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Recreation and Race in the Postwar City: Buffalo's 1956 Crystal Beach Riot
Victoria W. Wolcott
| In his 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King Jr. explained African Americans' impatience for justice. "When you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering," wrote King, "as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children ... then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."1 King's daughter, Yolanda Denise, was not the only black child to be inundated with summer advertisements for local amusement parks. Across the country, North and South, young African Americans discovered that timeworn discriminatory laws and practices limited their access to urban amusement parks. Since amusement parks were emblematic of American youth culture, the exclusion was particularly painful for black teenagers. After World War II young African American consumers and civil rights activists forced open the gates of America's funtowns. The racial conflict that ensued reveals the depth of anger and emotion at the heart of segregated leisure. |
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Contemporary civil rights leaders were uneasy about the young African Americans who informally desegregated public accommodations in northern cities. To many they were "juvenile delinquents" whose destructive behavior might harm delicate race relations in a city. Just as such teens have not been recognized as important historical actors in twentieth-century racial dramas, northern cities and recreation remain understudied sites of the civil rights movement. Yet a 1956 riot at Crystal Beach, in Ontario, across Lake Erie from Buffalo, New York, was a central battleground in the struggle for open public accommodations. Although the park was never segregated by law, few African Americans visited before the increase of black southern migration in the 1950s. On Memorial Day 1956, thousands of young white and black Buffalonians packed onto the Canadiana, the steamship that ferried customers to the park.2 By the end of the evening, all of Buffalo was talking about the violence that broke out at Crystal Beach and continued on the boat ride back. The next day newspapers, government offices, and members of civil rights organizations across the country were discussing the riot's implications. Yet the riot resulted in no deaths, only a handful of injuries, and little property damage—indeed, the term "riot" seems misplaced. The gap between the incident's small scale and the furor it created raises a question. Why did the tumult at Crystal Beach and on the steamship touch a public nerve? The answer lies in contrasting white and black visions of integrated recreation. The African American teenagers at Crystal Beach, many of them recent migrants to the city, asserted their right to enjoy commercial recreation. But for white Buffalonians the presence of young African Americans at Crystal Beach awoke fears that their families were unsafe in an era of integration. |
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For many whites safety and segregation were bound together. Urban amusement parks had long marketed themselves to white families as clean, wholesome, and secure spaces. In the 1920s, for example, Crystal Beach maintained "an excellent protective social service" agency on site staffed by Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) workers. Most parks prohibited gambling and drinking and hired private police officers willing to throw out "undesirables." Park owners banned African Americans entirely or actively discouraged their attendance as a means of advertising park safety to the white public. Within this "idealized public place," visitors could safely transgress norms by dressing in beach clothing, screaming on roller coasters, and reveling in the pleasure of a day off. Indeed, amusement parks, according to the sociologist Sharon Zukin, were ideally an "imaginary landscape" that provided "a retreat from the real world of power" where one could play freely without danger.3 As the political climate and demographic makeup of many cities changed, young African American consumers threatened the amusement parks' image as a safe retreat from urban ills. |
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