The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
The Ned Coll story reminds us our beaches aren’t open to all
Ned Coll was walking along the beach in Madison when he encountered a property owner who was standing on a sea wall, staring angrily at the “intruder.” “What are you doing here?” the man shouted at Coll.
“I’m walking here!” Coll told him.
“I paid for this wall!” the property owner said.
“I paid for this water,” Coll replied. “Who cleans up an oil slick here? The state of Connecticut. That’s my tax money.”
“This property is mine and you have no right to it,” the man said. (Maybe he was conveniently ignorant of the fact that the beach below the average high tide mark is public.)
Coll walked back toward the property man and pointed at the man’s American flag. “If this is how you feel about freedom,” Coll told him, “you ought to take down that flag.”
It was a classic Ned Coll moment and I was there to witness it as a reporter on that hot day in July 1977.
The headline on my story in the New Haven Register: “Blistered and besieged, Ned Coll forges on.” The subhead was what Coll muttered as he stalked away from that angry property owner: “They think they own the whole Long Island Sound.”
I was there for just a small part of that 12-day odyssey; Coll and two of his supporters walked the entire Connecticut shoreline. The hostility toward Coll intensified as he headed west, into the superwealthy towns of Fairfield County. When Coll had another confrontation with a homeowner, they exchanged blows. Coll got a black eye to go with his blisters.
You might be wondering: why bring this up again now? Isn’t this just ancient history for us, an odd series of events by a crusader in the 1970s? No, I think it’s an evergreen issue. Summer’s here and the time is right for us to start thinking about how we use our beaches and how they might be shared with poor people who are stuck in hot cities such as New Haven, Hartford and Bridgeport.
People of a certain age remember how Coll dramatically called attention to the “open beaches” issue. Coll, a white activist who then lived in Hartford, would bring a busload of black kids and their adult supervisors to a beach in Madison, Clinton, Branford, Old Saybrook or Westport and assert their right to swim below the high water mark.
As you might imagine, this did not go over well. They were not welcomed. Many parents rounded up their kids and kept them away from the strange, unknown black children. Others called out racist remarks. There were only a few property owners who dared risk the wrath of their neighbors by saying: “Sure, you can come into my house and be my guest. Go ahead and use my bathrooms.”
Coll had creative ways to attract reporters and shine a light on Connecticut’s unequal beach scene. Perhaps his greatest stunt came on July 4, 1974, when he arranged for a parachutist carrying a banner reading “Free America’s Beaches” to land in the water alongside the Madison Beach Club at the same time Coll and 65 mothers, kids and volunteers from Hartford hopped off three boats and waded ashore. Coll triumphantly planted an American flag in the sand.
Scenes such as this are described in detail in a new book by Andrew W. Kahrl, “Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline” (Yale University Press).
Kahrl certainly did his homework. The book provides a record and explanation of how Connecticut’s beachfront properties were gobbled up throughout the 20th century by private beach associations and wealthy people who had the money to buy land near the water and build homes there. Then the residents passed exclusionary zoning laws and set up regulations making it all but impossible for poorer out-of-towners to get to the beach.
Kahrl also wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, published last month. He titled it “The North’s Jim Crow” and explained how Connecticut and other parts of the Northeast set up their own version of the Jim Crow laws that discriminated against black people in the South.
In his essay and in his book, Kahrl told how Constance Baker Motley, who grew up in New Haven during the 1930s and later became a civil rights icon and judge, accompanied two white teenage friends to a private beach in Milford.
“Although Motley’s white friends were not members (of that beach association), they went there often,” Kahrl wrote in his op-ed. “But with an African-American joining them, Motley recalled, ‘there was suddenly a membership requirement.’ The three returned to New Haven, Motley dripping in sweat and stewing in indignation, her white friends having learned an important Jim Crow lesson.”
In his book, Kahrl often uses the word “segregated” to describe our Connecticut beaches. He said the
many restrictive laws and policies of shoreline towns have made “this form of segregation” almost impossible to undo. “Ned Coll was among the few who tried.”
Reading Kahrl’s book didn’t make me proud to be a Connecticut resident. Some of the attacks on Coll and his followers were shocking. Example: in 1972 Coll rented a cabin in Old Lyme, using it to gain beach access for those Hartford kids. Throughout the summer, there were frequent harassing phone calls made to the cabin. It was broken into, ransacked and vandalized. After the summer ended, somebody set fire to the cabin and it was destroyed.
In the summer of 1973, Coll set up operations in a cluster of cabins in Madison. He and his supporters were regularly subjected to racist epithets. Then, on June 1, two white men invaded a cabin and pounced on one of Coll’s female volunteers. They punched her and cut her face with a shard of broken glass. Madison police never tracked down the assailants.
I also ruefully realized while reading Kahrl’s book that neither I nor anyone in my family, in all the years we rented cottages on a private beach in Madison (I no longer rent there) ever invited a dark-skinned city kid to join us.
Coll labored for many years, well beyond the 1970s, to help poor people by rounding up volunteer tutors, delivering heating oil to cold families, etc. In 1972, he ran for president, using loopholes in state laws to assemble enough signatures to get onto the ballot. During a presidential debate, he illustrated the problems faced by poor city residents by holding up a large rubber rat.
Whatever happened to Ned Coll? I was able to reach him by phone last week at his home, a cabin in rural Barkhamsted, quite a different setting from his longtime inner city Revitalization Corps office and apartment in Hartford. He is now 78, divorced and lives alone in the cabin.
But Coll told me “I’m very upbeat about stuff.” He credited Jesus Christ for this and often during our conversation recounted what Kahrl wrote in his book: Coll believes that on Pentecost Sunday of 1990 he had a “vision” and saw the Virgin Mary. Coll now describes himself as a prophet.
Coll told me Christ “helped me walk all those miles” of shoreline protest. “It was all part of God’s plan.”
He believes his years of effort “had an impact” on the shoreline issue. But he acknowledged that still only about six miles of Connecticut’s 253 miles of shoreline are accessible to the public.
“As we get into the summer,” Coll said, “people should share the beach. They could have poor children and their families as guests.”
Coll seems to still have some fight in him. “I’m thinking of doing a prayer walk along the Connecticut shoreline this summer,” he said.
We agreed to keep in touch. As we ended our conversation, Coll signed off by saying; “Godspeed.”