#  Lines in the Sand: The Spatiality of Racial Segregation at Public Beaches in the United States  

 



This project plots the locations of racially segregated public beaches in the United States. These sites stippled coastlines, lakefronts, and leisure landscapes even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was in force to desegregate public accommodations. From Atlantic City to Santa Monica, prominent white entrepreneurs set discrete patches of beachfront aside for Black users in order to reinforce reprehensible ideas about Black “place” in public spaces built and bolstered by Black laborers. Nevertheless, a significant number of these set-apart sites were founded by Black entrepreneurs who sought to cultivate autonomous and safe leisure retreats for Black travelers.

This project involves both investigative research and a cartographic component. Unlike amenities and accommodations that were recorded in the Negro Motorist Green Book (1936-66) as hospitable to Black travelers, segregated public beaches were not identified in guidebooks. “Custom,” word of mouth, (sometimes inexplicit) signage, and police enforcement were the sole means of detecting such sites; ascertaining their presence and placement requires reference to testimonies in interview transcripts, Black newspaper databases, and memorials to uncover. Perhaps as a result of the investigative effort requisite to locate these sites, no extant resource plots their instances and distributions. The maps made on the basis of this research augment two-and-a-half decades of scholarship that counters the “Myth of Southern Exceptionalism,” a fiction that frames racial segregation as particular to the South.

This project sits at the nexus of landscape architecture, urban history, cultural geography, media studies, and American studies. In the awareness it will raise of the extent of segregationist limitations to public access of public space in the United States, this work is relevant to initiatives to foster inclusive and just cities. This project is meant to make viewers attentive not to the invisibility of injustice at such sites, but to alternative means of detecting and visualizing injustice where it is naturalized. An afterlife of this project will be a publicly available visualization that allows viewers to submit recollections and documentation of segregated beaches known to them.

   ![moses 1](/sites/g/files/omnuum10471/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-02/moses%201.jpg?itok=rcuX-m1u) 

 

   ![moses 2](/sites/g/files/omnuum10471/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-02/moses%202.jpg?itok=2mXd0FG6) 

 

   ![moses 3](/sites/g/files/omnuum10471/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-02/moses%203.jpg?itok=oBRl_BDb) 

 

   ![moses 4](/sites/g/files/omnuum10471/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-02/moses%204.jpg?itok=r0L5qJsw) 

 

Grant recipient(s): Sarah Moses