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Sea Change

Bringing Back the Beach

Lincoln Beach opened in 1941. If you were Black, the only place to soak up sun and sand was Lincoln Beach. The beach closed after segregation ended, but now there is an effort to bring back Lincoln Beach.
Eva Tesfaye
Lincoln Beach opened in 1941. If you were Black, the only place to soak up sun and sand was Lincoln Beach. The beach closed after segregation ended, but now there is an effort to bring back Lincoln Beach.

Even though New Orleans has water in every direction, it’s hard to access. And for a city with increasingly sweltering summers, this irony is painful.

In this episode, we’re going to talk about the uncomfortable history of Lincoln Beach, how it led to New Orleans not having any public beaches today, and how a community has rallied together to get their beach back. We start in the era of segregation, where if you were Black, the only place to soak up sun and sand was Lincoln Beach.

This episode was reported and hosted by Eva Tesfaye. I’m Carlyle Calhoun, the managing producer. This episode was edited by Rosemary Westwood with help from me, Halle Parker, Tyler Pratt, and Ryan Vasquez. Joseph King voiced WEB Dubois. Garrett Hazelwood is our fact-checker. Our sound designer is Emily Jankowski and our theme music is by Jon Batiste.

Special thanks to the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University and Sage Michael Pellet for sharing their archives.

Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We're a part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. SeaChange is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. WWNO's Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

You can reach the Sea Change team at seachange@wwno.org.

_________________________

TRANSCRIPT

(AMBI) Come join me for a day at the beach. That’s a sentence you don’t hear a lot in New Orleans.

 It's a nice sunny Saturday. I’ve just parked on the side of a street in New Orleans East.

If you don't live in New Orleans, you might not know how different New Orleans East is. It’s not the tightly packed shotgun houses you might be picturing. These houses are more spread out, with driveways and mail boxes, like a regular suburb.

I’m parked on Hayne Boulevard. On one side of the street: There’s a line of cars, some houses.On the other side is a levee – tall, steep concrete bordering the street. At the top of that levee is a fence. beyond it – you can’t see it – there’s a lake.

On that lake is a beach – and that’s where I’m trying to go. But: it is not going to be easy.

EVA:  there's cars coming really fast, so you have to be kind of careful of cars. But there's a lot of people parked here. There's a lot of families coming who are walking over to the beach. So, I'm going to cross now.  And I see Sage.  He was waiting for me.

Sage Michael Pellet is standing at the top of the levee,He’s a skinny Black guy with a laidback outdoorsy vibe. He’s got a bucket hat and a hiking backpack. He tells me where we have to go next.

SAGE: we got this sharp wall, this fence wall right here, that you can climb over, right past the caution, Do not enter sign. No trespassing. Um we do that. 

we ignore the sign.

EVA:  I'm climbing over. *climbing sounds*

But we're still not at the beach yet.

EVA: Now we're going to walk and cross the train tracks.  And I did see some trains pass by earlier. So it is  active.  

SAGE: Yes. The active railroad, the trains always blow they horn, you know, they know about this area and people real careful. 

I just watched a couple with a small baby do the same thing. They passed their toddler off to each other to hop over the fence.

SAGE: these, these are the barriers you have to cross and get through to get to Lincoln Beach. Yes. And that shouldn't be. 

Lincoln Beach. Named after Abraham Lincoln, the so-called great emancipator. During segregation: It was a Blacks-only beach.

Built to give people here badly needed access to nature — in particular, water.

And that’s what Sage wants now. A real beach for New Orleanians, especially for Black New Orleanians.

we walk through a small forest, I see remnants of huge, long picnic shelters. These used to be packed with families, drying off, sharing food.

SAGE:I can imagine in the past there were some neon lights running along it, um, and there was some bathroom settings in the back of it.

But those picnic shelters are now abandoned. All that remains are the curved cement pillars, covered in graffiti. And full of trash bags. –Which Sage actually put there. He and other beach advocates try to keep the beach clean.

SAGE: this is our third pile. 

Since it closed six decades ago, Lincoln Beach has been left to decay. People still come to swim, BUT they’re going rogue. We’re all trespassing.

Because the people who live around here? They need this place.

Half the year in New Orleans feels like summer – it’s hot, humid, unbearable – unless you have somewhere to cool off.

