Ian: When most people think of Martha’s Vineyard, the Obama family and the movie Jaws may be the first things they recall about the New England Island. But author Bijan Bayne, who has been a longtime summer resident on the Vineyard, shatters any stereotypical ideas we have about the island, as he shares some insights into the significance of Martha’s Vineyard to the African-American community and its basketball legacy.
Bijan: You would meet people from all over the eastern seaboard, who your parents didn’t necessarily know or weren’t friends with, because of the league.
Ian: Travel writer Kathleen [Walls 00:00:34] is a lover of history, especially American history. She says that often times, certain parts of America’s history is overlooked because of shame and guilt, but that having a full understanding of our history can help inform our future.
Kathleen: I grew up in New Orleans, where Andrew Jackson’s so revered, and then I moved to north Georgia for awhile, and I got the Turkey side of the story, where obviously he’s not too revered. And I began to realize that there’s a lot of sides to stories sometimes that get overlooked.
Ian: Join us as we explore American history like never before on World Footprints with Ian-
Tonya: And Tonya Fitzpatrick.
Ian: Since his childhood, Bijan Bayne has been living in his family’s home on Martha’s Vineyard during the summer. He says that the Vineyard, as locals call it, is more than a playground for the rich and famous. The island actually has a rich heritage within the African-American community.
Bijan: My father’s mother had a home, and her mom bought it probably in 1943. Because of that, there’s a lot of multi-generational friends I have, where my father and mother are friends with the parents, and I grew up knowing the kids of people that have gone up there every summer since they were small. This was primarily in Oak Bluffs, and particularly in the second [inaudible 00:01:59] of Oak Bluffs that’s kind of quiet and off the beaten path, up above. It’s not down near the beach or the tennis courts or anything. They call it the Highlands, where the author Dorothy West and people like that lived.
Ian: Martha’s Vineyard has a significant history within the African-American community. We wondered how this has evolved over the years.
Bijan: It’s debatable and depends on, for some people, how long they’ve been going or why they started going, or who they knew that was their first entree, whether it was a friend or whether it was a relative or whether it was a spouse, and the spouse’s family. But in the 19th century, Bostonians and then, to a lesser degree, some New Yorkers who worked for well-to-do Boston families, often they were the laundresses, the hair stylists, the chauffeurs after the invention of the automobile, some cases the butlers, sometimes household staff, would accompany these families to Cape Cod on Martha’s Vineyard when the families would stay there for the summer.
Bijan: In some instances, especially in the part of Oak Bluffs that I was referring to earlier, the household staff lived in a smaller cottage on the same grounds as the family. So it was the size of a guest cottage, but eventually, a lot of Bostonians, and again, some New Yorkers, saved up to buy those cottages to host their own families in the summertime.
Tonya: One may wonder right now if Martha’s Vineyard was segregated at a time, if there were places on the island where African-Americans were not welcome or did not frequent.
Bijan: Well, I can only say by what people had written and said that had been going there since probably a little bit earlier than my father’s generation, because by the 40s a lot of people had bought these places. I’ve heard that some people on the island either could not, or were officially restricted, or if not officially restricted, discouraged from purchasing in Vineyard Haven or Edgartown, which are the other two reasonably prominent towns on the island.
Bijan: I haven’t been around to experience that, but I do know that Oak Bluffs had a considerably more noticeable black summer population than the other two towns, and I don’t know how much of it was due to restrictions on purchasing, and how much of it was due to just people wanting to live in that section of the island. The reason I say wanting to is because Oak Bluffs was settled, and there’s still the camp meeting grounds from the First Methodists who settled Martha’s Vineyard in the 17th century, so Oak Bluffs is sort of [inaudible 00:04:45].
Bijan: Oak Bluffs is where the gingerbread cottages are, Oak Bluffs has a little bit more of the nightlife and the ice cream establishments, and it’s where the oldest working carousel in the U.S. is, so even if a person bought in one of the other two cities later, or even further what they call up the island, or up island, a lot of the pulse of the island, especially in the evening, is in Oak Bluffs. I’m not sure if that didn’t work out for the best for those families, and there’s a beach right in town, where there isn’t in Vineyard Haven.
Tonya: As travel journalists, we seek out new places to visit. Because Bijan has been going to Martha’s Vineyard every summer since childhood, we asked him how he keeps his annual visits fresh.
Bijan: One way that I’ve done it, which is an organic thing and you’re not really noticing it when you’re doing it, is if you’re there when there’s a friend or a cousin or a coworker who’s never been, doing it through their eyes. That’s one way.
Bijan: Another way is, there are things that are popular now that weren’t as popular before the 90s, and then there are things that were very popular before the 90s, that people wouldn’t do as much now, because they
