OAK BLUFFS, Mass. — When Barack Obama kicks off his flip-flops on the Martha’s Vineyard sand this month, he’ll be adding a modern note to the island’s black history, which stretches back three centuries.
Decades ago, the island was a summer sanctuary for middle-class black families unwelcome elsewhere. Martin Luther King Jr. swam and wrote there.
Centuries before that, Martha’s Vineyard was home to blacks who defied the times to claim their place in island life.
One slave woman became a landowner. Her great-grandson was the island’s only black whaling captain. And a modest 20th-century innkeeper helped establish Martha’s Vineyard as a summertime haven for the middle- and upper-class blacks who are preparing to welcome the country’s first black president.
“There’s so much pride. That (Obama) family is like our family,” said Skip Finley, a radio executive and year-round Martha’s Vineyard resident.
Director Spike Lee, attorney and Clinton confidant Vernon Jordan and scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. are a few of the prominent blacks who call Martha’s Vineyard home for at least part of each year.
The island’s black history is isn’t entirely upbeat. Discrimination lasted long after slavery was gone. But the overall story is not just about persecution; it’s also about the “massive success” that followed for blacks on the island, says local historian Elaine Cawley Weintraub.
Slaves probably lived on the island beginning around 1680, but the first known record of slavery is in the 1703 will of a man whose estate included “a Negro woman valued at 20 pounds.”
But slavery looked different in Massachusetts, partly because of a unique provision of the law that allowed slaves to inherit property. That enabled Rebecca Amos, a woman torn from her native Guinea, to become a landowner when her husband, a wealthy Wampanoag Indian, died in 1763.
Her great-grandson, William Martin, also married an Indian, and that couple lived on a Chappaquiddick Island plantation that was considered Indian land.
Working at sea was the primary way people of the plantation could earn a living, largely because whites were taking all the land, Weintraub said. Martin began his whaling career in 1853, and three decades later he had worked up to captain of an 86-ton whaling schooner, making him the island’s only black whaling captain.
The dangerous, dirty work of whaling, which sent people to sea for months or years, probably helped ease racial barriers because competence was far more important than skin color, Weintraub said.
Charles Shearer, born into slavery in Virginia but freed by the Union Army, was able to get an education and move north to the Boston area. In 1912, he built a summer inn on property he’d purchased from a Baptist campground. The inn catered to blacks when other establishments refused to host them.
The cottage became a center of a black summer population that grew over the decades and included actor Paul Robeson, singer Ethel Waters and U.S. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York, who all stayed at Shearer Cottage.
In the 1960s, a home owned by New York political organizer Joe Overton hosted various black luminaries, including Martin Luther King Jr. Local rumor says King worked on his “I Have a Dream” speech between swimming sessions at a beach across the street, but Weintraub said there’s no way to know for sure.
Obama will be the third sitting president to visit the island, following Ulysses S. Grant and Bill Clinton, and it’s his third trip to Martha’s Vineyard.
The island is buzzing about where he’ll stay, the sights he’ll see, the business he’ll bring.
“He found it a place where he could rest, recharge his batteries,” said a regular summer visitor, Charles Ogletree, a Harvard Law School professor and friend of President Obama. I think it’s exactly why he’ll come back again.”
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