In 1950s, Greenwich club for Black professionals defied norms
GREENWICH — At the edge of the Greenwich shoreline, at the bottom of Byram Shore Road, a small island rises from Long Island Sound.
It’s called Shore Island, and today it hosts little more than a stand of trees, a crumbling seawall, shore birds and a small sandy beach.
But the island looms large in African-American history — one of the few places in the area where Black people could enjoy an ocean breeze and watch their kids play in the sand during the era of widespread segregation before the civil-rights movement of the 1960s.
As Black History Month commences, overlooked stories such as that of the Lee Haven Beach Club are brought to light by educators and archivists.
The Lee Haven Beach Club, as it was known, was once the site of a beach club reserved for African Americans, a place they could call their own. As a shelter from the segregated world that excluded Black people from recreational opportunities and beaches that white Americans took for granted, it attracted Black professionals from as far as Washington, D.C., to summer on the little island.
The beach club was also closely entwined with a couple from Greenwich, Alver and Berenice Napper, early civil rights pioneers. The Nappers fought to integrate local businesses, improve opportunities for young Black people in southern Connecticut and provide a measure of dignity and respect for Black people, rich or poor, when such qualities were often in short supply.
Alver Napper, who was the treasurer of Lee Haven during its existence as a beach club for Black people from 1949 to 1952, was also the director of the Crispus Attucks Community Center, which was a recreational and advocacy organization for Black people in Greenwich. His wife, before the couple divorced, was an accomplished musician in addition to her work in the early civil rights movement and political organizing.
Alver Napper, whose oral history of Lee Haven and Black history in Greenwich has been archived at the Greenwich Public Library, said the beach club had a serious purpose beside summertime fun.
“I like to think of this island, of this club, as being one of the milestones in the evolution of the recreational aspirations of the Black people of this area,” he recalled in a interview in the 1970s.
He said the club provided Black people with “the luxury of recreation, which has been a luxury that most Black people could not share.”
Napper died in 2002 at the age of 91 in Stamford, where he moved after many years living in Old Greenwich. In his oral history, he recalled how difficult it was for Black people to find recreational opportunities at local clubs and fitness clubs. Even bowling alleys were typically off-limits, he recalled, and a Black church basement was usually the only place Black people could find a bit of fun or quiet time on their day off from work.
Andrew Kahrl, a professor at the University of Virginia who has written extensively about Black beaches around the U.S., said the shoreline enclaves
served a valuable purpose.
“They grew out of a need for leisure space in a hostile, segregated society, one in which African Americans, both individually and as groups, were not welcomed at whiteowned or even public recreational spaces. That necessitated the development of separate Black leisure spaces,” he said in a recent interview. “They served an important need in Black life. They provided spaces of relaxation and community.”
Shore Island near Byram Park was once the home of a rowdy and boozy saloon, with it roots in the days of Prohibition and rum-running along the Connecticut shoreline, variously known as the Pirate’s Den or the Pieces of Eight Club. A Black real-estate agent and developer from Mamaroneck, N.Y., James O. Hagens, purchased the island in the late 1940s and created a club for African-American residents to use in the summer months. It was named Lee Haven, referring to the small “haven” and beach area on the leeward side of the island.
In time, four buildings were built that accommodated dozens of guests during the summer. But there was resistance at every step of the way, Napper recalled.
There was a fight for the club to obtain a liquor license. There was opposition to the use of a municipal parking lot nearby for club visitors. There was a fight over the use of a small ferry boat, worked with a rope and pulley, to take club guests out to the island.
Lee Haven attracted a large contingent of wealthy Black professionals from New York — lawyers, doctors and teachers who found a way to advance themselves at a time when employment and educational opportunities were difficult for African Americans — as well as locals from Connecticut, Napper recalled. Some sailed to the island on their boats and docked there. The others drove and ferried a short distance to the little island. Meals were served three times a day, and a family-oriented routine revolved around swimming, boating, dances, lawn parties, games and beach time, Napper said.
While Lee Haven was a rarity on the Connecticut shoreline, there were other beach resorts around the
region and the mid-Atlantic where Black people carved out recreation spaces of their own that still thrive to this day. Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard has been a longtime destination for Black beach-lovers, as well as Azurest in the village of Sag Harbor on Long Island, N.Y. Highland Beach in Maryland was founded by Black abolitionists in 1893.
A number of others have vanished.
“There were hundreds,” said Kahrl, who has also written extensively about exclusionary policies at beaches in Greenwich and the Connecticut shoreline. But their existence was often in conflict with their surrounding communities, he said.
“Many of them were subject to forms of attack, whether it be arson, harassment from white neighbors, or from local government — zoning codes and other measures to wipe them off the map. Many of these places faced a variety of obstacles,” Kahrl said.
Class divisions were the Lee Haven beach club’s downfall, according to Napper’s recollections. The upper-income professionals from New York City and Westchester County, N.Y., wanted to keep the club exclusive — “they wanted to change the constitution of the club so you had to be a professional” — and turn away workingclass Black people, Napper said. The professionals eventually withheld funds from the Lee Haven Club’s operations, and the ensuing financial crunch caused the club to fold in 1952.
After that, a hurricane did extensive damage, and vandals and thieves did the rest. The buildings were all torn down: “Gone back to nature now,” Napper said of the club’s demise.
While the beach club lasted only a short time, Alver and Berenice Napper left a long legacy in the region.
Napper, a native of Georgia whose family moved to Hartford, graduated from Virginia State College (now a university) and later earned a master’s degree from the The Hartford School of Religious Education.
In 1938, in need of a job during the Depression, he became a toll collector on the Merritt Parkway, the first Black toll-collector, he believed, in the nation.
Later he served as the director of the Crispus Attucks Center, on Railroad Avenue in Greenwich, named for an early Black patriot killed in the the Boston Massacre by British troops in the years leading to the American Revolution. The center offered recreation to Black people, provided scholarships and guidance, and, Napper recalled, worked “to try and develop a new outlook for Black people,” one of ambition and determination.
Napper later worked as a probation officer for the state of Connecticut until his retirement in 1976.
Berenice Napper, a native of Norwalk who was a renowned singer and pianist, once hosted the prominent African-American opera singer Marian Anderson at the couple’s home in Old Greenwich. A graduate of the Howard University School of Music in Washington, she was a state social worker and
claims examiner for the state’s unemployment department.
In her capacity as a civil rights leader, Napper was a field secretary for the national office of the NAACP, lecturing, organizing membership drives and directing civil-rights campaigns around the country. She died in 2009 at the age of 92.
She was the first Black woman to run for local office in Greenwich, organizing a petition drive to get on the ballot for the Board of Selectman, in 1983 and again in 1985. Napper only garnered a fraction of the vote both times, but she was undeterred by the odds against her, she told a newspaper reporter at the time.
“You don’t get anywhere if you don’t venture,” she said.