A University of Mary Washington Professor Is uncovering the dark chapter of segregation In national parks/NPS file

"There will be some criticism by colored people against segregation. But I think we would be subject to more criticism by the colored people as well as the white people if we put them in with the white people." -- National Park Service Associate Director A.E. Demaray to Shenandoah National Park Superintendent J. Ralph Lassiter, July 26, 1937.

Establishing a national park during the United States' conflict with segregation was a struggle. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes was sympathetic to the place in society blacks were relegated to during the 1930s, and wanted to win "real justice and opportunity for the Negro at long last." But realistically achieving that in the newly designated Shenandoah National Park and elsewhere in the National Park System initially was little more than an aspiration he held.

“As a general rule, the National Park Service decided in the mid-1930s that they would abide by local law and custom in the states. So in Northern states, there were no segregated facilities provided," said Dr. Erin Devlin, a professor of American history at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

"But in those parts of the country where segregation was enforced, park officials decided that they would accommodate segregation. And so the states that were affected included the 11 former states of the Confederacy, as well as border states, like Kentucky and Maryland and Missouri and West Virginia."

A sign directed blacks to segregated picnic grounds at Lewis Mountain, Shenandoah National Park/NPS archives

Demaray's directive to Lassiter showed how that played out, and soon Lassiter went to work creating the Lewis Mountain Campground, the "Negro Area" in Shenandoah. Along with that campground for blacks, there were segegrated dining rooms, picnic grounds, and restrooms. Maps and signs directed blacks to destinations away from whites.

This was the landscape of segregation in some national parks during that divisive chapter of the country’s history. While the signs have been taken down and the separation erased, there remain remnants of that dark period in a number of parks today.

The arrival of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the White House in 1933 and his New Deal agenda at times were in conflict with Southern states, which continued to embrace racial segregation. While national parks were federal preserves, those located in states that held tight to Jim Crow laws challenged Interior and National Park Service officials in their efforts to treat all visitors equally. Even some park superintendents balked at moving away from segregated facilities.

“Harold Ikes was, before he became secretary of Interior, associated with the Chicago branch of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)," said Devlin. "And he’s perhaps most famous for allowing Marion Anderson (a celebrated African-American singer of the day) to perform at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to perform at Constitution Hall. He was certainly known as an ally and an advocate for African-American civil rights. But he was also a dedicated New Dealer, and in the 1930s Southern congressmen had disproportionate influence in the halls of Congress."

That strong Southern influence tempered what Ickes and National Park Service officials under him could do in the parks during the country's period of segregation.

"In Ickes’ case in regards to the national parks, he was trying to abide by his legal obligations under constitutional law, and balance his desire to advance civil rights for African-American citizens with the sort of the political necessity of being aware of the concerns of Southern congressmen," explained Devlin, who has been working on a historic resource study of segregation in the national parks of Virginia for the National Park Service.

A Park Service wayside exhibit provided some of the history of segregation at Shenandoah National ParkNPS

Shenandoah wasn't the only national park grappling with segregation. Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas, Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee, George Washington Birthplace National Monument in Virginia, Colonial National Historical Park in Virginia, and Prince William Forest Park, also in Virginia, all contain chapters from that period in U.S. history. At Prince William, for instance, "(C)amps One and Four had become known as Negro camps and Camps Two, Three and Five as white camps," the Park Service notes.

Devlin's research has uncovered instances of not only segregated campgrounds, but segregated pit toilets, restrooms, and parking lots, along with separate dining rooms, coffee shops, and cabins.

Ickes did not want these segregated facilities marked out on park maps, a decision the professor attributes to "a desire not to advertise that the parks were accommodating segregation, but also by desire not to naturalize segregation in the parks."

"Ickes had an advisor on Negro affairs named W. J. Trent, who himself was an African-American, and he supported the removal of designations like Negro and white from park literature and maps and signs because he didn’t want visitors to become accustomed to seeing the parks marked that way," Devlin said. "He felt that if the parks were clearly marked then people would come to assume that they would be segregated into perpetuity, and he felt that by leaving it somewhat unclear and ambiguous that policy might be more readily rolled back.”

