A Season Of Joy & Hidden Lines
By: Kadiatou Barry
African American children enjoying a moment of joy and laughter
Source: Picturing Black History
Summertime is often remembered as the most freeing season of childhood. Often consisting of long days filled with laughter, road trips, family visits, and many other excursions. It’s a time we tend to romanticize, suspended between school years and bathed in the glow of possibility. As I explored the HistoryMakers Archive for stories about summer, I expected warmth and nostalgia. Instead, I noticed a different pattern of lessons in race, place, and identity enacted by the harsh reality of segregation.
Whether it appeared in the form of separate entrances, forbidden swimming pools, or invisible neighborhood lines, summer became more than just a time of play. It became the backdrop for a subtle, often unspoken education in what it meant to be Black in America. For many children, the long days weren’t only about freedom they were also when the limits of that freedom became painfully clear.
Former Illinois Congresswoman the Honorable Cardiss Collins talks about the summers she spent in Cairo, Illinois, with her grandparents, and she recalls a specific memory from her summers there.
“But in the summertime, I'd go to Cairo, Illinois where she was at that time and spend the whole summer…. My grandmother took us to the movie, me and my two cousins. And we had to go in the balcony to sit down, and I asked my grandmother why I, we, couldn't go down to the front and sit in the front row so I could see the movie. And she said we were not allowed. And I never forgot that, and I asked my mother why we were not allowed, because we didn't have that problem in St. Louis as far as I knew”
Cell biologist George Langford had a moment of understanding and realization under the hot, scorching July sun in a fruit farm.
“I can recall a time when I was younger, before I understood how this worked. I was working with my mother [Lillie Virginia Grant Langford]. We, in order to earn extra money we would, sometimes my mother would take us to work in the fields of one of the white farmers. We could chop or pull weeds in the summertime. And I recall, this is a very hot day in July, and I was with my mother out in the field weeding cotton or peanuts or something. And I looked to the house, to the farmer's house, where there was a kid, his kid, the same age as I was. He was riding his bike in the shade. So I asked Mom, "Why isn't he out here pulling weeds like I am?" And she said, you know, "Do you not know the color of your skin?" You know, it was sort of the first time that I realized the difference in, you know, the life of a white kid versus a Black kid.”
Ballerina dancer Sandra Fortune-Green, reflects on her summers that she had no idea were shaped by segregation.
“When I was a child, when I used to go to my [maternal] grandparents' [Lucille Davis and Coley Davis] house in the summertime. Now I'm a little older. But as a kid, I had no clue that we couldn't go to certain pools in the neighborhood at that time. This was in the early '50s [1950s] at that time that I had no clue.”
All three HistoryMakers experienced the sting of segregation at a young age, and in both cases, it was the adults around them who quietly reinforced its presence. This delivery subtly placed the burden on the children to adapt, making them feel as though the restrictions were somehow their responsibility. The question of “Why can’t we sit there?” or “Why isn’t he working too?” planted the first seeds of awareness about a world divided by race and the quiet burdens placed on Black children to navigate it.
At the same time, it’s important to hold space for the adults in these memories, as many were doing their best to protect their children as a survival mechanism. For generations who had endured harsher, more dangerous forms of racial violence, a quiet explanation or a gentle redirection was not indifference, but strategy. Their silences were often acts of survival and ways to preserve innocence just a little longer in a world that refused to see Black childhood as fully innocent.
A segregated Theatre
Source: The University of Chicago Press Journals
Faced with exclusion, many families found ways to protect their dignity or create their own joy. The same instincts that led parents to soften the blow of injustice also fueled quiet acts of resistance and many efforts to reclaim control, comfort, and pride in everyday life.
Lawyer David Baker Lewis remembers how his father handled the threat of rejection when going to restaurants in Detroit.
“He would drive over to Windsor [Canada] to the Prince Edward Hotel [Windsor, Canada] where we could go into the main dining room and have a you know a wonderful lunch rather than trying one of the hotels downtown because of the fear of being rejected because they're not serving you know blacks. So yeah I had the consciousness about that and that was made me very aware.”
A woman at a protest in New Orleans
Source: 64 Parishes
Former CEO and executive director of the NAACP, Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. shared ways his parents took action when they were denied community recreational spaces.
“In the summertime, you know, I was a kid. I would play, I'd play marbles..Because of, again, segregation, we had no recreation facilities. So my mother [Elisabeth Ridley Chavis] and father owned some land that they turned into a baseball field.”