Sage brought me here because he’s one of the people pushing the city to spend millions of dollars to renovate Lincoln Beach. To officially reopen it as New Orlean’s only public beach — a place for everyone in the city to cool off.

SAGE: we holding on to this space to make sure that it's preserved, it's open for all people. Recognize this historically built for black people, but also recognize indigenous people that was even here before that because this was a coastal community.

Finally – we see the water. And the crowds. A lot of families, mostly Black and Hispanic.

Latin music blasts from speakers on a snoball stand

EVA: People are hammocking. They have Tubes in the water, pool noodles, there's two kids playing with like,  uh, water guns.

SAGE: The water guns. 

EVA: Uh, there's a bunch of people fishing on that little like,

SAGE: That's a jetty over there. 

And so that's a good fishing point right there. 

Sage and I sit in camping chairs on a quieter part of the waterfront. We look out at Lake Pontchartrain. It’s really a bay, North of New Orleans, connected to the Gulf of Mexico.

New Orleans is surrounded by water. I thought when I moved here I’d get to swim in it.

Water is important to me. My dad didn’t know how to swim, so he made sure all his kids did. We all became swimmers and lifeguards. Floating in the ocean or a lake has always relaxed me. Made me feel like I was connected to the earth.

But even though New Orleans has water in every direction, it’s hard to access.

Sage is trying to change that – by having the city take care of Lincoln Beach, instead of volunteers like him.

Sea Change theme music

SAGE:, it's neglected. I'm going to do for free for my community what you supposed to be doing right now. This is city owned property, you’re supposed to maintain this land.

I’m Eva Tesfaye and you’re listening to Sea Change. Today, we’re going to talk about the uncomfortable history of Lincoln Beach, how it led to New Orleans not having any public beaches today and how a community has rallied together to get their beach back.

After the break, we’re gonna go back in time to the era of segregation, to the 40s – the sweltering summers of New Orleans. If you were Black, the only place to soak up sun and sand was Lincoln Beach.

MIDROLL

Raphael Cassimere Jr remembers going to Lincoln Beach when he was little.

RAPHAEL: my Earliest memories probably must have been maybe about 10 going there. 

Raphael is in his 80s now. He has thick curly hair with a bit of gray. When we met, he was soft-spoken, but he had the composed thoughtful presence of an academic.

Raphael is a sixth generation New Orleanian. His family went to Lincoln Beach every summer. It was remote. Way off in the outskirts of the city. On the other side of a major canal.

So not easy to get to. Raphael says buses took Black families to Lincoln Beach from all over New Orleans. They would make a day of it.

RAPHAEL: What I most remember about it was a long ways out, it seems to me, maybe an hour and a half or two hours to get there, and I know I would always go to sleep.

Even the trip out to the beach was an adventure.

RAPHAEL: you had fun on the buses, singing and telling jokes or whatever.  So.  And then in particular the ones where you were from different neighborhoods, you got to interact with people from different neighborhoods.

Lincoln Beach first opened a little before Raphael was born, in the early 1940s

Before that, there weren't any beaches in New Orleans for Black people to swim in.

White people had Pontchartrain beach, which opened in 1928. The nearest place Black people could go was a resort in Mississippi called Gulfside.

At the time, New Orleans had so few places to swim that people ended up drowning trying to cool off.

RAPHAEL: In fact, one of the problems that people had had, uh, black youth not having swimming pools. I think we only had two black swimming pools in the whole city. And so people drowned in canals or drowned in the lakes because there was no place where you could really swim.

New Orleans’ Black newspaper, the Louisiana Weekly, published a running count of the drownings each summer.

Finding a place to have fun in the summertime was a huge problem in general for Black people across the United States. Segregation kept them out of many public parks and pools. W.E.B. Du Bois called it “The Color Problem of Summer”. That was the title of his article in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis.

VOICE OF DU BOIS: To the American Negro there comes,of course, the additional problem of race discrimination in amusement, and it comes most awkwardly because when one is searching for rest and renewal of strength, this is about the last time that one wants to settle social problems, or indeed to come in contact with them.

Finding a place to swim was especially difficult, he wrote. And he zeroed in on New Orleans. And its lack of beaches.

VOICE OF DU BOIS: “New Orleans Negroes are practically shut out from the sea and parks”

Black leaders at the time tried to convince the city to give Black people a beach of their own. One minister said the city accommodated ducks and geese before it accommodated Black people.

