CHAPTER 1

War Brewing

Every night was our party, and we invited the world.

— ­A t l a n t ic Ci t y musici a n Si d Trust y
A t l a n t i c C i t y, N e w J e r s e y
J u n e 1941

T
he windows of Heilig’s Restaurant are big—­big like the portions of
fresh Atlantic lobster and stewed snapper that Joe Heilig serves up
seven days a week. From the windows, diners are treated to a never-­
ending parade along the Boardwalk: ladies in colorful dresses cinched at
the waist, with T-­strap pumps and white cotton gloves light enough for a
fine spring day. They stroll, arm in arm, with fellows turned out in linen
suit jackets and straw hats the color of their trousers. It’s not unusual
to see a silver-­tipped walking stick tap-­tap-­tapping along the wooden
planks, or a gold watch chain glinting in the sun. Wicker rolling chairs
keep pace, on hire for those who prefer a cushioned ride under the shade
of a white parasol. From the carousel come the squeals of children. The
air is filled with music. There are buskers and showmen, hucksters and
carnival barkers calling out the latest wonderments to be seen: Ladies
and Gentlemen, right here, right now, in Atlaaaaantic City.
Wilson Caldwell Monk juggles plates piled high with Heilig’s spe­
cialties, careful not to spill a drop on the crisp white tablecloths. He
sneaks glances out the huge glass windows at the show playing out

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 4 Forg o t t e n

before him. America’s first boardwalk is a homegrown version of a Eu­

ropean promenade, a wide wood-­planked expanse where flâneurs sport­
ing the latest fashions come to see and be seen. Excess is the watchword
in America’s pioneer resort community, the first city dedicated solely
to leisure. Hotel marquees announce the biggest headliners of the day,
among them Bing Crosby, Artie Shaw, and Tommy Dorsey. There is
seemingly no end to the good times.
If the Boardwalk’s attractions aren’t enough, jutting far into the sea
are a half dozen grand piers lined with carnival rides, shows, and other
diversions. The king of them all, the self-­styled “Showplace of the
Nation,” is the Steel Pier, every inch crammed with amusements such
as the Hawaiian Village, with real hula dancers, and the giant Ferris
wheel. Resounding cheers echo as the Diving Horse and its attractive
lady rider, clad in a smart bathing costume and cap, surface in a pool
after plunging from a forty-­foot-­high platform.
Wilson never tires of the Boardwalk, never grows weary of the
crackle and hum. This four-­mile-­long walkway is the center of his
world, just as it is the pulsing heart that sustains “the Season,” the three
crucial months when Atlantic City is open for business. The summer’s
grand finale, the Miss America Pageant, is followed hard by Labor Day,
when the closing bell sounds and the curtain drops. Heilig’s and most
of the other Boardwalk haunts will close up tight, their thousands of
workers, the vast majority of them African Americans, left to struggle
through another long, bone-­chilling winter with little chance of find­
ing an off-­season job.
The Boardwalk was built in the early 1850s, by leveling natural
dunes that protected the wild barrier island known as Absecon from the
off-­season fury that the Atlantic Ocean unleashed from time to time. A
powerful hurricane could break this famed promenade to bits, though
nobody is thinking about that. Atlantic City is already in its declining
years, though nobody knows it. The war raging across the ocean is des­
tined to engulf a generation of young Americans like Wilson, though

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 Wa r B r e w i n g 5

few believe it. Looking at the summertime spectacle playing out before
the windows of Heilig’s, the future Private Monk, twenty-­one years
old, sees only opportunity.
Yet opportunity was fickle in Atlantic City. Though in-­season jobs
were ample for everyone, on a social level, advancement was divided
strictly by race. Heilig’s Restaurant wasn’t a place where Negroes like
Wilson Monk could enjoy a lobster or a plate of stewed snapper, even if
they could afford it. One time, Wilson watched as a colored nurse came
to lunch at Heilig’s with the old woman in her care and the rest of the
woman’s large white family. With a Negro caretaker in tow, the family
could hardly hope for a prime window seat with a view of the famous
Steel Pier. Their table was in the back, which was far back, since Heil­
ig’s cavernous dining room seated six hundred. Atlantic City’s Negroes
knew their place, and it wasn’t at Heilig’s or at any other Boardwalk
restaurant, or hotel. Even the carousel and other rides along the Board­
walk, which had once been open to all, were deemed “Whites Only” in
1904. Two years later, a color line was drawn in the sand, literally, when
hoteliers, worried about offending the new waves of southern tourists,
asked their black employees and their families not to “bathe or lounge”
in front of hotel properties. Eventually, the slice of sand relegated to
Negroes between Missouri and Mississippi Avenues came to be known
as “Chicken Bone Beach.” Even though it evolved into the most hap­
pening spot along the entire expanse of the Atlantic City shore, it was
still separate. Even if Sammy Davis Jr. and other visiting black celeb­
rities kept the sunbathers in stitches with improvised skits and general
fooling, it was still separate. And separate was not equal.
Atlantic City wasn’t the South, where so-­called Jim Crow laws kept
the races officially apart with whites-­only drinking fountains, waiting
rooms, hospitals, and just about everything else you would find in a
civil society. The name Jim Crow came from a white minstrel show
performer who copied a silly dance called Jump Jim Crow from a black
man in the 1820s. The New Jersey seaside town preferred a quieter

