Jim Crow in Savannah's Parks in the 20th Century presented by Jeffrey M. Ofgang: Customary Segregation

Courtesy of City of Savannah Municipal Archives on behalf of V. & J. Duncan Antique Maps & Prints

From the era of Reconstruction until 1964, the city of Savannah operated separate and unequal park systems for white and Black people. The division was not laid down by statute, but was understood by all, a prime example of customary segregation in the era of Jim Crow. The reformist mayor of the early 1960s, Malcolm R. Maclean, recalled that "it had been customary, only whites could play basketball in Daffin Park." That was the context for the arrest of seven Black men as they played basketball on the Daffin courts in January 1961. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions of the six remaining defendants in 1963. From 1896 until the mid-twentieth century, the Supreme Court held that racial segregation in public accommodations was permitted if Black people were given access to "separate but equal" facilities, a condition rarely honored in practice in Savannah or elsewhere. In Savannah, Black people were effectively barred from the city's biggest and best parks, Forsyth and Daffin, and given highly limited access to its only municipal golf course, Bacon Park. Until civil rights legislation, the "Black" parks were smaller, poorly-equipped parks and playgrounds in their neighborhoods on the east and west sides. Black taxpayers were paying for a superior park system for whites.

When the Confederacy fell and the U.S. abolished slavery, leaders of Savannah (and other southern cities) wasted little time passing laws to keep African Americans under control by other means. For instance, the Savannah City Council in 1866 voted to close all but two gates of Forsyth Park to keep Black people out. Police prevented them from entering unless they accompanied white children in their care, a common exception to customary segregation. The Bavarian landscape designer William Bischoff created Forsyth Park out of a pine forest in 1851. This stereoscopic image of an African American woman with a baby carriage in Forsyth Park is believed to date from the 1880s.

The Army declared that excluding Black people from the park was a violation of their post-war general orders governing Reconstruction, so the City Council temporarily closed Forsyth Park to everyone. City authorities then turned to passing vague statutes making disorderly conduct, “loitering,” and “loafing” a criminal offense. These statutes did not mention race, but police could and did enforce them selectively against African Americans. In essence, they imposed de facto segregation of Savannah’s parks into the 1960s.  

This ordinance from the early twentieth century, still in effect in 1958, banned loafing or loitering even in restaurants and pool rooms, and made it illegal to linger on the streets while unemployed:

The ordinance was rescinded in the compilation of the City Code in 1976.

The Park and Tree Commission was often preoccupied with park benches because police and white residents saw them as gathering places for Black people. White residents would petition the Commission to remove the benches and sometimes it complied as in this case in the Commission's minutes in June 1935.

The next week, the Park and Tree Commission Superintendent, William Robertson, wrote Snedeker, assuring him that "just as quick as possible," a crew would remove the benches from Grayson Park, near his home on Harmon Street in what is now the Eastside Historic District.

Why the deferential tone? One clue: Snedeker was listed in a 1934 city directory as the office manager of the Savannah Gas Company.

In 1935, Robertson asked the city attorney, Shelby Myrick, whether police could bar Black people from entering public parks in white neighborhoods. Myrick's response indicated surprise; he said "the parks are for all classes alike." However, he suggested that the police department could give officers discretion to keep Black people off the benches. Myrick thought he was offering this advice privately. He emphasized, "This is not a matter however which should reach the public prints." But his reply appeared in full in the City Council minutes of June 26, 1935.

Robertson kept the letter in his files:

Decades later, on February 9, 1961, Savannah NAACP President W.W. Law wrote himself a memo: white residents had complained about the playground in Wells Park, used mostly by Black neighbors, located one block east of West Broad, the main Black commercial street. "All equipment removed shortly thereafter and has not been replaced."

One of the few instances of explicit racial segregation in Savannah's laws involved roller skating. In the 1945 City Code, white skaters were permitted along a portion of one of the city's grand boulevards, Oglethorpe Avenue, and in Forsyth Park and Daffin Park. Black skaters were limited to fewer locations in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

Watch my lecture on Jim Crow in the parks, recorded for the City of Savannah Municipal Archives. 

Video: Jim Crow in Savannah's Parks. Jeffrey M. Ofgang Jeff Ofgang customary segregation de facto segregation Jim Crow Savannah, Georgia

NAACP organizer Mercedes Wright Arnold said an incident in Forsyth Park in 1958 propelled her into the direct protest movement in Savannah. Returning from a doctor's appointment, nine months' pregnant with her third child and walking with her two young sons along the north edge of the park on Gaston Street, the boys spotted white children playing on the swings and joined in. While her older son Danny, with a light complexion, went unhindered, a white police officer, waving a nightstick, went after her "very brown" two-and-a-half year old son Bruce. Wright recalls running toward the officer and warning him: "You will be dead. You better not touch that child." In an oral history interview, Arnold quoted the officer as saying: "You know that n____r children can't swing on these swings." Arnold told the officer that the taxes on the family's home on nearby Bolton Street paid for those swings. Arnold said she vented her anger through participation in the sit-ins at downtown businesses that started in March 1960. In August 1960, Arnold organized the first "wade-in" protest to integrate the ocean beach on Tybee Island, east of Savannah.

Watch: Oral history interview of Mercedes Wright Arnold from the University of Georgia Libraries

Retired Negro League baseball player Russell Patterson said that, growing up in Savannah, he rarely stepped in Forsyth Park or Daffin Park because of customary segregation. Watch this video of Patterson's recollections from an interview by a member of my graduate cohort, Benjamin Botham, for his project on the history of African Americans in baseball in Savannah.

As a young child in the 1950s, Wanda Lloyd could only admire Daffin Park from afar because "it was off-limits to Blacks." In a memoir of her upbringing in Savannah and career as a top newspaper editor and journalism professor, Lloyd wrote she could only catch glimpses of Daffin Park's lake and greenery when her family drove by on Victory Drive. She compared it to her neighborhood park in southwest Savannah, Cann Park, "a dirt-surfaced space devoid of green grass or athletic luxuries." 

When Lloyd finally visited Daffin Park in the late 1960s, after desegregation, a group of white boys passed by and someone called out to Lloyd and her teenaged girlfriends: "n____r." Then someone spat toward the young women. Lloyd avoided Daffin Park for fifty years, and then visited just for a community event. Lloyd wrote in 2020 that she will never walk in Daffin Park alone.

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In May 1892, the Savannah Tribune editorialized about the police harassment of a Black man who was watching a military parade in "white" Forsyth Park.