Black Freedom and the Other Side of the Boardwalk
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This dissertation chronicles the Black Freedom Movement in Atlantic City, New Jersey, a city marketed as a site of leisure and fantasy, but maintained through the exploitation of Black labor, structural segregation, and political power brokers. It argues that Atlantic City’s political economy of tourism rendered Black lives invisible, thus generating the very conditions that fueled Black protest. By centering the city’s “Northside,” this manuscript illuminates how Black residents responded to systemic inequality through protest and coalition-building. Drawing on extensive archival sources and oral interviews with movement leaders and community members, this project expands the geographic and conceptual scope of civil rights and urban historiography. By reinterpreting landmark events, such as the 1964 Democratic National Convention and the 1968 Miss Black America pageant, through the lens of local Black activism, this dissertation establishes Atlantic City as a forgotten but significant site in the broader Black Freedom Movement. This study also recovers the city’s rich tradition of organizing through sustained campaigns for adequate housing, gainful employment, and culturally relevant education, led by militant grassroots organizations such as the Afro-American Unity Movement. It further illustrates how non-traditional political actors operating outside of national organizations shaped the most inclusive articulations of Black freedom and possibility. Finally, this dissertation argues that resort-based economies shaped by seasonal tourism and service labor pose nuanced challenges, often intensifying racial subjugation and producing cyclical patterns of displacement and exclusion under market-driven redevelopment. Ultimately, this project contends that Atlantic City is a microcosm of urban racial capitalism and an instructive site of Black resistance in the twentieth century.
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