The sugary sand on Santa Rosa Beach is cool below the surface, sweet relief after a 10-minute hot-step from the parking lot with an armload of bulky chairs and a hangry toddler dragging me down. But by the third day of our family vacation, my young boys have settled in with their plastic shovels and left me cracking open a Michelob Ultra before noon. Drinking in the brew and the whooshing azure surf, I’m gobsmacked that this is what passes for adventure travel nowadays.
On 20 May the NAACP issued a travel advisory for Florida, noting a flagrant streak of contempt for and hostility toward Black, ethnic and queer communities; in a news release, the group quoted the state-sanctioned “war on woke” the Republican governor championed in a craven bid for his party’s presidential nomination. The NAACP board chair, Leon Russell, cited Ron DeSantis for “political grandstanding” and courting “a dangerous, extremist minority” – only to have conservatives mock Russell himself for living in Tampa.
The advisory came weeks after we had plunked down a sizable non-refundable deposit for a trip to Florida’s Emerald coast – the resort paradise formerly known as the Redneck Riviera. My brother-in-law, a 28-year-old ad man, was flying down from New York. My two boys, aged three and 19 months, were so excited, my oldest racking his brain to understand what it meant to be “on vacation”. My wife, an ex-navy psychologist, had grand designs on a week of idle fun in the sun. We should have known that being Black in America could deprive us of something so innocent.
Still: the idea of avoiding an entire state based on the fanatical policies of one man, even if he’s the top man, seemed a bit extreme – like avoiding computers just to stick it to Bill Gates. Let’s be clear here: even though the NAACP advisory never called for people to boycott Florida, that’s how the edict is being interpreted. The Republican senator Rick Scott’s own travel advisory last week, warning “socialists” and “communists” to stay away, has only made it easier for progressives to claim the moral high ground.
While it’s true that Florida’s willfully ignorant conservative lawmakers have made the state more unsafe for anyone who dares to disagree with them, it’s also true that many more states have an equally shameful legacy of systemic racism and discrimination. In the last few months alone, we’ve seen another California school board ban critical race theory, an unarmed Michael Jackson impersonator choked to death on the New York City subway and affirmative action in higher education struck down by an activist supreme court that’s declared open season on reproductive rights protections. But no one is calling for a travel advisory against the whole of America, much less its plainly progressive states.
There’s no doubt Florida’s latest political heel-turn has sunk its mass appeal to a low not seen since the 2000 presidential election. But it’s still home to the third-largest Black population among US states; that’s a lot of family, friends and hardworking folks left by the wayside. The more my wife and I thought about it, the more the reward of enjoying ourselves in Florida despite DeSantis outweighed the risk of offending the white parents at my kid’s school who considered the state a no-go.
Over a recent weekend we loaded up the minivan and headed south from Atlanta to Santa Rosa Beach, Florida. At no point before setting off did I consider the five-hour drive might take us through Alabama. Had that state come with its own NAACP travel advisory, I might have called for one more pit stop in Georgia before testing my three-year-old’s potty training.
Halfway through our journey, the GPS led us into Eufaula, Alabama, another resort town where great live oaks drape over pristine antebellum-era homes. But the southern gothic motif set off our inner klaxons. A web search confirmed our suspicions. The town played host to what may well have been the last civil war battle in 1865. Despite the promise of Reconstruction, white residents maintained control of Eufaula’s municipal offices five years after Alabama was forced back into the Union, even as Black residents held a two-to-one popular majority. My wife looked up from her phone, circumspect. I glanced down at the three-quarters full gas gauge, then over to my son squirming in his second-row car seat. “Hang with me for a few more miles, OK?”
When a slew of ballot referenda on civil rights threatened a white power loss, a mob went guns blazing into a Black crowd at a downtown polling place, killing six, injuring 70 and deterring scores more from voting. A historical placard recognizes the tragedy as the election riot of 1874. But it’s a good 15 miles north-east from our traffic jam at the intersection of Eufaula Avenue and Broad Street, where a 35ft Confederate-soldier-topped obelisk stands proudly on the very spot the massacre took place. All we could do was shake our heads with resigned disbelief.
The NAACP has only issued one other travel advisory in its 114-year history, in the summer of 2017, after Missouri lawmakers passed a bill rolling back state protections against discrimination. The local chapter of the NAACP was first to caution visitors over the civil rights violations that they risked by entering the Show-Me State . This was a year after a report from Josh Hawley’s state attorney general’s office found Black motorists had been stopped 75% more often than white drivers. The ACLU had issued a similar advisory for Texas that same year in response to a law that allowed traffic officers to interrogate the immigration status of people stopped for traffic violations.
Still: it’s one thing to warn holiday-goers about predatory policing that could materially affect their travel plans, quite another to roadblock a borderline inescapable tourist trap. According to a 2020 analysis from the market research firm MMGY Travel Intelligence, Florida is the top destination for Black overnight travelers within the continental United States. What’s more, the state was nearly run by Andrew Gillum; in 2018, the Democratic Tallahassee mayor emerged as the first Black gubernatorial candidate in Florida history and came within a hair’s breadth of pipping DeSantis at the polls.
Staying Black in America was a long-odds game well before DeSantis and Scott rolled up the red carpet. My family isn’t any less under siege in Atlanta – the American Wakanda hellbent on building the West Point of police academies – than on the Emerald coast, where 600 enslaved people joined forces with the Union army and fought their way across the panhandle to freedom near the civil war’s end.
