AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. – As summer comes to an end, many families are planning those final beach trips.
One of those beaches is American Beach on Amelia Island. There is a good chance, many of the people who visit, don’t know the storied history of what was once one of the only Black beaches in our area.
For Black families in Jacksonville, American Beach was the place to be for recreation during segregation.
The surf and sand offered a brief escape from the realities of racism.
American Beach is what founder Abraham Lincoln Lewis called, ”Recreation and relaxation without humiliation.”
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A.L. Lewis was the President and Founder of the Afro-American Life Insurance Company, also known as The Afro, which helped Black Americans obtain affordable policies and mortgages.
He was also Florida’s first Black millionaire. In 1935, he bought 33 acres on Amelia Island. That eventually grew to 216, and he named it American Beach.
It was soon filled with restaurants and beachfront properties owned by Black families.
Author Marsha Phelts has lived at American Beach for decades. Her passion can be felt through the words of her book, “An American Beach for African Americans,” which documents the Lewis’ and the beach’s history.
“We felt like this is our beach. This is where our people accept and want us, and this is where we can have a good time and no harassment,” she said “What he wanted was a place where we were welcome. Not on Thursdays only a place where we could go not from this hour, you know, from sunup to sundown, but a place that you could belong at a place that you could call your own.
World-renowned anthropologist Dr. Johnnetta Betsch Cole, is Lewis’s great-granddaughter.
“AL Lewis believed in the core of his being that there should be nothing that looked like, smelled like, could be, even imagined, that people should be superior simply because of the color of their skin,” Cole said. “He really devoted his life, even though he was a millionaire, trying to contribute to a time when there would be no such thing as systemic racism.”
Memories of visiting the beach as a child bring back warm feelings of comfort for Phelts.
“It’s like being a big momma’s house. And it ain’t no better place to be than at Big momma’s house who loves you, embraces you, and you’re comfortable and you are protected,” Phelts said.
Movers and shakers from Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie to James Brown, all paid a visit to American Beach, specifically, popular nightclub Evans’ Rendezvous.
“You ever been to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans,” Phelts asked. “That’s just what you saw when you got to American beach. That’s exactly what that was the atmosphere.”
Laws preventing Blacks and whites from sharing water were prevalent in the Jim Crow South.
A 1924 ordinance at Jacksonville Beach, then known as Pablo Beach, made it a crime for Black people to get in the water.
Setting one foot in a wave could cost them $125 and their freedom.
“And if I went to the beach, I got to be the nanny taking your white baby to the beach. But I cannot go down to that beach just to bathe and in. enjoy myself,” Phelts said. “You know the discrepancies. And, you know, the abuse of you as a citizen. And I just say all the time about My Country Tis of Thee sweet land of liberty. Does it include me? My country? Unrequited love? Change the subject.”
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In Dr. Martin Luther King’s quest for equal rights for all, he stayed at the beach’s motels as wade-ins were held, before the Civil Rights of 1964 was signed into law.
Months later, Hurricane Dora moved in, destroying businesses and homes along several streets of American Beach.
That’s when its appeal started to fade and the beaches that once barred Black Americans became accessible.
“We deserted American Beach, and we found the charm of Daytona Beach World’s Finest beach, we found the charm of Miami Beach, and other places like that. And so we did not bring our businesses back here,” Phelts said.
The history of American Beach lives on in the Black families who still call this area home. However, that history is slowly vanishing.
“The color is fading. And the residents are aging. And so we got some serious issues,” Phelts said.
Today, million-dollar homes are being built on land once considered less desirable.
Phelts remembers, and wonders, if others will too.
“My hope is to continue the legacy and heritage and be a place of affordable Well, affordability for the average citizen. I don’t want this to be an exclusive Millionaire’s club only I don’t want that. I want us to be able to continue to be open To Have and people enjoy and feeling like they belong,” she said.
Today, American Beach is just a little more than 100 acres, after one of A.L. Lewis’ great-grandsons sold part of the land to Nassau County.
The A.L. Lewis Museum on Julia Street in Nassau County, along with its board of directors, actively work today to continue to preserve the beach’s history.