Black people recruited from the South built Atlantic City, then staffed its early hotels. They fled 'entrenched racism,' but what did they find? As the national NAACP convention comes to New Jersey, the city looks back at its own Black origins.
Kaleem Shabazz , president of the Local Chapter of the NAACP in Atlantic City, alongside Maryam Sarhan, community organizer for Atlantic City's NAACP.ATLANTIC CITY — Kaleem Shabazz was in high school in 1964, when the Democratic National Convention blew onto the Boardwalk.
“I went down and went in the crowd,” Shabazz said. Of the police officer, he said, “He didn’t want me to be exposed and possibly arrested. He was looking at my future. He knew my parents.” But the city’s Black story also includes a history of redlining, a hotel industry that historically employed Black people to create the fantasy of an upper-crust Southern hospitality for white tourists, and a once thriving Black Northside neighborhood that had 13 Black doctors and 37 Black-owned liquor licenses, and where now there are none of either.
On Wednesday, July 20, from noon to 5 p.m., there will be a jazz and history celebration at Chicken Bone Beach at Missouri Avenue, the once-segregated beach in Atlantic City that became a famous gathering spot for Black celebrities and politicians, including Martin Luther King Jr., Sammy Davis Jr., and Joe Louis, and for Black visitors as well as locals.
Shabazz, an activist for decades, sees this moment in time, and the multiple crises emanating from the rise of Donald Trump — a man who once dominated the conversation in Atlantic City — as crucial for the policies and goals of the NAACP, which last held its national convention in Atlantic City in 1955 at Atlantic City High School.
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