In 1938, the wealthy owner of a fruit company donated a portion of the lakefront for a Blacks-only beach. Lincoln Beach opened in 1941, but it was far from perfect.

One observer described the water as quote "reptile-infested." A report from the city’s own health director said it was not clean enough to swim in. Fishing camps and a nearby canal dumped raw sewage into the water.

RAPHAEL: You would get out along the, uh, the seawalk and get into the water. And it wasn't as fresh as, because I knew I would come home with red eyes.

People complained. And then, in the 1950s, Lincoln Beach got a $500 thousand renovation. That’s almost $6 million by today’s standards.

The renovated beach reopened to huge fan fare. Thousands of people were there. (Jazz band music starts under ) 

Papa Celestin's Tuxedo Jazz Band was playing.

 (Jazz band music up for a couple seconds, duck under ) 

There was even a Miss-Lincoln-Beach pageant that first year.

The new version of the beach had a dance pavilion, a new restaurant, a bath house – with 2000 lockers – and amusement park rides. They also put in three large swimming pools so that people didn't have to swim in the dirty water.

RAPHAEL: I couldn't swim, but I'd always get in the pool. The locker rooms were very nice. I remember you had to have at least a couple of bucks once you got there to buy food and you had to pay for each ride. 

The beach was advertised and celebrated in Black magazines and newspapers.

It became a destination for Black people across the South. And a music hub for Black artists. Like Nat King Cole and Fats Domino.

RAPHAEL: There was music, I think, on maybe Wednesdays or Thursday nights. One of the local black radio stations would broadcast from there. And it'd be a singing contest. I think I remember Ray Charles being there once. I wasn't there. But, you know, coming from nothing, it was certainly nicer than what we had had

But the main thing Raphael remembers is the stark difference between Lincoln Beach and the White beach: Pontchartrain Beach.

Raphael says the amusement park rides at Pontchartrain Beach seemed safer, the facilities nicer, the water cleaner. He wasn’t allowed to go there, because he was Black, but he noticed this from the commercials.

RAPHAEL: on television I kept seeing these pictures of Pontchartrain Beach, and it was so much nicer. 

EVA: So is that what you remember the jingle from?

RAPHAEL: Train Beach, you'll have fun, you’ll have fun, the rest  of the week

JINGLE: at the beach, at the beach, at Pontchartrain Beach, you'll have fun, you'll have fun, every day of the week,

It was this sort of thing which led Raphael to become a civil rights activist. And then a history professor. Today, he’s a professor emeritus at the University of New Orleans.

And he says Lincoln Beach was separate, but never equal.

RAPHAEL: maybe if I had not seen the difference. It would not have registered as much with me

Like schools, swimming pools and beaches were a battleground for the fight to end segregation. Especially in the South.

Just one state over in Biloxi, Mississippi, civil rights activists organized history-making protests called wade-ins. Black people gathered on a supposedly public beach. But they were attacked by white mobs and arrested by the police.

In the late 50s and early 60s, federal courts ordered the City of New Orleans to desegregate its parks and public facilities. Both Audubon Park and City Park chose to close their pools rather than integrate.

Then the Civil Rights Act passed.

NEWS REPORT: Now, in this summer of 1964, the Civil Rights Bill is the law of the land. In the words of the President, it restricts no one's freedom, so long as he respects the rights of others.

The 1964 Civil Rights Bill forced New Orleans to integrate Pontchartrain Beach.

And then, a month later, Lincoln Beach closed. The thinking was: after integration, the beach would lose money. People would choose the nicer – formerly whites-only Pontchartrain Beach – instead.

The Lincoln Beach corporation had even prepared for this. Their lease with the levee board specifically said they could end their contract if they couldn’t keep the beach segregated.

Raphael’s family started going to Pontchartrain Beach instead.

The whites-only beach responded to Black families like Raphael’s by closing its pool, installing a fence around the park and requiring people to pay for entry.

BUT, Pontchartrain beach eventually closed, too. In 1983. It took awhile, but over time, people stopped going there as much.

NEWS REPORT:  Popular opinion has deemed this piece of history obsolete.

One reporter at the time said: people had ways they could entertain themselves at home instead.

