Martha’s Vineyard demographics
With all the brouhaha about Martha’s Vineyard lately, I’ve noticed a lot of pundits saying that it’s an enclave for the white and the rich. Far be it from me to defend the Vineyard, but in this case I’d like to clear up some misconceptions.
According to the 2010 census, African Americans remain a small percentage of the Island’s full-time population — less than four per cent — but their numbers are growing steadily, with many choosing to retire here.
And that full-time cohort appears to be migrating throughout the Island. Oak Bluffs is still the Island’s black population center, but Edgartown and Vineyard Haven are creeping up with significant increases over the past decade.
Reliable data about the summer population is scarce, but a wide range of black residents say the Vineyard has retained its grip on the imaginations of vacationers, as more and more are finding their way here from places far beyond New England, New York and Washington D.C. The Island’s beauty, history, cultural and intellectual institutions — and not least — comfort factor all combine to create an atmosphere that keeps attracting short-term visitors, seasonal residents and year-rounders of all races, most especially blacks.
When compared with other summer resorts that have historically welcomed blacks — Idlewild in Michigan, Sag Harbor in New York, or Highland Beach in Maryland, for example — the Vineyard still stands apart, they say.
I’ve been to the Vineyard a few times. I used to have a relative by marriage (now deceased) who had a good friend with a very large home there that was often empty. So my relative visited now and then and invited my husband and me to join her. Free vacation – nice deal! It didn’t take but one visit to learn of Martha’s Vineyard’s special history vis a vis black people, which at one point involved a section of the island named Oak Bluffs.
The article goes into some of that history:
Mrs. Goldson articulates a message that is repeated over and over among many long-time seasonal African Americans on the Island. Their love for the place keeps getting passed down, with each successive generation making its own memories.
“For us,” she says, speaking about her own family but she might just as well be talking about scores of others, “it’s about family and friends. I can be with friends who have been friends my whole life.”
Mrs. Goldson was among a generation of kids lucky enough to come to the Island for the entire summer. Usually the mothers stayed with them, while the fathers came when they could, often on the Friday night Daddy Boat, as it was known.
Occasionally, Mrs. Goldson’s father would fly down from the Boston area in his two-seater Ercoupe, buzzing State Beach as he headed to Trade Wind airfield, a grass landing strip that today serves as a dog park as well. What many families sought here was the kind of community they lacked the rest of the year, a critical mass of black friends, which had been sacrificed as families moved from black-only neighborhoods into predominantly white communities.
“You [had been] segregated, but not lost,” says Bettye Baker, who first came to the Vineyard in 1964 and writes about Oak Bluffs for the Gazette. “So you came to Martha’s Vineyard and recaptured that.”
Obviously, these were black people with the financial resources to do this. But it’s been going on for a long time, and is part of the Vineyard’s history, with events such as the following:
The demand for tours on the African American Heritage Trail, with its 23 sites across the Island, can sometimes overwhelm the supply of available guides, says Elaine Cawley Weintraub, chairman of the high school history department and co-founder of the Heritage Trail with Carrie Camillo Tankard, who is also vice president of the Vineyard chapter of the NAACP. “For older African Americans, they are so excited and honored and pleased” to take in the trail, she said.
Here they may learn that a black man, the Rev. John Saunders, first brought Methodism to the Island in 1787, not those who later founded the famed Methodist Camp Ground; that the great blues, jazz and gospel singer Ethel Waters stayed in the Shearer guest cottage; that Adam Clayton Powell Jr. bought a house in the Highlands; Dorothy West, the novelist and youngest Harlem Renaissance figure, was virtually unknown to recent generations until Oprah Winfrey produced a TV movie of The Wedding; that Edward Brooke, the first black elected to the U.S. Senate since Reco nstruction, taught swimming at Inkwell beach; and that President Obama probably won’t vacation on the Island in 2012, an election year.
The other thing I have to say about Martha’s Vineyard is that it has the world’s best fudge. At least, it was the best fudge the last time I was there, which was about 25 years ago. It’s this stuff. Extremely yummy – and I don’t even get a commission. Since I can’t eat chocolate without getting a migraine, I appreciate their excellent non-chocolate selections, which sometimes included a kick-ass cranberry flavor.
The film from 1998 of D West’s The Wedding (story set in the 1950s) was rather good, as was Jumping the Broom (a contemporary tale), filmed several years later. The very enjoyable novel by Yale Law’s Stephen Carter (The Emperor of Ocean Park) also takes place, in part, on MV. A local novelist named Jane Chittick suggested, rather amusingly, that the not tiny domicile of the Obamas might have been used as temporary housing and processing for the diverse arrivals on the privileged isle.
The Inkwell was a story about young African-Americans spending the summer on Martha’s Vineyard. I remember almost nothing about it, but it did make clear to me that the Islands weren’t all White. 4% isn’t that much, though, and the people in the clips complaining about the illegals or congratulating themselves on being so welcoming after they left all appeared to be White.
Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Hamptons weren’t always havens of the rich. That mostly started after WWII. That’s why fishermen, potato farmers, and impoverished artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning could live in the Hamptons back in the Forties. Starting in the Seventies and Eighties they were bought out or priced out. Something similar happened or is happening on the Islands, but there are still year-round islanders who run the shops and do chores for the rich.