In a study she prepared as a companion piece to Ken Burns' The National Parks, America's Best Idea, Susan Shumaker pointed out how the bathhouses at Hot Springs were segregated in the 1880s after a decade of whites and blacks sharing the waters, how Park Service officials thought it best to provide separate picnic grounds for blacks at the George Washington Birthplace National Monument, and the planning for "colored campgrounds" at Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

In 1893, the superintendent of Hot Springs required bathers to apply for baths at the Government Bathhouse strictly on the basis of poverty. Yet this was still the only bathhouse where African Americans, many of whom were affluent, were allowed to bathe at all hours. The new policy justifiably angered black visitors, who were forced to perjure themselves by signing a paper declaring their poverty before partaking of the springs. -- Untold Stories from America's National Parks by Susan Shumaker: Segregation in the Parks.

At the George Washington monument, there was an incident at the Wakefield picnic ground that involved a group of black schoolchildren from a Washington, D.C., convent. The superintendent told the group's leaders that they couldn't share the picnic grounds for whites, and led them to a location about a mile away, Shumaker discovered during her research. That prompted a letter of complaint to Roger Toll, the Park Service's assistant director. Toll in turn contacted Superintedent Philip Hough to explain his action.

"All in all, this is the most unpleasant visitation we have had in the seven summer seasons I have been here -- and all that happened was due to the fact that they were segregated for their lunch only," Hough wrote in his reply to Toll. "All I can say is that that is the way it's done in Virginia. If I did wrong, I'm sorry -- but then again if I had let them in the regular picnic ground we would no doubt be having complaints from the white visitors."

Some maps that designated Lewis Mountain "for Colored People" existed despite Ickes directive/NPS archives

But it was Shenandoah that stood out above the other Park Service properties for its segregated areas, which attracted nationally notable blacks. Among those who camped at Lewis Mountain and enjoyed the meals that Mittie Tutt, wife of campground manager Lloyd Tutt, served were Chester A. Franklin, the publisher of the Kansas City Call, a weekly African-American newspaper, and Benjamin O. Davis Jr., who was the first African-American general in the U.S. Air Force.

"These folks would come there fairly often with their families, and then go into D.C., on business," said Claire Comer, an interpretation specialist at Shenandoah who has explored the topic of segregation in the park. "And supposedly, according to at least one or a couple of oral histories that we have, one of the presidents came to visit."

That president was said to be Harry S Truman, who had developed a relationship with Franklin back in Missouri. Franklin was a conservative Republican, and looked down on Democrats with distain, figuring they wanted to "return to the days of the antebellum South," wrote Thomas D. Wilson in Chester A. Franklin and Harry S. Truman: An African-American Conservative and the "Conversion" of the Future President.

When he was president (March 1929-March 1933), Herbert Hoover would retreat to a small, woodsy compound not far north of Lewis Mountain. The compound initially was known as Camp Rapidan, and later referred to simply as Camp Hoover. The president, who often wore white flannels and a Panama hat while at the camp, held an arms-control summit there with British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, met with senators and congressmen, convened Cabinet meetings (separate cabins for Cabinet members where built down the road from Camp Rapidan), and held sessions with the day's leading industrialists as he sought a solution to the Great Depression. 

If President Truman, a Democrat, and Franklin, along with Davis, did indeed dine together at Lewis Mountain, their discussions at times likely took on the appearance of a domestic policy summit that most certainly included talk of civil rights and desegregation. Those talks could have fostered the president's ensuing Fair Deal initiative that stressed equal rights for all Americans.

The Lewis Mountain Campground had a reputation as "a hopping joint!" in the 1940s and 1950s/NPS

But the Lewis Mountain Campground was an exception to the rule of "separate but equal" that prevailed at the time.

"In many ways it’s not representative of the facilities that were available to African-American visitors," said Professor Devlin. "One thing that’s important to understand about this history is that at the time, Park Service Director Arno Cammerer had a policy that he would only build facilities in accordance with the demonstrated demand for them, from African-American visitors. And though while many parks had plans to build areas for African-American use, those facilities were often not built because of perceived low demand from African-American visitors, or perceived low interest in outdoor recreation.

“The Interior’s advisor on Negro affairs, W.J. Trent, protested that in applying that policy Cammerer was applying a standard to African-American visitors that he was not applying to white visitors."

The end result, Devlin said, was that facilities for blacks built across the park system during those years didn't match those built for whites. "In some cases, parks deprioritized or underfunded the development of facilities for African-American use, preferring instead to build those intended for white use first," she said.

