Essential Businesses of Oak Bluffs: Black Heritage in the Highlands
“For millennia, Black people have sought respite from systemic racism and found refuge from racial terror in Martha’s Vineyard, a New England island, and other coastal communities open to African American homeownership after the Depression (e.g., Sag Harbor). Films like The Wedding (1998) and The Inkwell (1994) and media coverage of Obama family vacations have shed light on the island’s Black cultural landscape, but have also obscured its commercial infrastructure. Aidoo proposes in this paper that boarding houses, rental homes, and inns owned and operated by Black families have defined the “Main Streets” of Oak Bluffs. Scattered across the island’s Highlands, residences rented seasonally to Black church congregations, fraternal organizations, alumni associations, and advocacy collectives sustain the island’s cultural economy despite decades of encroachment on this disaggregated Black Wall Street. Preservation practices of ‘The Cottagers,’ Aidoo argues, raise the stakes of “managed retreat”—from coastal storm surge to speculative economic development.”
