By Victor Greto
REHOBOTH BEACH — You can’t see it anymore.
This stretch of less than 50 yards of shoreline, bracketed on either side by a worn jetty, looks like any other slice of beach at this popular resort.
For some, though, it always will be the Crow’s Nest, for decades the only spit of sand at this resort town on which Blacks were allowed to sunbathe and splash in the surf.
It sits just north of the most crowded sections of beach, a seashell’s throw from the Henlopen Hotel and the Stuart Kingston auction house, where Grenoble Place ends.
Like other Blacks-only Delaware beaches from the segregation era, the Crow’s Nest is becoming a piece of the state’s lost history.
The state Archives only has one picture of Blacks on a beach. It was taken in Kitt’s Hummock in 1885. There are none of the Crow’s Nest, or of swinging Rosedale Beach with its hotel and famous Black performers who also drew whites, ears straining from their boats to listen.
The beaches themselves have changed. At Rosedale, newly-built condos that line the water sell for $600,000 each.
This history is little known by the younger generation, old timers say. And why should it be?
Today, Blacks and other minorities go where they want to go. As Rehoboth, Wildwood and Virginia Beach transformed into mega-resorts, vacationers of all colors have integrated there.
Today, Wildwood fills with Blacks from Dover and whites from Pittsburgh. On any given Saturday during the summer, the boardwalks at Rehoboth and Ocean City, Md., teem with whites, Blacks and Latinos.
But that’s today. For a much longer period of time, it all was very different.
The value of knowing this story and telling it, says Delaware State Archivist Russ McCabe, is that it’s a well-needed reminder that things have changed and that great change has occurred over a relatively short period of time.
“It happened in my lifetime,” says McCabe, who went to Trapp Pond east of Laurel as a boy, while Blacks stayed at nearby Jason Beach. “What was once unacceptable practice, today would be considered downright absurd.”
The tale of Delaware’s forgotten Black beaches also illustrates a people’s determination to live as it wished, even within rigid societal restraints.
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A segregated people inevitably develops its own traditions, says Jim Newton, University of Delaware emeritus professor of Black American studies.
“Blacks developed a parallel society along the Delaware beaches,” he says.
Although Rehoboth Beach always has been the state’s greatest resort, other beaches became centers for religious revivals, while still others became the focal point of celebrations, often echoing white culture.
“Any spot that would not be the mainstream, they would stake their ground there,” says Newton, who lives in Pike Creek.
“Some of the Black churches held revivals in the Milford area, and the beaches were not too far. Bowers Beach and Slaughter Beach were small havens for African-Americans. They’d have revivals and have their frolics on the beaches.”
Those “frolics,” he says, mainly included picnics.
“Blacks were basically picnickers,” he says. “They weren’t swimmers, especially women. They’d wade in the water after taking their shoes off. The kids would play stickball, and they would have barbecues.”
August became the greatest time of year for beach celebrations, he says.
This includes the African-American version of Big Thursday, begun in 1852 to celebrate the end of an oyster ban. The celebrations were centered in Bowers Beach, Slaughter Beach and at Oak Orchard.
Whites celebrated the second Thursday of August — the actual day when the ban was lifted — and Blacks celebrated the following Saturday; their celebration became known as Black Saturday.
According to the 1938 federal government Works Progress Administration’s guide to the state, these celebrations were a time of courting and political speeches, “and promenading in fine clothes. Men wear the latest Harlem styles….Women display long evening gowns all day long.”
These segregated celebrations dissipated quickly after World War II.
In fact, Jim Casey, who lived at Slaughter Beach year-round from 1946 to 1953, did not see one Black person, during either summer or winter.
“In the winter, Slaughter Beach was the loneliest place in the world,” said Casey, 72, retired from Sun Oil and now living in Boothwyn, Pa.
“There couldn’t have been more than 20 people who lived there. In the summer, everyone came down and jumped it up to 250. But I never once ever seen a Black person down there.”
