Did you know that more than forty civil rights activists were arrested protesting segregation at Glen Echo Park during the summer of 1960? Did you know that Frederick Douglass once visited what is now Collingwood Picnic Area? 

From the height of Jim Crow’s influence to the final years of the Civil Rights Movement, Black communities in America sought access to recreational facilities like pools, beaches and amusement parks. In this virtual seminar moderated by US national park ranger Daniel Blier, join two distinguished professors and authors of recent scholarship featuring Glen Echo and Collingwood Beach to learn the hidden history of these parks on the George Washington Memorial Parkway. 

Andrew W Kahrl is a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South, which won the 2013 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award, an annual award for the best book by a historian about the civil rights struggle, and The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation and Dispossession in America (forthcoming, April 2024).

Victoria W Wolcott is a professor of history and the director of the Gender Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of three books about African American history, including Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement (2022) and Race, Riots and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America (2012).

For adults and teens. Please register to receive a Zoom link to attend this virtual program.