Oak Bluffs, where the Inkwell is, was discovered as a vacation spot by middle class Methodists. It’s similar to Chautauqua in New York, Ocean Grove in New Jersey, or Pacific Grove in California, so there was a lot of middle class housing available there, and perhaps a more welcoming climate than Newport or Saratoga or Bar Harbor would have provided.
Brazilians felt comfortable coming to the Vineyard in large numbers partly because we already had a Portuguese-speaking community descended from Azoreans and Cape Verdeans. The Portuguese-American Club in Oak Bluffs can be a hot spot: I remember attending a Burns’ Nicht Dinner there 4 years ago. Haggis and bagpipes at the PA Club, only in America.
Oak Bluffs also had the only monument the Confederate dead north of the Mason-Dixon line. The plaques were taken down in 2020 and moved to the Martha’s Vineyard museum.
Don’t forget the Wampanoag, the “Gay Head Indians” of Herman Melville’s description. They have their reservation at Aquinnah.
I dispute the assertion that Martha’s Vineyard was not a haven for the rich until after World War II. But what it was is tied up in the story of the old Establishment–especially its Northeastern WASP component–how it rose and fell. To pick an anecdote, Charles Lindbergh–married to the daughter of a Morgan partner–was on the Vineyard when he learned about Pearl Harbor. Or another: we used to sneak onto Katherine Graham’s estate to go fishing. Emily Post was a neighbor, in what would now be considered a modest house.
What has changed about Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard in the past 20 years is that it used to take some effort to get there, so you went there to get away from it all. Now you can fly in every weekend.
But the Vineyard has always been a complex place. I joke that the energy industry in the form of the sperm whale business made Edgartown the Tulsa of the 1820-40’s, where Nantucket was the Houston. RH Macy was from Nantucket. The Vineyard had the Luces. We also had Lillian Hellman and James Cagney. Going back farther, the first great Unitarian preacher in Boston and propagandist for the Revolution was Jonathan Mayhew, whose parents were missionaries to the Wampanoag. A complex place, and troublesome.
A complex place indeed.
https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2022/09/20/things-take-an-unexpected-turn-as-some-marthas-vineyard-residents-applaud-desantis-bash-biden-n630323
They had a better class of people back then, in terms of people in public life
Sorry, the best fudge comes from Uranus! Uranus, MO.
https://www.uranusgeneralstore.com/
The other thing I have to say about Martha’s Vineyard is that it has the world’s best fudge. At least, it was the best fudge the last time I was there, which was about 25 years ago.
Heresy.
You haven’t HAD fudge until you’ve visited Mackinac Island in Michigan. The fudge there is so good they named an ice cream flavor after it:
https://www.hudsonvilleicecream.com/flavor/mackinac-island-fudge/
I Callahan:
Apparently you didn’t follow my link.
The fudge on Martha’s Vineyard is the same fudge. Here’s that link again. Look at the logo.
Only 4% black sounds pretty white to me. Places I’ve heard described as white include Wisconsin (6% black), Seattle (7% black), and Utah (3% black).
“Whiter than Wisconsin but less white than Utah” sounds like a very accurate description of Martha’s Vineyard. Far whiter than Texas or Florida or any other* Southern state. If we were talking about Utah or Wisconsin the media would definitely being saying it was white.
*Some people don’t count Texas or Florida in the South.
Frederick:
Martha’s Vineyard is in Massachusetts, and is not Boston and not urban. For non-Boston non-urban Massachusetts – or any part of New England north of Massachusetts – 4% is pretty high.
Some people are idiots, too.
@neo: Just saying that the grace you seek for Martha’s Vineyard is denied to Salt Lake City (3% black), Madison, WI. (7% black), Boise (2% black), Seattle (6% black), or Portland, OR (6% black). All of these places are described as inexcusably white by any humanities professor, or indeed by the kind of people who spend time in Martha’s Vineyard.
If Martha’s Vineyard doesn’t count as a white enclave, nowhere does. And perhaps that’s much the better way to view it. But until the powers that be stop using racial bean counting to justify social meddling, Martha’s Vineyard counts as as a white enclave.
Neo,
Wow! I didn’t even notice that!
Guess that only proves my point…
🙂
I Callahan:
No, it proves OUR point. 🙂
Frederick:
My point is that, in reality, Martha’s Vineyard has more black people than is typical of non-urban New England in Massachusetts and north of Massachusetts. It actually does have a history of welcoming black people, as long as they can afford it.
“It actually does have a history of welcoming black people, as long as they can afford it.”
I’ve never been, but my impression, and I think the impression most people have, is not that it is a racist place, but that it is a classist place. Opera singer Leontyne Price would be welcome there, but rapper Cardi B.? Cardi B.’s net worth is almost certainly greater than Ms. Price’s.
The point I heard most people making about Nantucket tossing out the Venezuelans that DeSantis sent was that many of the residents (especially the part time residents) of Martha’s Vineyard talk a big game about welcoming poor people from third world countries, but they have no desire to live anywhere near poor people from third world countries. It wasn’t a race, or ethnic thing. It was about their being poor.
Again, never been, but I get the impression most of the people who summer on Martha’s Vineyard pay great expense to avoid interacting with people who cannot pay great expense to summer on Martha’s Vineyard.
The states do it. The federal government does it. The aliens nations started it. 50 Shades of Apartheid. That said, the Vineyard becomes a border property through the democratic/dictatorial model.
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