The battle for the boardwalk: Racial formations in a segregated coastal resort

Abstract

Scholarship within Black geographies and Black studies has highlighted how historical injustices continue to shape the ways in which space is racialized and race is spatialized. This paper examines a fight during the late 19th century between white business owners and Black citizens regarding whether or not the boardwalk of Asbury Park, New Jersey ought to be racially segregated in order to trace the emergence of a racial formation that signified Black people as unwelcome in tourist spaces. By focusing on a battle to implement a color line within a popular northern coastal resort community during the 1880s and 1890s, the paper shows how racial discrimination was justified and normalized through the prioritization of economic growth. Thus, a form of coastal ‘racial capitalism’ also emerged from this conflict. The spatial, cultural, and economic legacies of the battle over the boardwalk continue to shape present spatial inequalities and imaginaries in the city as well as in other parts of the United States. The paper concludes by arguing that efforts to address racial inequalities and to reimagine what it means to be human in must engage with the racist history of the resort. Through this, the paper demonstrates how histories of racial inequality continue to reverberate in the present and intersect with new forms of vulnerability.