5th generation, through my granddaughter, to occupy this land. Five generations. I'd like information technology to exist 10. [MUSIC PLAYING] The developers are actually targeting our community. Information technology's platonic real estate. They want to flip it to a different kind of community, and we want it to be ours even so. And information technology's not that we object to other people moving in, it's simply that nosotros want to maintain the sense of community. If they want to come and be a part of the community, it'southward fine. Just if yous want to come and hunt all of usa out, it'due south a whole unlike thing. And that's the trouble. And y'all have a developer and some people pushing an agenda that isn't the proper agenda to arroyo, and it's more of a scare tactic. [MUSIC PLAYING] [CHILDREN GIGGLING] There are things that can be done, but it is supposed to be done collectively by the community. So for me, as a historian, a preservationist, a history teacher and professor, I will continue to tell the story and write it downward until everyone learns well-nigh the tenacity of the women and the men who continue to brand sure that their children have admission to what every one mother, grandmother, auntie, cousin wanted. So, I think for kids, and particularly our kids, like to meet that this is what they come from and this is their history, this is not new, and just kind of agreement how their great-grandparents, I guess, got here. It's only something that they need to know. And hopefully, they value it, because what we really want to have happen is this gets passed on and on and on. And I think the worst thing you would see here is things non being passed on to the adjacent generation. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Even long after the abolition of slavery, well-nigh Black people in the United States had difficulty condign homeowners, primarily because they were discriminated against when they tried to get bank loans. Their mere presence in a neighborhood was too thought to devalue property, so many white residents wouldn't alive well-nigh them. In Eastville, things were different: In 1840, in response to segregated conditions at Sag Harbor'south churches, Black people were even able to build their own church building, St. David A.M.E Zion, which is believed to have been a stop on the Surreptitious Railroad.
Terry and Meredith — who first began coming to Eastville in the 1930s alongside dozens of other Black families who spent their summers in rented cottages and bungalows — also hoped to buy their own homes at that place. And then that twenty-four hour period, afterwards line-fishing, Terry decided she and her sis should attempt to purchase the 20-acre plot she had discovered. They soon learned it was owned by Elsie and Daniel Gale, a white mother and son, of nearby Huntington, who had wanted to sell it but had been unsuccessful, partly because it was built on reclaimed marshland and thus unsuitable for growing vegetables. Terry, withal, saw more than in the land than other prospective buyers: She envisioned a place where Blackness families could residue, grow, heighten families and simply exist without the burden of systemic oppression.
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In 1939, Terry, 52 at the time, and Meredith, 44, brokered a deal: They promised to find buyers for the 70 parcels that the Gales had platted, most of which were fifty by 100 to 125 feet, recruiting Black families and friends, many of them from Brooklyn, to motility in. In doing so, they created non simply the oldest historically Black subdivision in Sag Harbor but 1 of the near enduring Blackness beachfront communities in America, alongside Highland Beach in Maryland, which was founded in 1893 by Charles Remond Douglass, a son of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, where prominent people — including the Obamas — have vacationed since the turn of the 20th century. In honor of the vision the sisters had, they named their new community Azurest: a "heavenly peace, blue rest, blueish haven," as Meredith wrote in her sister'southward eulogy.
WITHIN AZUREST, Black people could buy land for $700 to $1,000 (around $xiii,000 to $18,500 today). In 1947, the Gales cordoned off 200 more lots to create a second department, under the aforementioned terms offered for the first: Working with two friends — Dorothy Spaulding, a lawyer, and James Smith, a civil engineer — the sisters created contracts and bylaws that deterred white people from intruding, non that the wetlands were that desirable to them one time Black families started arriving. The 4 partners soon established the Azurest Syndicate, incorporating themselves as a financial establishment that helped sell the land at a turn a profit to cover their ten-year mortgage with the Gales, which was paid off in 1962. (Terry died six years later on; Meredith died in 1984 at Azurest South, the house she had designed and built for herself, which is on the Virginia State University campus.)
Professional, middle-class Black people whom the sisters knew from sororities at Columbia University's Teachers Higher, where they both studied, and Fort Greene, the neighborhood where Terry taught at Brooklyn Technical High School, likewise as from previous jobs and unions, soon started to summer in Sag Harbor. Once Azurest was nearly total, a grouping that called themselves the Sag Harbor Beach Development Company worked with white landowners throughout the 1950s to create two more Blackness subdivisions: Sag Harbor Hills and Ninevah, both comprising similarly sized plots of the then devalued land that hugs Sag Harbor Bay.
