Free the Beaches

Ned Coll is not a name familiar to most persons knowledgeable about the twentieth-century civil rights movement. In Free the Beaches, Andrew W. Kahrl of the University of Virginia makes a compelling case that it ought to be. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, twenty-two-year-old Coll—who, like the slain president, was Irish Catholic—worked at an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. Dismayed over the loss of a young, dynamic president and bored with his own staid, middle-class life, Coll quit his job to become an antipoverty activist. Through an organization he created, the Revitalization Corps, he provided a “grass-roots channel for the city dweller and the suburbanite” to alleviate poverty in Hartford's North End (p. 55). He made his stand on Connecticut beaches. By the mid-twentieth century, Connecticut's Gold Coast communities had become affluent enclaves of white professionals (p. 9). The wealthy elite received charters from the state legislature to organize private associations that prohibited nonresidents from using the beaches. The trend extended throughout the nation. By 1967, only 2 percent of the 59,157 miles of shoreline in the continental United States was publicly owned (p. 10). In Connecticut, which included 253 miles of shoreline—seventy-two miles of which sported white, sandy beaches—only seven miles of coastline were accessible

Administration (probate law · Archaeology · Battle · Economic history · Elite · Frontier · Geography · Irish · Legislature · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Shore · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · White (mutation · American Environmental and Regional History · History · Law · Oceanography

• Coastal blue space and wellbeing research

  B Wheaton, Jordan Waiti et al.•Leisure Studies•2019

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