NEWS REPORT: In this modern age of computer games and TV, there seems to be just too many other things to do. So, on Saturday, September 24th, 1983, Pontchartrain Beach closed its gates for the last time.

So New Orleans no longer had any more beaches.

(Music turn)

Historian Andrew Karhl studies the history of beach access.

KAHRL:  in a sense, sort of what happened to Lincoln beach and, um, was a harbinger of things to come, across the South 

Karhl says, after integration, funding was immediately pulled from lots of Black spaces, forcing them to close.

When Black people started going to the newly integrated white spaces, white people no longer wanted to use them. Andrew Kahrl says, that sent them elsewhere,

KAHRL: middle class and sort of more privileged whites, who can afford to, into private spaces, whether they be private swimming clubs, private Golf courses, other sort of private amenities,

And because of that retreat, over the years those newly integrated spaces – true public spaces – started to close.

KAHRL: that really sort of, um, open the floodgates to this, you know, disinvestment in public recreation and public recreational facilities, um, that we've seen unfold over the second half of the 20th century and continuing to this day. 

Kahrl says we’re still losing beach access, especially for people of color. Some beaches are becoming private beaches. For others, local governments are making it harder to reach them.

Kahrl says: public beach access has been under attack for decades.

KAHRL: And I think, you know, especially in coastal cities or cities like New Orleans that just, you know, have, you know, You know, surrounded by bodies of water. I mean, that is a really critical area of need that is going unmet.

SCENE- PROJECT IN THE 90s(Music)

It’s been sixty years since Lincoln Beach closed. But the residents of New Orleans East never really gave up on the idea of reopening it. They even came close in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Back then, the push came from a community group called All Congregations Together. For a while, it seemed like the project was going pretty well. The levee board promised $1.5 million dollars for a new pier, according to an article in New Orleans magazine. It also commissioned plans for the beach: a new pavilion, restrooms, a playground and a mural depicting its civil rights history.

BUT things just kept getting stalled. The levee board and the city argued over who was responsible for the beach. The city found contamination and pushed off construction. And they also lost paperwork for the demolition.

Then Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. And those plans for Lincoln Beach were left behind.

And it would take another few decades to get that close again. That’s coming up after the break.

Music

MIDROLL

SCENE - THE THREE AMIGOSAs a Black woman, I couldn’t help but get excited at the idea of having a beach in town that has so much Black history.

When I met up with Sage Michael Pellet, the skinny, outdoorsy activist trying to reopen Lincoln Beach, he told me he was braised in New Orleans, born and raised.

SAGE:I was a barber for over 30 years, um, and community organizing and part of New Orleans culture for a long time. 

Sage is 49 years old. He first came to Lincoln Beach when he was 24.

SAGE:  I came over and I, my dogs and I discovered it and it was a, a, a beautiful place. Beautiful sight of old amusement ruins and a beachfront  in a wild forest. 

Sage is really the one who began this latest push to reopen Lincoln Beach. It was during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement back in 2020. he started cleaning up the beach and posting about it on social media.

SAGE:  Lincoln Beach was an opportunity for a project to say black lives matter and to show black lives matter and to inspire others to invest in their community and invest in our nature. 

But Sage hasn’t been leading this effort alone. There’s two other important people you need to know. Reggie.

REGGIE: My name is Reggie Ford. I'm born and raised in New Orleans. Uh, attended  nine different public schools,  live uptown, downtown and cross the river.

And Blyss.

BLYSS: Trisha Wallace, also known as bliss. I am a singer here in New Orleans, but also a philanthropist and activist.

Sage likes to call them the three amigos. Blyss found Sage on Instagram and Reggie saw him doing a TV news interview. They reached out to him and the three of them started cleaning up the beach together. Eventually they started the nonprofit: New Orleans for Lincoln Beach. Blyss runs it now.

SAGE: We brothers, sisters from then on to this day.

They hosted events they called, Clean Up and Chill. People came to the beach. They played music and picked up trash. But they didn't just make the beach look nicer. They took on some small infrastructure projects too digging up old fences buried underground, creating trails using seashells, lining those trails with solar-powered lights. Sage says there was a lot of standing water.

SAGE: it creates millions and millions of mosquitoes for the community. So we created, um, drainage systems for the site. 

But there were issues they couldn't solve on their own. They couldn’t fix how hard it is to get to the beach or keep people safe from the alligators.