A little further south, however, Blacks thrived at Rosedale Beach, off of Highway 24 near Millsboro.
“For a long time, it was considered the place to go,” Newton says.
In 1937, a man named Jesse W. Vause bought land and property there, tore down a five-room hotel and built a resort in its place, including the Rosedale Beach Hotel.
Thorris R. Brown, 81, of Wilmington, recalls spending a belated honeymoon at Rosedale Beach with her husband just after he returned from World War II.
“There was a boardwalk and a dancehall there on the water,” Brown says. “Ella Fitzgerald was there. We stayed for a week in a little cottage with two rooms.”
Brown recalls also attending dances.
Rosedale became a destination on the “Chitlin’ Circuit” tour, which featured African-American entertainers. This included all the big bands of the swing era, and, as the 1950s turned into the 1960s, it saw James Brown, Jackie Wilson and Stevie Wonder perform.
Some whites would come up by boat just to listen, Waynne Harmon Paskins, 64, recalls.
The hotel was sold in 1960, and Rosedale Beach began to decline soon after the Civil Rights era kicked in.
“It all begins to fade out as Blacks incorporate into the social order,” Newton says.
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The emotions and moments segregation inspired are as alive and real as the creamy white formica table that Walter Harmon’s hand occasionally hits when he speaks.
“You already know what happened!”
Walter Harmon is not in the mood for foolish questions about the past.
The 90-year-old former sawmill and cannery worker’s face almost looks like a clenched fist when he states the obvious.
Until his son, Waymon, 65, points out the age of the person who asked the question.
“He don’t know,” Waymon says. “He’s young.”
Actually, he knows. A little. Through books.
“We knew where we belonged,” says Walter, a branch of whose family has lived in the state for hundreds of years. “And that’s where we stayed.”
“Not where we belonged,” Waymon says. “Where we had to be.”
But Walter doesn’t stop speaking: “We couldn’t, didn’t, have the privilege to go where we wanted to go, where white folks could go.”
Blacks only had one day a week to freely walk the boardwalk, Walter says.
“I didn’t know that,” Waymon says.
The Crow’s Nest — was it named after the color of crows, or Jim Crow?
“After Jim Crow,” definitively says Walter’s wife Edna, 88.
Jim Crow, a term that grew in usage in the early 19th century, comes from a stereotyped Black minstrel character first created in 1828. Less than a decade later, it was used in the North to refer to segregation laws.
The big day to be out at the Crow’s Nest was Thursday, says Walter and Edna’s daughter, Waynne Harmon Paskins.
“That was the traditional maid’s day off,” she says. “We all would congregate there.”
Not only maids on Thursdays, but the Black waiters at the popular Henlopen Hotel, where, of course, they would never have been allowed to stay.
Waynne and Waymon’s uncle Oswald Winchester became one of the first Black lifeguards at the Crow’s Nest.
Thorris Brown also recalls going to the Crow’s Nest as a teenager. She worked as a chambermaid and pantry girl at the nearby Bell Haven Hotel.
Paskins says she felt pretty sheltered from any obvious — as opposed to assumed — discrimination.
Even so, there were times when walking on the boardwalk she could get in at least one concentrated act of rebellion.
“In my head, walking down the boardwalk, I wouldn’t move aside for anyone,” she says.
At the time, it may have seemed enough, but memories of summers past and the Crow’s Nest cannot help but burn.
“As a child, you don’t know why your mom hustled you to a particular part of the beach,” says Alexs Pate, whose family came down from North Philadelphia to spend many summers of his boyhood at Rehoboth Beach in the late 1950s and 1960s. “And if you strayed, they told you to go back over there. You wondered.”
Pate doesn’t wonder anymore.
“As a young man, you start to feel sad for your parents, for your relatives who you know now were older and had desires but couldn’t exercise them,” he says. “You realize I may have been happy running up and down the road, but we were locked in. And, really, there’s no fun to being locked in.”