All told, there are 195 buildings in the subdivisions — which, aslope several other sites and structures, collectively go past the acronym SANS — all erected before circa 1977 across the 154 acres that prevarication north of Sag Harbor hamlet's Hampton Street, which still divides the predominantly white customs from the historic Black one. Most of these houses reflect the dominant architectural styles from the eras in which they were built: They're unmarried-story, traditional ranch-style, saltbox or midcentury-modern wood-frame homes that the residents often designed themselves, creating variation from street to street, though some of them share the aforementioned gray, bounding main-weathered shingle or clapboard exteriors.
Epitome
With little access to credit, those who bought property had to get creative. The Azurest Syndicate underwrote the land for potential owners, allowing them to pay for it slowly, starting with a $100 down payment. In the early days, some landowners ordered kits for homes with gabled roofs and wraparound porches from Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogs for around $500, then assembled them with assistance from friends. Others waited to build on their country until they could afford it or made structures piecemeal. J. Howard Payne Jr., a lawyer and former naval officer, purchased his Ninevah property in 1954 for $600, paying $200 upfront. Over the adjacent few years, he built his own house using plans that he saw in an advertizing in Popular Mechanics, co-ordinate to his son Michael Payne, a 75-yr-onetime former attorney for the Section of Justice who still recalls visiting the plot every bit a child and seeing the surprise on his father's confront when he realized he could buy something that faced a picturesque marsh. The family unit rented their home in Harlem, just J. Howard'due south wife, Natalie, used the money she had saved from the housing allotment funds that she received from her husband's naval service to invest in a abode. "He threw up the house here for about $5,000," says his son, who now owns and spends summers on the property. Michael recalls going to the nearby Southampton Lumber Co. with his father, where he watched him arrange a payment plan for the materials he needed to build his modest, boxy home, where the family started summering in 1957. For the Paynes and some of their neighbors, the lumberyard "acted, in outcome, like a depository financial institution," Michael says.
Because the lot was depression-lying and prone to flooding, J. Howard decided to capsize the typical structure, situating the main living areas on the summit floor, which fabricated it easier to savour views of nearby Piddling Northwest Creek. In 2010, Michael and his wife, Susan Henriques-Payne — who is 70 and also grew up spending summers in Sag Harbor at her family'south home in Chatfield'due south Hill, another Blackness subdivision created around the aforementioned time as Azurest that has seen considerable new construction past white interlopers in the by 20 years — razed and rebuilt his father's house, raising the entire construction several anxiety and calculation floor-to-ceiling windows so they could better find the passing egrets, herons, swans, foxes and raccoons. Though the two,300-square-foot home is now in the Modernist style, with a flat roof and large glass windows, the couple even so wanted to pay respects to their elders: The sometime kitchen sink, for case, was moved downstairs, where Michael cleans and scales his catch from angling trips; the bubble drinking glass that his father had installed in a window is at present used for the outdoor shower, where visitors can wash their feet after coming dorsum from the embankment. From the beginning, "it was nearly having a vision and pulling together," says Michael. "Instead of spending money every summer sending your kids to camp, you invest in a holding similar this, and it'south safety and at that place are people like you lot."
TODAY, THE SANS subdivisions have a singled-out, summer-camp-like atmosphere. There aren't many streetlights, and where there's not pavement, in that location's sand. The sounds of deer rummaging through backyards and rustling fallen leaves crackle in the air. The houses, though increasingly singled-out from each other, share a sense of mutual history: Fifty-fifty the fully rebuilt ones announced lived in and comfortable, like they've already raised a family unit. Together, they've survived financial, racial and interfamilial disputes, and are reminders of the tenacity of the people who developed this terrain.
The original Black families who purchased homes in Sag Harbor were able to transcend the economic stratification that still exists between Black and white Americans. (As of 2016, the net worth of a white family was on average about 10 times that of a Black family, co-ordinate to the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public-policy organization.) These Sag Harbor pioneers not only had the opportunity to accrue intergenerational wealth but to learn from one some other: virtually the schools and universities their children should attend, the neighborhoods they should buy into, the artists they should support, the professional careers they should pursue and the new spaces that they, together, could figure out how to navigate.
