The Segregated Shore: Bethune Beach and the Fight for the Water

For the first half of the twentieth century, if you were Black and you lived in Daytona Beach, the World's Most Famous Beach was not yours. The white sand that attracted speed racers and tourists and winter celebrities was legally off limits to Black residents. This was not a local quirk. Segregated beaches were standard practice across the South, enforced by custom and, when custom was not enough, by violence.

The alternative for Black residents was a stretch of shoreline about twelve miles south of the city in a community that came to be called Bethune Beach. In nineteen forty-five, the year after President Roosevelt's death, Mary McLeod Bethune was involved in making that shoreline accessible to Black families, a small piece of coastline that became one of the few beach destinations available to African Americans anywhere in Florida.

Bethune Beach was an unusual space: a Black resort community that attracted Black professionals, educators, and civil rights leaders during the era of segregation. It was celebrated as a rare experiment in Black capitalism on the Florida coast. But it was also a symbol of exclusion: that this particular stretch of sand was necessary at all was a measure of how thoroughly the rest of the coast was closed.

Daytona Beach remained deeply segregated through the nineteen fifties, as segregated as virtually any city in the Deep South by the accounts of civil rights workers active there during that period. The beach itself was not desegregated until the civil rights era brought sustained legal and social pressure to bear across Florida.

The water today belongs to everyone equally under law. Bethune Beach, now part of the broader Bethune Beach community in Volusia County, still carries that name as a reminder of what was required to make something as basic as a shoreline accessible to all.