Differences can be seen today at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park in Virginia, where Devlin and her students worked with the Park Service to interpret a "blacks only" restroom that remains intact there. While the restrooms for whites were built in the bottom of the visitor center and involved the use of polished stone on both the floor and the walls, the restroom for blacks was away from the visitor center in a service area, had a bare concrete floor, and common tiles on the walls.

"Eric Mink, the cultural resource manager at the park has done a great job preserving the historical integrity of some of the initial or original fixtures, so visitors today can see the difference between what was once a white only bathroom and what was once labeled as a colored men’s restroom," the professor said. "They can see the differences in the finishes in terms of the tiling, the size and scope of the facility, and of course its placement on the park landscape.”

Blacks only (left) and whites only men's restrooms at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park/NPS

Devlin's work, said Mink, is proving to be invaluable.

"For segregation at national parks, it’s something that is little known. We have very little information about it," he said. "For instance, here at Fredericksburg we know through construction drawings and photographs of our 1935 maintenance building that it had restrooms for African-American visitors, while restrooms for white or Caucasian visitors were inside the visitor center itself. And so, that’s all we had to go on. So we needed the context to look at our resources from the perspective of the National Park Service involved in Jim Crow laws and segregation.”

While park staff has discovered planning documents from the early 1930s and 1940s for construction of picnic areas for blacks, whether they were built is unknown. But that doesn't really matter in interpreting that period of history at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania, said Mink.

“The picnic areas for white or Caucasian visitors were constructed, and in the era of Jim Crow, as this park followed the Virginia laws, an African-American visitor showing up at the park wanting to lunch at a picnic area more than likely was not going to be allowed to lunch at the white picnic areas," he said. "So the white picnic areas that were constructed were segregation sites."

At Colonial National Historical Park, Devlin found "restroom facilities that were constructed in 1931 for the sesquicentennial of the Yorktown victory that are still completely intact, retain all their original fixtures. Those particular restrooms were designated for white use."

"The imprint of this history still remains on our park landscape, and that’s part of what I’m trying to understand. My study is both what was the policy of the (National Park Service) Washington, D.C., office in terms of how segregation would be implemented, and then what did that look like on the ground, in individual national parks?"

Also segregated during the 1930s was the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put young men to work building trails and facilities in the National Park System. They had camps, which were segregated, in Shenandoah, the Smokies, Colonial National Historical Park, and many other areas.

"Here in the state of Virginia, Colonial National Historical Park was completely developed with segregated African American CCC labor," Devlin pointed out. "The park actually had at one time five African-American CCC camps working there, which meant that there were 1,000 African-American enrollees working in the park at any given time to reshape that landscape and prepare it for visitors.

"So the contributions of those enrollees to the park system in the state of Virignia are really quite remarkable. As I tell my students today, the next time you drive down Colonial Parkway and you’re admiring the beautiful flowering redbuds and the dogwoods, and the landscape that surrounds you as you move through that space, that is a direct legacy of the contributions of African-American enrollees."

Segregated restroom facilities at Shenandoah National Park/NPS archives

America missed a great opportunity with those CCC crews, believes the professor.

“One of the things that I’ve been looking at as my study has proceeded is that program effectively trained thousands of African-American men in the basic principles of conservation and forestry, and what happened after the close of the CCC," she said. "While many white enrollees in the CCC ultimately did find their way into permanent positions in the technical staff of the National Park Service, the same opportunities for advancement were not extended for African-American enrollees. And so it really, in a way in retrospect, was a lost opportunity to substantially diversify the ranks of our National Park Service.”

It's somewhat ironic, but the decision to locate the "blacks only" campground at Lewis Mountain today has produced a very popular campground for all visitors, said the professor, who hopes to expand her study to other states were segregation was practiced. 

"This is certainly not a story that just affects parks in Virginia. It affects all those states that I mentioned," she said. "Really, it continues to shape the park landscape that we traverse today. Lewis Mountan, for example, is located in a relatively quiet part of the park, it’s not near a predominant entrance gate. It’s sort of tucked away in a quiet place, and now, it’s really popular because that’s what people are looking for in their camping experience, sort of an undiscovered gem tucked away, maybe a little quieter and off the beaten path."

Traveler postscript: You can listen to Traveler's conversation with Dr. Devlin and her research in this podcast.

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