2025 Theses Doctoral

Civil Rights Struggles Over Access to the Outdoors in the United States

Martin, Amanda

This dissertation, titled Civil Rights Struggles Over Access to the Outdoors in the United States, demonstrates the long history of environmental inequality in the American outdoors. This project explores the ways that access to “nature”—which might seem to be open and available to all—has in fact been structured in a racially exclusive way since the emergence of parks as a natural amenity. The manuscript begins in the 1890s, when “the cult of wilderness,” or the beginning of American outdoor recreation culture as we recognize it today, coincided with the apogee of restrictive Jim Crow policies across the country. My project will be the first to document “greenlining”–a term I introduce and define as any attempt to deny people access to outdoor spaces based on their ascribed race, or using outdoor spaces as physical barriers to perpetuate racist segregation in the built environment.

Chapter 1 (“Sublime Civil Rights”) reveals how in 1905, W.E.B. Du Bois countered the growing impact of segregation with the Niagara Movement. Although the Niagara Movement has been historicized as a mere forerunner to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the organization is significant in its own right for using iconic American “nature” imagery (in both political rhetoric and visual culture) as their guiding inspiration for civil rights activism. In this chapter, I argue that well-known white environmental figures (including John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt) should be historicized in tandem with their Black contemporaries (including Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois) who conceptualized the outdoors as a site of both natural beauty and Black political autonomy.

Chapter 2, “Lost Cause Landscapes,” documents how Confederate nostalgia proliferated across the built environment of parks in the American South during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By examining Lake Placid, New York; Memphis, Tennessee; and Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, the chapter demonstrates how Confederate apologists saw parks as sites of white identity and Black political exclusion. Perhaps more importantly, however, it documents how Black activists have resisted the erection of Lost Cause memorials in green spaces since their inception. For example, in turn-of-the-century Memphis, white citizens constructed a park to commemorate Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Simultaneously, local Black businessman Robert Church used his own money to finance the construction of a park for African Americans. Later on, between the 1920s and thirties, the NAACP became embroiled in a debate with the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) over commemorating Harpers Ferry, Virginia–the site of John Brown’s famous abolitionist uprising–as a historical park site. While the NAACP wanted to memorialize John Brown’s raid, the UDC wanted to construct a “faithful slave” monument that venerated slavery and honored the Confederacy. Finally, in Lake Placid New York, Black activists and their white allies organized to successfully construct one of the only John Brown statues in the country. This chapter demonstrates the longstanding but heavily contested relationship between public parks and white supremacist politics in the United States–which foreshadows contemporary debates over Confederate statues.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 focus on three cases that reveal how the NAACP attacked greenlining in the federal court system. Chapter 3 (“Separate But (Un)Equal in the Outdoors”) chronicles how white private property owners sued Knox County (in Hart v. Knox County) to prevent the construction of a park for African Americans adjacent to their neighborhood in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1948. The white plaintiffs lost the case, which the local NAACP argued was racially-motivated. The plaintiffs’ failure demonstrated how inferior (or non-existent) park facilities for African Americans became the “Achilles’ heel” of separate but equal doctrine in the 1940s—even before the well-known school desegregation cases. Chapter 4 (“The State of Nature vs. Just Ecologies”) reveals how the NAACP took greenlining to the Supreme Court in Dawson v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore (1955) over a segregated beach in Maryland. NAACP lawyers framed this understudied court case as an environmental expansion of Brown v. Board (1954), as it proved that the high court’s Brown ruling was intended to desegregate all public spaces—not just schools. Chapter 5 (“Massive Environmental Resistance”) provides a history of white environmental backlash to civil rights gains against greenlining. This culminated in another Supreme Court case (Watson v. City of Memphis) in 1963, in which the Supreme Court overturned the Memphis Parks Department’s plan of “gradual integration” that would have delayed park desegregation in the city for at least another decade. Following this second Supreme Court victory over greenlining, white authorities and homeowners changed their strategies. With segregation in public spaces now considered unconstitutional, many whites adopted more covert versions of greenlining by privatizing public recreation spaces, and even constructing new parks adjacent to white neighborhoods to block proposed integrated housing developments.

The conclusion grapples with the transition from de jure to de facto outdoor segregation and the resulting long-term consequences. By the 1970s, a trend of privatizing outdoor recreation facilities coincided with a nationwide disinvestment in public infrastructure (including parks), which shifted the focus of Black activists across the United States to a new set of environmental problems. During the 1980s, a group of scholars coined the term “environmental justice” to address the urgent concern of disproportionate pollution in majority-Black communities. Not only did many Black neighborhoods lack adequate green spaces, but toxic sites (including factories, interstates, and garbage dumps) were also constructed proximate to these communities, which made them more vulnerable to health conditions such as asthma. This unequal distribution of environmental benefits has profound ongoing implications. As a result, understanding the historical origins of greenlining (as well as its contemporary forms) is an essential step to rectifying some of the most urgent environmental threats humans face today.