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Some of the older people come back to the Crow’s Nest, out of habit. It still seems weird when they look around and see whites elbow-to-elbow with them.
One afternoon late last month, the former Crow’s Nest was peopled only by whites, some sitting and leaning back on stiff arms, oblivious, mesmerized by the sound and movement of the water, or by a paperback book.
It was not so up until the early 1970s.
We were not unaware that we couldn’t walk the full length of the beach,” says Pate, who published his novel “West of Rehoboth” in 2001, part of which details Rehoboth’s Jim Crow rules.
The book provides a taste of what it was like to live in West Rehoboth Beach, the only place where Blacks were permitted to live. Pate also is the author of “Amistad: the Novel.”
“Into the 1970s it was segregated,” Pate says. “No one could tell me this didn’t have a powerful impact on the people who lived under that system, and would foster anger and dysfunctional behavior.”
The Crow’s Nest wasn’t roped off, recalls Stuart Kingston owner Jay Stein, who grew up in Rehoboth. “But even as time went on [and segregation ended], Blacks would still come back to that beach. “
Waymon Harmon says his children know next to nothing about that past.
“They go now wherever the hell they want,” he says. “Back then, it was accepted. We knew where we were supposed to go and that was it. Some might come here from the city, and they would go to other parts of the beach, but someone would tell them, and they would come on down.”
The Crow’s Nest pavilion, once a hive of socializing, courtship and barbecuing, is gone, too.
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In this part of Delaware, a strand of the Harmon family goes back to the 1700s.
They came down originally from Frederica, Walter says.
Walter Harmon’s skin is the color of butterscotch, much lighter than his son’s and the skin of his wife Edna, a former school teacher.
Their different skin colors also hint at another story embedded in the past.
According to Waymon — who learned about this from his brother, Wardell, who did a lot of genealogical digging — the Harmons have American Indian and Moroccan “blood” running through their veins. Not to mention either German or English ancestry. All on Walter’s side.
According to the federal government Works Progress Administration’s guide to the state, 70 years ago there were several families at nearby Millsboro who called themselves “Moors” or “Negroes” or “Indians,” a multi-racial stew of people that the encompassing white world reductively called Negro.
“As a landowning class primarily, they have been their own masters for generations,” reads the guide, which names the Harmons as one of the families living here.
“The United States Census and most Sussex Countians consider these people Negroes, and many of the people themselves say they have Negro blood, neither deploring nor boasting of it,” it says.
Walter and Edna, their daughter Waynne, son Waymon and Waymon’s daughter, still live close together off of county road 273, near construction-plagued Del. 1.
More than three decades ago, Waymon bought seven acres of property off of his aunt and brother Wardell.
Waymon sold a chunk of it to his daughter, Tamela and her family, who live here, and built himself a house just down the road, where he’ll be moving to in a year or so.
As time slipped away, Waymon’s personal experience of waning segregation contrasts from his father’s.
“We were taught, from the time we were little, what the deal was,” Waymon recalls.
There were rules that Walter and Edna taught their children: Don’t be running your mouth; keep your hands off people; and don’t look at any white women.
Today, Harmon says, “I look at white people my age and I sort of know they were some of the ones that did it to me.”
He shrugs.
“Every person tries to survive the best way they can,” he says. “We survived by not crossing over the line too much. We did the best we could do because we were going to catch hell because we were Black.”
That itch to be nostalgic about one’s youth, coupled with the reality of segregation, makes Pate ambivalent about his Rehoboth past.
“As idyllic as it could have been, and was, being barefoot and running up and down the road and trying to catch bees and crabbing, who cares,” says Pate, who now teaches at the University of Minnesota.
“Except, you’re looking at all the boats going by, and you’re looking across and seeing the white boy crabbing with a metal trap, and I’m doing it with a string and a piece of chicken.
“And, with all of that, you wonder — Why?”