Immediately upon arriving in Santa Rosa Beach, we were struck by the conspicuous lack of Black faces. According to recent census data, Black people officially account for none of the town’s 5,700 residents. This is despite Santa Rosa Beach sitting on the same 20-mile stretch of state route that threads through Pensacola, Panama City and Destin; between the military air stations, MTV’s Spring Break and the nationally renowned jazz festival, this region – nicknamed 30A, for the state route, attracts all kinds. But after wrangling the kids all day, my wife and I couldn’t imagine exploring that scene, much less staying awake past 9pm. That didn’t stop my brother-in-law from bellying up to the Irish pub one block over.
In his 2016 book This Land Was Ours, the University of Virginia professor Andrew Kahrl explains how Black southerners were redlined off the beaches to make way for a government-spurred tourism industry designed to enrich and serve whites.
It’s a heartbreaking story that draws from a slew of oral histories with Black people who lived through that phase of Jim Crow – not least Lodie Marie Robinson-Cyrille, who recalled her experience working at a Florida resort. “They wouldn’t allow Black[s] to swim in the Gulf or be seen on the beaches,” she said. “The families could go and work in the hotels as cooks, as domestics, as maids, but they could not lounge or enjoy some of the same activities as, say, a tourist would enjoy.” Leisure time, at least in this country, has been a white privilege from the very beginning. But my three-year-old is none the wiser. One day while sipping a juice box while sitting by the pool in his swim vest, he asked: “Are we on vacation yet?”
My wife and I, it seems, are always working hard when we’re supposed to be off. Too often when we were young, childless and still living in New York, we were the lone Black people in a restaurant, at Broadway shows or otherwise spending money to enjoy our hard-won downtime hours. We moved to the South Carolina Lowcountry expecting to fraternize with the region’s proud Gullah Geechee descendants (my wife is one, too), only to wind up surrounded by white pleasure-seekers who referred to enslaved people as “workers”, rushed to put up stakes in “plantation” communities and thought nothing of exploiting the tax code to further decouple foundational Blacks from coastal land they legally owned.
The scenes are even more stark when we go on holiday; it doesn’t matter if we’re lazing around a spa in Scottsdale or biking around Belle-Île-en-Mer. We anticipate the wary smiles, the nervous laughter, and forward questions about what we do for a living. No matter how many times we’re forced, however politely, to justify our presence, the takeaway never changes : “Good for you,” they say.
But the people of 30A didn’t interrogate our presence unless we were pitching our beach tent, which could get complicated depending on the size and the invisible lines in the sand that separate public access from resort seaside. And seeing the white parents hounding their kids about their manners, their sunscreen, the fact that “we didn’t spend all this money on a nice vacation for you to stare at a screen!” was another reminder that they’re not that different. We all come from the same country, where the sight of a C-130 cargo plane, roaring low enough over the coast that airmen’s faces are visible as they wave, isn’t cause for alarm. It’s an invitation to wave right back.
Twice while schlepping the kids to the beach on bikes, we crossed a man in a “Let’s Go Brandon” shirt; he just smiled and kept moving. There was a thought that things might get political when we saw a young man standing outside the beach parking lot waving a giant Trump 2024 flag. But the boy, bless his heart, didn’t seem like he was from around there, given the Slavic accent that inflected his timid “hello”.
The only time it seemed as if the vibe might shift on us was after sundown, while I hoofed around seeking a dinner spot with my wife and brother-in-law. Ultimately, we were drawn into a bustling Italian place. With white faces at every place setting and spilling out the door, we were fully prepared to be turned away by the two white schoolgirls behind the host stand. All the while, an older Black woman was stuck on the phone. But then she hung up.
Before I could backtrack out of her way, she was snatching three menus, seating us at an open table and leaving us in the care of “our best waiter”, also Black. We were looked after, doted on; when our orders were up, the plates arrived via three different servers – all of them Black. It was as if every Black person in the joint was on a mission to go above and beyond to make us feel at home. Later, our waiter let slip that we were his first Black table in “weeks”. No, he wasn’t thrilled about the NAACP advisory scaring Black folk away, but he agreed with its intent because, well, Florida has become a hard place to be Black.
By this point, the dinner rush had eased, the place had emptied out and we were in our own little world, just talking. But the kicker was when he learned my wife and I had come down from Atlanta. “I just moved away,” he said with a laugh. “It’s like Grand Theft Auto up there!” Here at least, he felt he could rely on the kindness of empathetic whites – but also, “they need us,” he said. “No one wants to work.”
On the last evening of our trip, we took a self-guided tour through Alys Beach, a breathtaking sight. One woman who looked to be on a shift break greeted us with an eagerness that suggested we had already met – an assumption that’s easy enough to make in yet another Emerald coast town where Black people don’t live. Alys Beach isn’t just awash with white people; the town is quite literally made up of ivory towers meant to mirror the architecture of the old world.
After a slack-jawed walk past the Grecian trellises, the Moorish arches and Dutch gables, we pulled over for a beer at a cafe across the street from a $20m beachside mansion. The idea that this cloister was just a car ride away from home, let alone part of the same highway system as Queens or Compton, simply beggared belief. It left me wondering about what other idylls conservatives were desperately trying to keep hidden. It made me want to push deeper down the Gulf coast, into Alabama and Mississippi. It convinced me that the NAACP’s travel advisory should have made the opposite statement: “Lookie what we have here!”
Before my brother-in-law gave the boys one last squeeze and ducked into a cab, he told me about his long goodbye to the white regulars and staff at the pub – friends forever, apparently. “Thanks for coming to visit us,” one said, “despite … you know. Hopefully you felt welcome.”
There is no question that venturing out to Florida was a risk in this fraught climate, but there’s also never been a better time to see the country while Black. The farther we wander out of our comfort zones, the more potential they have to expand – and that, son, is when the vacation really begins. Issuing a travel advisory against one state for its extreme politics doesn’t just play into the zealots’ hands, it gives the rest of the country a break it doesn’t deserve.
