Recreation 

Escape provided African Americans a hard-won escapism. 

Black tourists have long undertaken travel for travel’s sake, but after the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, Black travelers embraced such journeys further— whether in roving family reunions, travel groups like Black Girls in Nature, or sojourns to the African continent Black people called homeland. Artists like jazz great Sun Ra evoked not only “India” in song but imagined stellar origins and flights. 

There had long been safe havens set up by and for Black people—whether in Idlewild, Michigan or Hot Springs, Arkansas; in Sag Harbor, Long Island or Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard—places where families not only traveled but could call their own, staying the season. Black resorts were advertised in newsreels and Negro newspapers. Even these retreats could be encroached upon: one such area, the Pacific Beach Club in Huntington Beach, California, built by African Americans in 1926, was destroyed in a suspicious fire two weeks before its opening.

Nonetheless, the Schomburg Center archive commemorates a beauty contest held there, in a photograph on view nearby. Beauty was one of the goals of Black travelers, whether sightseeing at the Louvre, buying a new car or motorcycle, or splurging on a cruise.

Maya Angelou, whose papers reside at the Schomburg Center, traveled to and lived in Ghana in the 1950s and was later treated to a cruise to celebrate her 70th birthday by her friend, philanthropist, and entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey. Recreation offered Black travelers, tourists, and vacation seekers the chance at re-creating community and their own version of paradise. It would be the cookout standards “We Are Family” and “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now”—the song that writer Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor ironically terms “the Black National Anthem”—that would provide the classic soundtrack to contemporary travels and unapologetic good times.