The end of the Black Hamptons?

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A century and a quarter ago, during the Gilded Age, one ordinarily didn’t speak to strangers.  Even at parties, it was considered bad manners to engage a person one had never been formally introduced to. However, adhering to such guidelines, which were meant to avoid unwelcome familiarity, could be awkward, so in 1922, in the first edition of her book “Etiquette, in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home,” Emily Post decreed, “A friend’s roof … is an introduction to those it shelters.”

The fabled Hamptons are like the Newport, R.I., of that era. The most wealthy, the most admired and sought-after celebrities bring the city’s parties, rivalries, and snobbery to the seashore. Depending on who a host knows, there is delightful entertainment with live music, splendid food, beautiful flowers, and beautifully dressed companions, at one charming gathering after another; gatherings that can last an entire day or even a whole weekend.

At Hampton festivities, you are likely to meet the famous and the rich. In the city, such people might be disinclined to talk to ordinary beings, unknown to them or the world. But thanks to Ms. Post and to proximity, they very often speak freely, like old friends, when in the Hamptons.

An unexpected attraction of Hampton’s magic is its diversity. At every level, even among billionaires, whites enjoy an average of 100 to 1 advantage as to wealth. The United States has 800 billionaires and the richest white American has around $200 billion. The richest of the 14 most wealthy African Americans only has $14 billion. 

Yet, despite the great expense and restrictive clubs, elites of all varieties flock to the Hamptons. A house in the Hamptons is important as an indicator of standing and status. 

As fellow club members become tiresome, sooner or later, everyone intermingles at the most fashionable watering holes, where it’s difficult to book a reservation. Everyone who is anyone or who aspires to be highly regarded also does all they can to support worthy causes.

“That’s oxymoronic,” a friend quipped on Facebook after I posted pictures announcing a reception to raise funds for the new Southampton African American Museum (SAAM).

Like many, my friend was unaware of the Hamptons’ history as an African American enclave. Established by our enslaved ancestors, whose descendants later prospered as free Black seamen, farmworkers, and servants, these communities became centers of abolitionist fervor. Many Blacks intermarried with local Native Americans. To the unaware, they might have been mistaken as the typical descendants of Blacks and Europeans — some Harlemites, on first encountering mixed-race Shinnecock Nation members, referred to them as “Lenox Avenue Indians.”

In general, the new museum celebrates our rich legacy. Most importantly, this includes the stories of specific Black residents of Southampton. 

Now, beyond superb restaurants, the Hamptons offers alternatives to golf and tennis at posh private clubs. During inclement weather, fishing, sailing, hiking, polo, and opportunities to commune with nature offered by excellent state parks and town beaches can be substituted by a museum visit. Nightclubbing until dawn is popular with the young. Whatever age, though, it’s parties, big and small, public and private, that are most integral to life in the Hamptons.

Such parties vary. Some are cookouts with homogeneous guest lists, made up of parents, for instance. On and on, they happily discuss riveting topics like infant ailments, fourth-grade curricula, and outrageous tuition costs. Others are mild bacchanalia and, although not “freak outs,” last until all hours. Whatever form they take, parties are often justified as charity events.

A couple years ago, when I attended the Southampton African American Museum’s first high-summer gala, I knew in advance that the benefit, although the event was festive, would fall somewhere between these two extremes. An institution that had been decades in the making, determined to show that African American history is American history, too, to compete with more established charitable causes, its benefit gala has, of necessity, become bigger and better each year. It’s worked that way with the other gala celebrations that Black groups from the city host out east to raise funds. 

Collectively, the Evidence Dance Company benefit and Diversity Affluence award brunches, which used to be held at the late Barbara “B.” Smith’s harbor-side restaurant; the new Dance Theater of Harlem Hampton’s showing — it’s these elegant events that form the Black Hamptons framework. Now, expanded into a three-day celebration, the SAAM’s benefit joins the lineup. Thanks to the involvement of philanthropists Jean and Martin Shafiroff, a good time, a soulful and satisfying experience, among a crowd more diverse than most, is guaranteed. 

