social justice sojourns | A guide to social movement history tourism for kids and adults
In 1892, Major Charles Douglass, youngest son of Frederick Douglass, and Charles’ wife Laura, were turned away from a restaurant at the Bay Ridge Resort and Amusement Park because of their race. The resort was separated by a narrow channel—the mouth of Black Walnut Creek—from property owned by the Brashears, a local black family. Crossing the channel, it was through a chance encounter between a member of the Brashears family and Charles and Laura Douglass that the origins of Highland Beach are rooted. Afte
By 1894, Douglass had built the first cottage, establishing a retreat for himself and others on the Chesapeake Bay. With 600 feet of beachfront, he turned it into a summer enclave for family and friends. Frederick Douglass—famed activist for abolition and women’s suffrage, orator, publisher, diplomat and adviser to President Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the most famous black man of his time, and one of the most photographed personalities in our nation’s history—would have become a resident had he not died in 18
The Town of Highland Beach became a gathering place for educated blacks, including many of the well-known blacks of the time and later years. Among the residents and guests were—Paul Robeson, concert artist and stage and film actor famous for his cultural accomplishments as well as for his political activism; Judge Robert Terrell, who served as one of the first municipal court judges in Washington, D.C., and his wife, Dr. Mary Church Terrell, one of the first African American women to earn a college degree,
social justice sojourns | A guide to social movement history tourism for kids and adults