“After segregation, there was desegregation and people were allowed to go where they wanted to go on vacation,” Sewell said. “We couldn’t go shopping,” said Judy Whitted Biagas, now in her 80s, who has been coming to Highland Beach since she was in utero.īiagas recalled her mother purchasing the clothes for the kids and asking them to try them on at home because they were not permitted in store fitting rooms. The ice man came through regularly to provide ice, milk and other items, and a Good Humor man also frequented the area, but the residents still encountered segregation when they visited Annapolis. ![]() The smallness of Highland Beach only allowed the community to be partly self-sufficient. “We had our own enclaves we had our own entrepreneurships we had our own grocery stores we had our own clothing stores because we could not shop in the other communities.” “During segregation, out of necessity, Black people had to be self-sufficient,” Sewell said of her childhood in the 1950s and 1960s. Summer residents shared their catches of fish and crabs, and everyone helped take care of each other’s kids. Sewell recalls her mother telling her that the community was essentially a large family in the 1920s and 1930s. The pavilion hosted dances, card games, meetings and movies, according to the 2008 book “Highland Beach on the Chesapeake Bay: Maryland’s First African American Incorporated Town.” Over its first few decades, the town established its identity, including its own government composed of a mayor and commissioners, streets named for Black visionaries in history, a small post office inside Twin Oaks and a town pavilion built in 1932 on the shore. The Twin Oaks property was then passed down through generations of the Douglass family. The home’s design included a balcony where the elder Douglass would have been able to look out across the bay to the Eastern Shore, where he was born into slavery – only now as a free man with a storied legacy. Frederick Douglass, however, died in early 1895, just months before its completion. Bill/Capital Gazette)Ĭharles Douglass built Twin Oaks as a retirement home for his father. ![]() The community is working to maintain its historic essence and structures while also modernizing components of the town to keep it sustainable. It was founded by Frederick Douglass' son, Charles Douglass as a getaway for Black people during segregation. This past spring Highland Beach, a small town of roughly 100 people, turned 130 years old. Twin Oaks, Frederick Douglass' Summer Home at Highland Beach.
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