Abstract: This essay focuses on New Orleans’s first and only beach for Black citizens, Lincoln Beach. It tells a particular story about Louisiana’s legal and governing aims under Jim Crow between the 1880s and 1960s. It argues that the Orleans Levee Board, the government agency that created Lincoln Beach, developed the land in the name of public interest as an economic bet on the success of segregation in the city. Additionally, the article looks at Lincoln Beach as a unique place to examine leisure in New Orleans and Louisiana, with geographic and legal realities that highlight the failures of segregation. Through focusing on memories, laws, and the land itself as evidence, this project reconstructs Lincoln Beach as a place of cultural significance for Black New Orleanians, tracing its little-known history alongside state neglect and dispossession.
Shruti Gautam (Sun,) studied this question.