Explaining how the museum’s ambitious education program extends throughout the community, founding president Barbra Simmons declared: “The three things we’ll be teaching, to focus on local history to better understand national events, are the Great Migration, with the history of our area’s Black barbershops, beauty parlors, and juke joints; Black and native whalers and other mariners; and the nobility of a notable ancestor, Pyrrhus Concer— born here, as a slave, taken away from his mom at 5 years old to work on a farm, once free, working hard, prospering, and endowing an education fund [that assists] our youth today, more than a century after his death.”

Harlem is more a cultural homeland than the African American mecca that is today’s Brooklyn. That’s where most Black New Yorkers live now. The epicenter of the Black Hamptons is Sag Harbor.

In 1640, the site of today’s Sag Harbor was the Native village Wegwagoneck. English colonists called it Great Meadows. To access the bay, 5 miles to the south, settlers of Sagg, or Sagaponack, cut through the forest. It became known as “the harbor of Sagg” and mention of this new sheltered port as Sag Harbor was first made in 1707.

Including both Blacks and Natives from the first was the pursuit of sperm whales to render oil from their fatty flesh. By the late 18th century, people switched from candles to whale oil lamps to light buildings more efficiently. With the introduction of gas lights in the 1830s, the industry faltered. By 1847, Sag Harbor whalers were at their  busiest. That year, 32 ships brought in 605,000 pounds of whale bone (to reinforce corsets). Similarly, Sag Harbor’s fleet produced 68,000 barrels of oil, valued at more than a million dollars. 

Discovery of more easily accessible kerosene in Pennsylvania (and the use of steel stays to better constrict women’s waists), doomed the area’s prosperity. The last whaler, the Myra, left Sag Harbor in 1871 and never returned.

With the 20th century, as other Hampton communities gentrified, Sag Harbor remained a mixed-use community with an industrial waterfront, including airplane manufacturing, torpedo testing, and a watch factory that used toxic paint. Rudimentary workers’ housing coexisted with the homes of the well-to-do. Socially and racially, Sag Harbor retained a more heterogeneous mix. 

Late in the 19th century, South Hamptons’s Shinnecock Indian reservation had a population of about 300. Several people born there became quite successful. Dr. William H. Johnson had a Harlem medical practice. Garnette Payne, whose Pine Street office was near Wall Street, had land holdings via the reservation that were owned by his family for more than a century. 

Inhabiting tiny clapboard houses, some Black and Native American families always occupied  Sag Harbor’s grittier nearby Eastville neighborhood. As early as the decade that led up to the first World War, with the Great Migration swelling Harlem, Brooklyn, and Queens, Sag Harbor evolved into a favored Black vacation spot, with a campground and guest houses like Ivy Cottage. During the 1920s and beyond, African Americans were gradually able to acquire housing that was more substantial.

Accounts in the Amsterdam News of the comings and goings of Black residents attest to established seasonal settlement. In September of 1923, the paper noted, “Judge Scotland closed his vacation at the lvy Cottage, Sag Harbor N.Y. by giving a dinner party. Miss Beatrice Van Houten was the guest of honor. Among the out-of-town guests were: Mrs. George Butler of East Hampton, Mrs. Chas. Verona of Manhattan and Mrs. Starkes. On Sunday the Judge motored home to Irvington, N.J. declaring he has gained seven pounds.”

On September 9, 1925, the Amsterdam News ran an item telling readers how “Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Jones and children have returned to Jamaica [Queens] after having enjoyed a wonderful vacation at Sag Harbor L.I.”

In 1929, the Amsterdam News reviewed 20 years of Sag Harbor history. It described the summer cottage of the late Mrs. Daisy Tapley (1882–1925), a widowed classical singer and vaudeville performer. An esteemed society figure who entertained notables like composer Harry T. Burleigh and singer Roland Hayes, Tapley left the cottage when she died, as well as a cooperative Harlem apartment, to her companion, Ms. Minnie Brown.

The Amsterdam News also portrayed the mechanic of South Hampton’s leading garage, a Black man. “Edward Johnson” did a yearly “business of over $50,000,” an example of how “Colored men from the south are fast replacing foreign whites on the farms of this section.”

Owned and operated by J. Jamison, the Wells Hotel at Quogue was among the best that admitted Blacks. Forging inroads in property ownership, in time, even those who lived with employers as servants chose to buy and rent houses in anticipation of a happy retirement. Throughout two counties, about 40 Black houses of worship were established.

