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Andrew Kahrl

Andrew
Kahrl
Fellowship: 
Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow
Term in Residence: 
Full Year Fellow
Title / Appointment: 
Post Doctorate in African American History
Location: 
Indiana University

Contact Information

Address: 
104 Mount Auburn Street, 3R
Telephone: 
617-384-8350
E-Mail: 
akahrl@fas.harvard.edu

Biography Information

Andrew W. Kahrl is an assistant professor of history at Marquette University.  He received his Ph.D. in history from Indiana University in 2008.  His dissertation, titled “On the Beach: Race and Leisure in the Jim Crow South,” examines the segregation of bodies of water, and the history of separate African American beaches and resorts, in the American South.  An essay based on his research was awarded the 2007 Louis Pelzer Memorial Award from the Organization of American Historians.  Articles based on his research have been published in the Journal of American History and the Journal of Social History.  Andrew has received fellowships and grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies, the North Caroliniana Society, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina.  As a student at Indiana University, Andrew served as an editorial assistant at the Journal of American History and as a research consultant for the Liberian Collections Project, an initiative aimed at collecting, preserving, and making available materials and information on Liberia to researchers, students, and teachers, with a focus on reaching Liberians in Liberia and in the diaspora.  In 2001, Andrew received his B.A. in history and American Studies from Kenyon College, a small liberal arts school in Gambier, Ohio.

Andrew and wife, Aileen, live in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Project Description

Race, Class, and the Law along America's Coastlines, 1945 to the Present

This project asks what the history of African American beaches and resorts in the American South can teach us about the politics of leisure in the Jim Crow South (ca. 1890-1965). Through case studies, this project examines the creative measures African Americans adopted to secure and defend leisure spaces along Southern waterways.  The rise of segregated commercial amusement and tourism industries severely restricted African Americans’ access to bodies of water for pleasure and amusement, and contributed to the emergence of a pathological image of black leisure in popular culture.  In the face of such obstacles, African Americans struggled to circumvent exclusions, mitigate humiliating conventions, combat stereotypes, and capitalize on segregation. African Americans contested their exclusion from city parks and playgrounds, and relegation to the most remote and environmentally hazardous sections of rivers, lakes, and coastlines.  The development of attractive and accessible black beaches and resorts free from white harassment emerged as a major political issue in the long civil rights movement. Conversely, whites worked hard to suppress the fruition of black beaches and resorts comparable to their own, and to ensure that black leisure spaces conformed to, rather than challenged, practices of power and privilege.  A flashpoint of the era’s gender and economic anxieties, and a mechanism of environmental inequality, bodies of water became, for both white and black Southerners, pivotal and contested sites in the manufacturing and dismantling of Jim Crow, and the making and unmaking of racial difference. In examining how middle-class black Southerners worked to develop dignified leisure spaces of their own, places that were both shielded from and a conscious rebuke of white harassment and derision, my project offers important insights into the role of leisure in African Americans’ long struggle for social and economic justice.