Lynne Scott Constantine
Digital Photomontage, 2023-2024. 20” x 24”

In the late 1940s, as Americans settled into postwar normalcy, developers looked at the sparsely populated coastal southeast and saw opportunities to offer people with money and leisure a stake in a beach lifestyle. Frank Stick, an artist turned real estate developer, bought up a large tract of land in the Outer Banks and designed a simple home model called the flat top, acclimated to the windy, sunny, sandy conditions of the barrier islands. Stick was committed to building up the economy of the local community, so the flat top was designed to be built with local materials and local labor.

But there was an invisible ugly side to all this: in all the deeds for the flat tops sold starting in 1947, the very first of the “terms and conditions” stipulated that the houses were not to be sold to, rented to, or occupied by “people of African descent.”

Although such restrictive covenants were declared to be unenforceable by the US Supreme Court in 1948, they continued to appear for decades in real estate deeds in many places as a marker of a community’s whiteness. – Black North Carolinians countered the restrictions both by fighting segregation and by creating resorts of their own, such as Seabreeze and Freeman Beaches in New Hanover County, popular through the remaining years of Jim Crow segregation.

Image Sources: The typewritten text in the sky is reproduced from a publicly recorded deed from 1948 for one of the original flat tops. Identical language appears in nearly all of the early deeds. The small text in the lower right is drawn from the text of a highway marker created by NCDOT to memorialize these Black-entrepreneur-created beach resorts in New Hanover County. All other images in the photomontage are photographs I have made and have manipulated for the purpose of this piece.