Maude Terry was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, of interracial parents who married (boycotted afterward, her white father committed suicide). A Brooklyn elementary schoolteacher, she’s credited as the unlikely catalyst who transformed Sag Harbor. When fishing while vacationing in Eastville, she discovered a stretch of unimproved marsh and woodland, crisscrossed with a circuitous network of native paths. The 20-acre tract belonged to Elsie B. Gale and her son Daniel, who were white. Long unsuccessful at finding a buyer, once they did, not even the Klan could dissuade them from selling to Terry. 

It’s on the beachfront, where typically, the bay’s surf is as placid as a lake and the water’s temperature is as warm as a bathtub. Imagining the plot as a summer community where Black families could escape the city’s oppressive heat and demoralizing over-crowding, Terry enlisted her sister, Amaza Lee Meredith, to help develop a 120-lot subdivision. 

Back in 1947, as in Harlem before and simultaneous with Addisleigh Park, devising Sag Harbor Hills’s, Azurest’s, and Ninevah Beach’s seaside developments for African Americans was a revolutionary act. The initial Azurest Syndicate was organized to create an African American allotment that offered beachfront lots for $1,000. Inland parcels were discounted to $750. The following year brought a second offering. Elevated, but just as ample, these new plots cost less than half of the lots that were adjacent to the water: just $450 apiece. Some of those who looked ahead astutely obtained two, three, or four. 

Michael Henry Adams photos

More than a few made building a house for summer use into a do-it-yourself weekend project, while others took a decidedly different approach. Take Dr. Binga Dismond, a Chicago native who was a football and WWI hero. Once married to star journalist Gerrie Major, divorced and remarried, he sought professional help. Vertner Woodson Tandy, the doctor’s neighbor on Strivers Row and New York State’s second registered Black architect, designed Dismond’s house (later owned by “Black Enterprise” publisher Earl Graves, it was remodeled beyond recognition).

All this was before construction of the Long Island Expressway. Driving from either Harlem or Brooklyn took four or five hours at least.

Never licensed, Terry’s Columbia-trained sister Meredith designed at least two Azurest houses. One, Terry Cottage, designed for her sister, she visited with her lesbian lover, academic Edna Meade Colson. 

Surrounded by his family, my friend E. T. Williams, a money man, connoisseur, and philanthropist, owns a family compound made up of several parcels and inhabits a house well over a century old. My late friend Dr. Chester Redhead built his modernist Sag Harbor house with rooms for entertaining on the upper level, to better contemplate his bayside view. 

Artists, writers, musicians, and other Black intellectuals have always been drawn to Sag Harbor. Their juxtaposition with the Jackson Pollocks, Peter Beards, and Truman Capotes of the East End — bohemians who became millionaires, as far as self-expression and self-indulgence is concerned — is instructive. 

Civil rights attorney, ambassador, and activist Edward Dudley was a resident. One regular visitor of yesteryear was poet Langston Hughes, who liked to sit beneath a tree crosslegged, penning verse. Actors Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, as well as composer Duke Ellington, all sought to recast their playground of privilege into a colony of the aware and woke, who, if no longer starving, were undeniably artists.

In 1947, the roads of Sag Harbor were still unpaved.

Painter Judith Henriques-Adams wistfully recalled, “We would refer to ourselves as the ‘Un-Hamptons’ … The Hamptons are about money; Sag Harbor is about arts and creativity. We came here to think, to write, to paint. We have a different mindset; it’s what sets us apart … but it’s getting harder to fend off newcomers who have no knowledge of the area’s important past … We don’t want Sag Harbor to be a fad that came and went … We want to keep the essence of what we have now. We want our kids to be able to afford and maintain what we’ve built. We want to see a Black community that can continue to flourish.”

But how? It isn’t just whites who seem eager to spoil an earthly paradise with ostentatious $25 million houses. Whether noticing former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault or Jay-Z and Beyoncé on the scene, Sag Harbor’s shores might remain home to a host of “ordinary” notable African Americans, such as photographer John Pinderhughes, social abstraction artist Gregory Coats, interior designers Courtney Sloane and Cheryle Riley, fashionista Edward Wilkerson, or Pulitzer-winning author Colson Whitehead — but for how much longer? Are the Black Hamptons destined to be gentrified, too? Will displacement be okay, just like Harlem, Fort Greene, and Mott Haven?