Indeed, the subdivisions provided some of the state'due south first Black middle-class families a chance to larn how to exist rich in a identify where their status was both accepted and encouraged, as opposed to questioned, resented, envied or, worse, actively denied — as was the instance in most other bulk-white East Declension coastal communities. Several of these Sag Harbor families, a large portion of whom have managed to maintain and pass downwardly their homes over the past 80 years, through one or two generations, have go fully intertwined: Payne and Henriques-Payne are ane of a scattering of married couples who live in the subdivisions today who both spent fourth dimension there in their youth; they reconnected afterward in life and bonded in role considering they shared the same respect for and history in this Black enclave, and remained committed to keeping its essence live. As each summertime passes, the young and teenage children of those former generations are now developing their own beachfront traditions and bonds, which go along off-flavour, back in New York City. Everywhere, there's a shared understanding and respect for the thought of community: a recognition that all they take is each other.
Richard and Dorothy Granger, both dentists in Glen Cove, Long Island, came to Sag Harbor Hills in the early 1950s. Their daughter, Beverly Granger, lxx, a retired dentist and ceramist who was born a year earlier her parents built their habitation, now lives in a renovated two,500-square-foot, two-story house on the original plot of state with her 73-year-old married man, Aloysius Cuyjet, a retired md who grew upwardly in Sag Harbor. Granger renovated the home in 2003, afterwards her female parent died, puncturing the exterior with foursquare windows and adding sliding glass doors that provide views of Sag Harbor Bay beyond her ain private beach. Back in 1951, when the home was completed, it was small-scale, with sketchy wiring and inadequate heating. Dorsum then, she remembers being able to skip across the backdrop and through the wood to run across her friends.
She also recalls a time when there was no way to tell where one house ended and another began. All the children in the subdivisions belonged to every adult that lived there. If a child scraped her knee joint in front of the Grangers' house, she could walk in scuffed and walk out with a bandaged wound. If one mother cooked, all the kids nearby ate. If ane mother was on the beach, all the children were looked afterwards. "I felt loved in that location in a mode that, now having lived in many other communities, I realize was unusual and incredibly empowering," says Brooke Williams, 54, who grew upward spending summers simply outside Azurest and at present owns her ain small firm in Sag Harbor, where she spends summers with her husband, Josh Liberson, 49, and their daughter, Ada. "Our pride of place — of the various achievements of our friends and family — and our cohesion and generosity toward each other came from a profound sense of love," she says.
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Brooke's father, E.T. Williams, who is 82, first came hither in the 1940s. He lives in a almost 200-year-old house that has been inhabited only by gratuitous Black men since it was purchased past David Hempstead in 1869, and and then by William Trott in 1922, and so by himself in 1968. Within 10 years, the Williamses bought 7 other homes nearby, creating a kind of family unit compound: Brooke's 2-story, i,500-square-pes shingled original cape — where her granddad used to stay every bit the then-owners' guest — is a stone's throw from her male parent's; her younger sister, Eden, 51, has a nearby cottage that once belonged to their grandmother. E.T., an avid art collector who grew up in Brooklyn and has sat on the board of several major museums, spends half the yr in Sag Harbor with his wife, Auldlyn, who is 80, in their ii-story, 1,650-square-foot clapboard cottage, its walls hung with paintings past prominent Black American abstractionists such as Romare Bearden and Claude Lawrence. "Yous go out at that place, and you've got a whole mess of summer friends," Brooke says. "We're lucky to spend that kind of time."
WHEN THESE FAMILIES first fix down roots in Sag Harbor, many parts of the land still had split water fountains for white and Black people. Throughout the United States, there were unwritten laws, ghost rules that were understood and barely spoken, which Black people abided by to ensure their own survival. While the children in SANS ran through the wood discovering Native American trails, Black kids around the country were desperate for a place where they could exist without having to detect the weight of the color of their skin. Indeed, leisure spaces were some of the most segregated, racially fraught places in the Jim Crow era, according to Andrew Kahrl, a professor at the Academy of Virginia and the author of "The State Was Ours" (2012), a history of how Black communities nearly beaches were pushed out by white people looking to build their own wealth.
Prototype
Places like Sag Harbor ultimately provided a haven for Black people that sought an escape from the daily insults of a racist society. It allowed them to convene and find pleasure and customs in a time when survival was the priority and joy was an reconsideration. Beyond the beach, ane of the means they did so was by joining national organizations similar the Comus Social Society or the Guardsmen — or, for the children, Jack and Jill of America — which allowed rich Blackness families across the state to go to know one another, whether on winter ski weekends or group trips to Panama. Because the families in Sag Harbor were unlike many Black families in America, they stayed close to one another, not only to share experiences only also because they had a shared — if "very privileged," equally Eastward.T. puts it — style of life. "Places similar Sag Harbor played an of import role in both sustaining Black communities as well as helping to provide outlets for socialization and leisure," Kahrl adds. "This is an important component of how African-Americans worked to resist racism as well equally transcend the strictures of a segregated society."
