When I first looked at the black and white photo, I noticed the grim-faced African American man with folded arms and averted eyes standing with two other men near a parade float.
The three were stationed like sentries around a float overflowing with so many flowers and bunting that it was hard to see the two little white girls sitting beneath an overhang in the shadows. Across the top of the photo, which was torn at the left side, someone had handwritten in pen and ink “Atlantic City Beauty Pageant.” Along the side was the name “Terrius Hotel (it was unclear), 2nd Prize.”
The men wore hats that also bore the indistinguishable name of the hotel. They were obviously hotel employees minding the float. Two of them, based on their expressions, were not enjoying this chore in the least.
The photo did not contain a date, only the name of the photography company Atlantic Foto Service. But based on the clothes and the girls’ exposed legs and arms, it was a few decades after Atlantic City held its first beauty pageant that evolved into the Miss America festivities.
That was September 1921, and the event was said to be a spectacle, with plenty of folks parading around in bathing suits and exposing parts of their bodies (knees and arms) that had been hidden for years under mounds of Victorian clothing. That first “Inter-City Beauty Pageant” drew eight women from several Northeast cities competing for the grand prize of the Golden Mermaid Trophy. The festivities also included floats from various organizations and civic groups, a night carnival, a rolling wicker chair parade, a costume ball and bathing-suit revue.
Among the floats was one decorated by the Atlantic City Free Library that featured a group of children – the girls covered and stockinged – and a replica of the front of the library.
The 1921 event was not the first. The idea of a pageant (not a beauty pageant) was the brainchild of Atlantic City hotel owners who in 1920 wanted to keep money-spending visitors in the city a little while longer past Labor Day. The first pageant was simple, and this “Fall Frolic” featured a rolling wicker chair parade and a masked ball on the Steel Pier.
The next year a local newspaperman suggested a popularity contest run by newspapers in various cities to choose a young woman to represent that city. Atlantic City businessmen bought into the idea and agreed to sponsor it. Eight women – teens actually, 15 to 17 years old – competed, and the annual contest and party were on (it was discontinued for a short time during the Depression and after a few scandals).
The three men in the auction photo may not have been among the African Americans who worked at the hotels during the first two pageants. But they were part of a network of black employees who since the early 20th century had made the city a frolicking destination for the thousands who showed up for its beaches and boardwalk – partaking of activities that were forbidden to the workers.
Many African Americans had first come during the late 19th century to work for the summer, but as hotels started popping up and Atlantic City became a destination resort, they stayed year-round. Black workers from Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina came North to become servers in the hotels, bulking up the city’s population. They created a self-contained community called Northside and did their own sunbathing at Chicken Bone Beach, which attracted African Americans from other cities.
For the 20 years starting in 1905, 95 percent of the hotel workers in the city were African American, according to the 2010 book “Boardwalk Empire” by Nelson Johnson. They toiled long hours, and endured humiliations and anonymity among the guests in an industry that Johnson said was akin to a plantation. Nevertheless, working at the hotels as cooks, waiters, bellmen, porters and chambermaids – some of the same types of jobs open to blacks outside the industry – provided wages that were much better than working as private domestics.
Blacks nonetheless held their own parades. I came across a photo of several African American women posing with black Atlantic City lifeguards at Chicken Bone Beach. They had been aboard a float sponsored by Walls Bath House, the only black-owned business on the Boardwalk, on the north end. Owned by businessman George Walls, it was opened from 1899 to 1929, and served both blacks and whites.