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 6 Forg o t t e n

approach. As the black population grew, the city’s whites decided to

separate from their black neighbors, many of whom were descendants
of African Americans whose backbreaking work had transformed those
twelve square miles on the northern end of barren Absecon Island into
a leisure destination that attracted, from the earliest days, vacationers
of both races.
The workforce that built Atlantic City from little more than sand
and hope in the mid-­1800s included freedmen and likely runaway slaves
terrified of discovery, with no laws to protect them if they were found
out. Although New Jersey had repealed slavery in 1804—­it was the
last northern state to do so—­a clause requiring “apprenticeships for
life” to former masters kept many Negroes and their children in in­
dentured servitude for decades longer. It is likely, then, that black men
still in bondage toiled alongside white European immigrants to turn
sand dunes into hotels and salt marshes into hard-­packed ground that
brought the first trains to the island in July 1854.
The newly incorporated Atlantic City didn’t begin its history with
a proud record where African Americans were concerned. Yet by the
1880s, black workers from southern states were flocking to the island,
intent on escaping the venomous race hatred that blossomed across the
South like a poisonous weed in the decades following Emancipation.
Black migrants were lured by the possibility of expanding their em­
ployment opportunities, which had hardly been improved since the
days of slavery, with sharecropping and domestic work the only real
options. Each multistory hotel that rose along the Boardwalk brought
with it the promise of jobs that paid wages and tips, which meant that
the emerging black working class could save money and envision the
possibility of a better future for their children.
By 1900, Atlantic City’s year-­round population of thirty thousand
included about seven thousand African Americans, with perhaps double
that number coming to work during the Season. About 95 percent of
workers in the city’s twelve hundred hotels were black, which white

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 Wa r B r e w i n g 7

vacationers found either charming or upsetting. America’s new vacation

class included working-­class blacks with factory jobs in rapidly expand­
ing cities such as Philadelphia. They could pay the $1.50 round-­trip
train ticket for a day at the shore and twenty-­five cents to rent a bathing
suit and a locker. As the numbers of dark-­skinned vacationers grew,
white Atlantic City became concerned. The annual “Excursion Day”
set aside for Negro vacationers attracted thousands of day-­trippers in
1900, and drew a snide broadside in the Atlantic City Daily Press, which
mocked the “great long line of Sambos and Liza Janes” enjoying them­
selves along the waterfront. “Considering the event and the low price of
razors,” the newspaper sniped, “it is wonderful that so few disturbances
occurred during the day.”
At the turn of the twentieth century, Atlantic City was a racially
and ethnically diverse stew that was unusual in America, where hatred
toward migrating blacks was creeping north like a quiet infection and
where segregation was no longer a southern preserve. Forty years after
the slaves were freed, their children and grandchildren knew that the
South never truly intended to free them. From Florida to Virginia,
many were living as sharecroppers in conditions barely distinguish­
able from the bondage their parents and grandparents had endured as
slaves before the Civil War. In the supposedly emancipated South, the
price for insubordination under Jim Crow was a fine, a hammer to the
head, or a hangman’s noose. America’s blacks were whispering about
the great northern cities, with jobs and strange apartment houses, and
they began to plot their escape, in secret, to avoid retribution from
their white employers.
The Great Migration began as a trickle and grew into a torrent that
would see six million southern blacks resettled in the North over the
next seven decades, shattering for good the feudal southern order. It was
“the first big step the nation’s servant class ever took without asking,”
writes journalist and historian Isabel Wilkerson. These migrants found
work as servants in the northern cities. If they were lucky, they were

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