The idea for Elizabeth Patton’s stunning exhibit at UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Gallery came from sorting her late grandmother’s boxes.

Patton’s mother had been too overwhelmed to look through them after her own mother’s death, so she asked her daughter, who is chair of media and communications studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, to help.

What Patton found were snapshots — dozens of them, loose and largely unlabeled — of aunts and uncles at the beach. A closer look revealed multiple generations of family at the same beaches, year after year — particularly Chicken Bone Beach in Atlantic City, New Jersey. A racially segregated stretch of sand only for Black patrons, Chicken Bone was named for the leftovers of the picnic lunches that bathers brought because local restaurants would not serve them.

“My mom told me, ‘I didn’t realize the beach was segregated until I was about 12 years old,’” Patton said.

That got her thinking about segregation in the mid-Atlantic, and how she hadn’t thought much about separate but unequal accommodations outside of the American South. She thought the topic would make an excellent research project rooted in photography, particularly snapshots.

“I started looking into other locations that Black families started to visit during Jim Crow,” she said. “Then I decided I wanted to do a project to map this nationally.”

That she’s done, with the help of UMBC students and its library’s Special Collections staff. The exhibit, “Picturing Mobility,” runs through Dec. 19 and highlights two inventions that made leisure travel possible during segregation — the automobile and the camera.

Black Marylanders were restricted in where they could live, but if they could afford a car, they could buy one that suited a personality, the exhibit notes. A Cadillac, for example, showed you had made it. And the camera let them see themselves as they did, and not as white people pictured them.

I started thinking of this as a project, and what that meant, and just the volume of photographs. I started looking into other locations that Black families started to visit during Jim Crow. Then I decided I wanted to do a project to map this nationally.”

Elizabeth Patton, UMBC Professor

Patton is turning her research into a book, and she continues to offer tours of Picturing Mobility. As federal museums face pressure from the Trump administration to de-emphasize slavery and other aspects of the Black experience, honoring what her forebears endured became all the more critical.

“Black families found joy in mobility despite the restrictions of Jim Crow,” said Patton, referring to the system of legally enforced segregation. “This is a story of resilience, which is really important and needs to be told. It’s a story of reclaiming space and reclaiming time.”

Here are three local destinations featured in Patton’s work.

Brown’s Grove

Before the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Marylanders boarded steamships bound for bayside resorts in Betterton, Tolchester and Love Point — all of which did not allow Black vacationers.

In 1884, a group of Black Baltimoreans purchased first-class tickets on the Steamer Sue, but the captain barred them from entering because the rules forbade Black and white travelers from sitting together. In protest, the group spent the night in the saloon, then sued the steamboat company, hoping to end segregation.

A judge agreed that the first-class accommodations were not equal to the second-class ones, and awarded each passenger $100. However, integrated travel wouldn’t come until decades later.

Believing that Black vacationers should not suffer such indignities, Baltimore steamboat Capt. George Brown partnered with Walter R. Langley to buy a 450-passenger steamboat, the Starlight. The Black entrepreneur also bought 45 acres on Rock Creek in the Pasadena area for a resort, which he called Brown’s Grove. He advertised it as “the only steamer and the only park in the State of Maryland run exclusively for Colored People and by Colored People.”

From 1906 to 1935, more than 3.5 million people traveled on his two steamers. The exhibit showcases a directory from the resort as well as ticket stubs.

Brown died in 1935; nothing remains of his grove. Two decades later, the opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge effectively ended steamboat travel as Marylanders took to Route 50 for vacations by car, though Ocean City would remain segregated for several more decades.

Carr’s, Sparrow’s and Elktonia beaches

In 1902, a formerly enslaved man named Frederick Carr bought 180 acres of beachfront on the Annapolis Neck Peninsula. He left it to his daughters, who operated resorts at Carr’s Beach and Sparrow’s Beach. A 5-acre parcel, Elktonia Beach, remained undeveloped.

Later, William “Little Willie” Adams, known as Baltimore’s first venture capitalist, would buy the resorts. Beauty contests, swimming parties and all-night dances with music from DJ Hoppy Adams or rocker Chuck Berry lent beachgoers a respite from segregation. Adams’ wife, Victorine, became Baltimore’s first Black councilwoman. She’s featured in Picturing Mobility, winning the local beauty contest.

By 1974, Adams had sold Carr’s Beach off to development, and Sparrow’s Beach became a wastewater plant. But Elktonia Beach remained. The late Vince Leggett and his organization, Blacks of the Chesapeake, worked with the city of Annapolis and the federal government to buy and preserve Elktonia for $4 million. The plan is for a museum to tell the story of the area’s music, culture and entrepreneurship.

Highland Beach

In the early 1890s, Charles Douglass, his wife, Laura, and their young son, Haley, went to the Bay Ridge Inn south of Annapolis hoping to relax. Management turned them away, saying they didn’t allow Black patrons. The Douglasses began walking and eventually encountered descendants of the Brashears family, Black farmers who acquired waterfront property in 1858.

From the center of the Brashears’ land, Charles Douglass could look across the Chesapeake and see Talbot County on the Eastern Shore — where his father, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, had been enslaved. He knew that if he, a well-known citizen, could not enter local beaches and hotels, then almost all other Black citizens were barred, too.

Charles Douglass bought the land and sold lots to Black families from Annapolis, Baltimore and Washington for summer homes. In 1922, the Maryland legislature passed a bill affirming Highland Beach as a town. Maryland’s governor, Albert Ritchie, signed it into law. That has allowed Highland Beach to have control over its own destiny, with its own zoning, planning and mayor.

“I don’t think I ever missed a summer at Highland Beach,” says Linda Newton, a fifth-generation resident, in an oral history at the UMBC exhibit. “It was a routine; we used to pack up every summer just after school closed.”

Newton’s mother was a teacher, as were most of her friends’ parents. Summers were magical; kids played together in and out of the water until dinnertime.

“We always felt deprived because we didn’t go to camp,” she said. “Now, we know.”