Every August, Martha’s Vineyard fills with a familiar rhythm: ferries packed at dawn, porches crowded with old friends, the Inkwell glowing gold at sunset. For generations, the Island has been a place where Black families come to exhale, a retreat built on decades of chosen community and hard-won belonging. This year, a coalition of organizers is asking the Island to hold something more alongside that rest: solidarity. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) are bringing programming to the Island this year, informed by conversations with local queer and Wampanoag community members. The goal is not to invent something new. Visitors have long mixed beach days with real conversation about what is happening back home; that pairing of rest and reckoning is part of the Island’s character. What is different this year is who is in the room for it. These conversations have been happening for a while, often without the people who actually live on the Island year-round.
“We will not be free until all of us are free, especially our Black queer and indigenous family,” said Dr. Amara Enyia, interim co-executive director of programs, policy, and campaign for the Movement for Black Lives, which is returning to the Island with its own programming. “We cannot achieve liberation without each other.” The movement has described itself as building toward the liberation of Black people, queer people, and all people.
“For generations, the Vineyard has been a place where Black people have built community, ownership, institutions, and connection, often in defiance of the odds,” said Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “There is something powerful for our national work in learning from a community that has sustained that kind of belonging across generations.” DPA is joining M4BL on the Island this August, part of a coalition approach that treats local organizers’ work as something to be acknowledged and supported, not spoken over. Frederique described DPA’s focus, confronting the broader systems of criminalization that shape issues from health and housing to bodily autonomy, as work that sits downstream of what communities like the Vineyard’s have already built. “The Vineyard is a powerful place to imagine what comes next,” she said.
One centerpiece is a mixer celebrating queer life, hosted in the tradition of the tea as a Black cultural institution, a familiar form repurposed to hold something pointed. The afternoon carries the usual details of a good tea — seasonal food, toasts — but the guest list and framing are the point. This is a room built for queer Islanders and visitors, not added as a panel onto someone else’s event. Its stated frame, an afternoon rooted in Black queer joy and community, is meant to be read literally.
The Henry family’s Dragonfly House, the Oak Bluffs home Danroy and Angella Henry restored and recently saw added to the African American Heritage Trail, is the site for the queer mixer. Their home reflects this same push to connect visibility with obligation. The Henrys built the DJ Henry Dream Fund to honor the life of their son, and have used their platform on the Island, including through guests who stay at Dragonfly, to support local causes.
Beyond the mixer, M4BL is also hosting a conversation on national and local organizing that includes Wampanoag elders, not as guests brought in for local color but as people integral to the discussion. Built as dialogue rather than lecture, it centers sovereignty, land, and cultural survival on an Island where Wampanoag history predates everyone else by thousands of years. Organizers are placing it deliberately alongside M4BL’s national work, treating Wampanoag organizing as part of the same continuum as the fights for voting rights and racial justice nationwide, not a local footnote.
“Solidarity and liberation are built through relationships,” said Wampanoag elder David Two Arrows Vanderhoop, Wôpanâak tribal elder and co-founder and executive director of Sassafras Earth Education, who will participate. “Partnering with M4BL allows us to honor the history of Nôepe, learn across Black and indigenous communities, and come together to practice the collective future we want to see.”
Events like these contribute to the Vineyard’s late summer glow. Rest and solidarity are companions, not opposites. Black communities have always known how to hold both at once, to dance and organize in the same breath, to treat joy as resistance rather than retreat.
Why these threads need each other is not complicated. A mixer celebrating queer Black joy, a conversation led by Wampanoag elders, a family turning grief into a fund for other people’s children, and national organizations bringing their campaigns to the Island are versions of the same idea: Belonging on the Vineyard should come with responsibility to it. Pull the threads together and you get something closer to reciprocity, a summer that gives back to the place that makes it possible.
The hope, organizers say, is that this becomes a pattern rather than a one-off, an institution where the Vineyard’s visitors and its Wampanoag and queer residents build lasting partnership instead of passing proximity. The Island has always been a place people come to renew. This August, some are asking it to also be a place where people can connect and align locally.
M4BL events:
- Monday, August 17, 3 to 5 pm: Ki & Tea: A Queer Mixer with Drug Policy Alliance Dragonfly House, 115 Seaview Ave., Oak Bluffs
- Tuesday, August 18, 4 pm: Organizing Black People as a Base for Power
Union Chapel, Oak Bluffs
RSVP by emailing contact@m4bl.org.
James Blue is the owner of two New York City– and London-based production companies. As a television journalist, he has reported on conflicts around the world.
