The summer of 2025 witnessed a frenzy of “rebranding” Oak Bluffs with a single story — as the Wakanda for Black folk — the epicenter of Black Joy, Black Legacy, Black Brilliance, Black Excellence, and home of the Black Elite, best captured in the rapture inspired by an advertisement selling Ralph Lauren fashion masquerading as a documentary. Fortunately, this town that covers only approximately 7.4 square miles of land area has the capacity to offer more than one narrative about Black folk. As novelist and essayist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie most famously warned in her 2009 TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story,” relying on a single, one-dimensional narrative about a person or group leads to critical misunderstandings and harmful stereotypes. With that inspiration, I offer another story about Black folk and their history and culture in this place.
A friend who came with her family beginning in the 1950s visited me here last summer and was dismayed. She said, “I often feel like the Bluffs [as we used to call it] has been hijacked by the Black elite. In the old days there were doctors and lawyers and schoolteachers — some of the original owners were Pullman porters and other working-class people. It wasn’t fancy.” She remembers a sense of community without pretension; not attending “the scene,” but porch-sitting, enjoying family, the beach, and the literary talks. She feels “the real history of ordinary Black families gathering for the summer is getting lost and out of reach.” Fortunately, we can look to Jocelyn Coleman Walton as a raconteur of this other story.
Jocelyn Coleman Walton, a Black woman who is a retired educator, administrator, and mathematics textbook author, has summered all but one year of her life in the Highlands of Oak Bluffs, the historic area in which Black folk were allowed to purchase property and form community. Someone who recently purchased a home in the Highlands did not know his connection to this history because the area is being “rebranded” as “East Chop” to cash in on those seeking elite status. Fortunately, Ms. Walton’s book, “The Place My Heart Calls Home: Stories of a Working-Class African-American Family from Boston to Martha’s Vineyard,” offers us a story of multigenerational resilience, determination, love of a family, and love of this place. In her epilogue, Ms. Walton makes a few thoughts explicit:
Over the years, there has been a popular conception about Oak Bluffs being the center of the African American “elite.” As more upwardly mobile Black families have discovered the Island and purchased property, that demographic has certainly increased.
However, African Americans from all walks of life and all levels of financial status, whether celebrity or not, visit and live here to enjoy the beauty, the peace, the camaraderie, and the freedom this Island offers.
In an article about Oak Bluffs that appeared in the June 2003 issue of National Geographic, someone was quoted as saying that “you must have a certain pedigree to be here.” The Coleman family and many other working-class families have spent decades of summers here in obvious contradiction to that perception.
I heard a version of the story told by Ms. Walton more than 30 years ago when I bought a cottage from Ouida and Geri Taylor, second-generation proprietors of Taylor’s Playfair, a guesthouse launched by their mother to welcome some of the earliest Black visitors to the Island who found their way via the “Green Book.” Caroline Hunter and the Polar Bears tell and carry on a story of Oak Bluffs each summer morning, welcoming everyone into their circle. Within these 7.4 square miles of land are multiple stories that enrich the history and lives of Black folk.
Barbara Y. Phillips has been an Oak Bluffs cottage owner and summer resident for more than 35 years, and was inducted into the national History Makers archive in 2018.
