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"The Slightest Semblance of Unruliness": Steamboat Excursions, Pleasure Resorts, and the Emergence of Segregation Culture on the Potomac River
Andrew W. Kahrl
| After he assumed management of the Potomac riverside resort Notley Hall in 1901, Lewis Jefferson, an African American businessman, general contractor, and real estate developer from southwest Washington, D.C., set out to rid the resort of its unsavory reputation. For years the resort, a popular destination for black riverboat excursion parties, had been labeled "Razor Beach" by white Washingtonians for the reported violence and debauchery of its guests and their frequent confrontations with the city's harbor patrol. Over the next several years, Jefferson worked to transform Notley Hall into a family-oriented amusement park. He renamed the resort Washington Park, closed the bar, instituted a code of conduct, and installed a roller coaster, carousel, penny arcade, and fortune-telling tent, among other modern attractions. Jefferson hoped to provide black Washingtonians of all backgrounds and persuasions a recreational space they could be proud of, one without the closed gates and hostile stares they confronted daily both in the city and on the river. "I have given you an up-to-date wharf, where before you had but an old coal shed," he reminded prospective guests. "Now it is modern, thoroughly lighted by electric lights and all of the modern improvements. There is no Jim Crow entrance and you are not subject to the humiliation of a practical quarantine."1 |
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Yet removing the stigma of Razor Beach from the minds of both white racists and black reformers required more than a mere structural face-lift. Although confrontations between black patrons and white police officers at Notley Hall diminished considerably within a few years after Jefferson began running it, the place was still seen as a magnet for the bawdier elements of black Washington. His white competitors spread "malicious and libelous stories" that the excursion steamer River Queen, which ferried guests to Notley Hall, "had been made, at different times, a cock pit, and a prize ring" where drunken women were knocked down and dragged across its deck and the police regularly summoned to "quell an affray." The park, they alleged, was no more than "a dumping ground for the roughs and riff-raff of Washington."2 |
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Despite Jefferson's protests and despite the claim in his advertisements that a dollar spent at Notley Hall was a dollar spent on black enterprise, many black Washingtonians were reluctant to embrace his riverside resort as a shining example of black initiative and a symbol of the upward mobility of their race. For years community leaders had extolled the virtues of black ownership and the need for African Americans to spend their hard-earned dollars at businesses that treated them with dignity and respect. Yet many of the most vocal proponents of racial self-sufficiency were conspicuously absent from the decks of Jefferson's steamers and Notley Hall's shores. From 1909 through 1911, a local black chapter of the Masons habitually shunned Jefferson's steamboats and resort in favor of segregated facilities aboard a white-owned steamer and Jim Crow service at River View, a white-owned resort.3 Jefferson's friends at the city's black-owned newspaper the Washington Bee were quick to note the hypocrisy of those self-proclaimed racial representatives: "The Negro who cries the loudest for race enterprises is the most deceiving and less race supporting.... The man who cries 'wolf' should himself be watched and chained, because he is more dangerous to the community than any other animal. The so-called intelligent Negro is the first to cry out against 'Jim Crowism,' and the first to 'Jim Crow' his own race and discriminate against himself."4 |
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