Much like schools at the fourth dimension, the country's pools and beaches were also segregated. While the American Red Cantankerous offered Black children swimming lessons in Sag Harbor during the summer, other Black families around the nation stayed away from such spaces in society to avoid persecution past white people who monopolized the declension. In fact, the racist ideas and stereotypes that white people held were amplified in recreational settings. Children were non exempt. And spots where people could go to relish themselves and relax were, then equally now, some of the virtually heavily policed. Many counties and towns didn't bother creating legal ordinances that restricted beaches or public pools to white residents, but it was understood that Black people who challenged the norm would be met with violence. In Sag Harbor, meanwhile, the children could laze on their private beaches or besiege at Havens Beach, the but one open to the public, whiling away their summer days.
That doesn't mean, yet, that the SANS children weren't haunted past racism when they traveled through the whiter parts of town. "We didn't go alone," Cuyjet recalls. "Nosotros always traveled in groups." Payne remembers beingness around 13 years old when he went into the hamlet with his father for a haircut. The Payne men could easily be mistaken for white people because of their light pare, which Payne attributes to a few white ancestors. The barber told the Paynes and a white customer that appointments were required, and then the latter got up to leave but was told he could wait; when the Paynes said they would, too, the barber sent for the police. There are now laws, of course, meant to prevent such incidents, fifty-fifty if racism is no less rampant, but Payne volition never forget that feel — and the double-consciousness, as West.Due east.B. Du Bois famously called information technology in "The Souls of Blackness Folk" (1903), that it forced him to face at a immature age.
Most of the subdivisions' electric current residents do not experience those same pressures set upon them, or their children, as they did when they were teens. Granger told me that she feels just as comfortable on Main Street every bit she does on her private beach. This past bound, Sag Harbor staged its largest Black Lives Affair demonstration, a depression-central affair that included a march. And equally the two,200-person hamlet — more than 91 percentage of which is white, according to the recent demography — has connected to evolve, condign more than like the posher Hamptons with which it shares the seacoast, it no longer intimidates the Black residents who are an indelible role of its fabric. "I am a member of a discriminated minority," Payne says. "Just there is no manner that I tin can sit down hither and say, 'Oh, I feel ready upon, this country has treated me badly.'"
THESE DAYS, the Sag Harbor subdivisions are increasingly nether threat, as Hamptons developers attempt to buy multiple lots so they tin combine them and build outsize homes. And the SANS neighborhoods aren't all Black anymore, though several of the founding families remain.
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Concluding year, the subdivisions received national and land landmark status, which are mostly celebratory designations. Some longtime residents are now hoping that Sag Harbor will name the subdivisions a historic commune, which volition protect the area'southward graphic symbol and culture and limit renovation in the area. Merely infighting between Black homeowners — those who welcome the landmarking and those who are afraid it will proceed them from being able to change and remodel their homes in the futurity — has acquired friction. "Nosotros're all having a chat near whether there should be a preservation measure," says Kathleen Mulcahy, Sag Harbor'due south mayor.
Since nearly of the properties in the Black subdivisions practice not have a shared vernacular, as they do in the whiter parts of the village — which is dominated by 19th-century frame structures on smaller flatland lots — local officials are hesitant to secure the subdivisions' futurity. "Nosotros accept no legal standing," says Renee Five.H. Simons, 71, who has a home in Sag Harbor Hills and helped lead the fund-raising effort for the national and country landmark applications. "We've got to figure out how to define and preserve our concept."
For now, at least, the neighborhoods' legacy remains intact. On a steamy Mon in July, down Granger's individual beach, a mother sat in her chair every bit her two children played close to the shore, their heads protected by bucket hats every bit they chased minnows glinting in the water. Up the hill, the family who lives next door was eating breakfast at a picnic table in the backyard, laughing equally they drank their coffee. Granger and her husband were within, listening to music. And in the morning'southward gentle light, a particularly perilous summer felt, for the moment, both carefree and bucolic — only equally the beachgoers hoped it might exist.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/t-magazine/sag-harbor.html
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