In the face of systemic denial and the quiet violence of segregation, Black families created their own spaces for joy, not just as a response to exclusion, but as a declaration of worth and safety. Segregation wasn’t only about denied access; it carried the emotional weight of being made to feel unwelcome and less than. By building fields, rerouting meals, and carving out safe spaces, families offered their children not just comfort but protection from a world intent on limiting them.
City Council member Linda Cropp remembers traveling alone to Atlanta during her school breaks.
“When I got out of school during the summertime, I would immediately go down to Atlanta. I would either take the train and it seems impossible in those days, or I would take the train by myself or the airplane by myself and go down. They'd meet me at the train station. If it was the train, it was during that time when you would carry a lunch on the train in a shoebox. And the reason was because there was still segregation. And—plus, I don't think my mom really wanted me, wandering around too much on the train, but it was still segregation on the train and in the airports and things like such as that when I first started out. And I would go to Atlanta and stay with my maternal grandparents during that time.”
Photographer Don West recalls towns in Massachusetts, specifically Cape Cod being exclusionary to African American families but one stood out.
“Mashpee at that time in the 1940s and '50s [1950s] was a place where African Americans could go to vacation in the summertime, a part of the cape that they could go to, because it was an Indian [Native American] town and they were welcome there. But they were not welcome in other parts. Because even though, you know, as I spoke, how race didn't really play too much into my consciousness in those days, it was happening…whereas other parts of Cape Cod [Massachusetts] which were white were not so welcoming.”
Former FBI agent and corporate executive Carver Gayton recalls rules that were unspoken yet followed.
“The whites stayed on the other end, and so you would--there'd be this big, you know, you were really brave if you went on the side where the whites were 'cause, you know, they'd look at you funny and all that sort of stuff. The Black kids wouldn't be with the whites at the other--sometimes a little bit of intermingling, but those were the kinds of things that--you 'member it was, you know, you didn't think of it as that offensive, not necessarily, I mean as a kid, you know, that was just part of growing up.”
These stories reveal the many layers of segregation that shaped Black childhoods beyond just physical spaces. Whether traveling alone on segregated trains, finding rare havens being welcomed by Native American communities, or navigating unspoken social boundaries at local swimming holes, these experiences underscored the constant negotiation of belonging and exclusion. Together, they highlight how Black children learned early on that the rules of society often placed them at the margins, yet within those margins, they found resilience, community, and moments of joy.
Summertime, often imagined as a carefree season of freedom and play, was for many Black children a complex landscape shaped by segregation’s harsh realities. These stories illuminate how summertime, despite its promise of freedom, also became a time when Black children first deeply felt the boundaries imposed by race, while simultaneously finding pockets of community, joy, and resistance within those limits. Black families created their own spaces for joy, not only as a response to exclusion but also as a declaration of worth and safety. Segregation carried the emotional weight of being made to feel unwelcome and less than, but through acts of resistance and creation, families nurtured dignity and protection. These memories remind us that the fight against segregation was not just a political struggle but a deeply personal and communal effort to preserve childhood innocence and hope.
A 1920s photo
Source: “Living The American Dream” by Solomon Sir Jones
Citations
The Honorable Cardiss Collins (The HistoryMakers A2010.059), interviewed by Larry Crowe, June 28, 2010, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 1, story 9, The Honorable Cardiss Collins recalls segregation in Cairo, Illinois
George Langford (The HistoryMakers A2012.165), interviewed by Larry Crowe, August 6, 2012, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 3, story 4, George Langford describes his experience during segregation in Potecasi, North Carolina
Sandra Fortune-Green (The HistoryMakers A2007.270), interviewed by Cheryl Butler, September 23, 2007, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 1, story 9, Sandra Fortune-Green remembers the segregation of Washington, D.C.
David Baker Lewis (The HistoryMakers A2007.081), interviewed by Larry Crowe, March 9, 2007, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 3, story 5, David Baker Lewis describes his father's activism in the community
Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. (The HistoryMakers A2004.267), interviewed by Racine Tucker Hamilton, December 20, 2004, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 1, story 10, Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. talks about his childhood activities in Oxford, North Carolina
Linda Cropp (The HistoryMakers A2005.013), interviewed by Racine Tucker Hamilton, January 13, 2005, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 1, story 5, Linda Cropp talks about her maternal grandparents and her summer visits with them in Atlanta
Don West (The HistoryMakers A2016.078), interviewed by Larry Crowe, October 22, 2016, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 2, story 7, Don West describes his experiences of segregation in Massachusetts
Carver Gayton (The HistoryMakers A2008.080), interviewed by Larry Crowe, June 4, 2008, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 3, story 8, Carver Gayton remembers segregation in Seattle, Washington