EVA: have you seen an alligator?  

SAGE: Yes, I seen alligators. Baby ones, big ones. 

Even the trash can be too much. In 2021, the three amigos started asking for help. From everyone. The city council, the mayor's office, even Congress.

According to the mayor’s office, fixing Lincoln Beach was on the to-do list. But not much progress was being made. The city says it was trying to figure out how to reopen the beach on a much smaller budget.

But as Reggie sees it, the city kept dragging its feet.

REGGIE: They always missed the deadlines. They're not the best at communicating with the public about what the next move is or what the current moves are.

Reggie's great-uncle was a freedom rider in the civil rights movement and an advisor to Martin Luther King. So he knew how to do this. He's got advocacy in his blood. He lobbied politicians to find more money.

REGGIE:  I demanded it and the politicians delivered. That was my main thing and my main objective for it to be fully paid with tax dollars so the public could have full control.

His efforts paid off. City council put aside $20.5 million dollars for Lincoln Beach. And earlier this year, Congressman Troy Carter secured an extra $4.1 million from the federal government.

REGGIE: I wanted to be a part of recapturing that thing. And that's, That's what we did.

SCENE - COMMUNITY MEETINGA lot of people want to be a part of recapturing Lincoln Beach. The first public meeting of the project was at Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, a huge modern Black church in New Orleans East, right off the highway.

Around 70 people showed up All ages, mostly Black, some hispanic, Vietnamese and white. Many seemed to already know each other. Most were excited about the future of Lincoln Beach.

A couple city council members and staffers were also there. So was the architecture firm contracted to design the master plan for the beach. One of the landscape architects explained how the process worked.

PUBLIC MEETING: So today we're not coming with any designs.

We're here to hear your feedback and your priorities of what you want to see for the future vision of Lincoln Beach.

Everyone sat in groups around tables. There were maps of the beach, posters, markers and sticky notes. AMBI Each group discussed what they wanted to see at the beach. The architects encouraged people to think big.

Then a member from each group shared what they came up with. One of the priorities was making sure whatever designs look like, they include the beach’s Black history.

I think number one is just preserving the culture and the history of that space, understanding that that is a national landmark. 

the oral history of, um, generations that lived during the Lincoln Beach era should inform, um, the decision making

Many people had thoughts about the environment.

water quality, uh, is that going to be monitored? 

Let's be inclusive of wildlife, people, and animals. 

the rehabilitation of the coastline was important to our group,

And then there were some fun ideas.

a beautiful idea that came up was like a drive in movie theater.

But a lot of people had concerns.

Where are the funds going to be that are going to continue to show the priority that we have in that beach?

Another concern was entry into the beach, ADA accessibility, should there be a bridge,. 

People wanted to know that the project would not only get done, but that it would get done right, with the city making efforts to engage everyone in the east, not just the people who show up to the meeting.

And then one woman got up, and summed up the stakes of the project. The REASON so many people are invested in this beach. Repairing their connection with water.

 There should be a campaign for black children in New Orleans to learn to swim and be at one with the water. We are a water people. Why are we so disconnected not only from nature but water when we have several bodies of water. 

Music turn

After the meeting, the architecture firm used all these ideas and came up with three designs to bring back to the community.

All of the designs incorporate structures still at Lincoln Beach –leftovers from the 1960s. And they all include a parking lot and a pedestrian bridge over the train tracks — so you don’t have to climb a levee and hop a fence like I did.

But each design also has different features the public will help choose, like a drive-in movie theater, a nature center, an urban farm.

Even though the project is in motion, a lot of people share the same fears – the ones expressed during the community meeting. That the Lincoln Beach project might just never get done.

Sage — the outdoorsy activist — is worried too. The city did an assessment of the beach back in 2021, but he said little work has actually been done at the site since.

SAGE: This is 2024 and, and, and none of  the basic infrastructure stuff’s not out yet. It’s not laid out yet. It should have been done. It should have been done when the money came.

The three amigos are still the main people taking care of the beach. And Sage is worried that if construction doesn’t start soon, the money might get moved around to other city priorities.

SAGE: it's time to turn this place into a construction site. so I could see my elders walk through that gate.

Sage has good reason to take such a skeptical view of the city. City projects get delayed all the time. And city officials never followed through on reopening Lincoln Beach the last time there was a big push – back in the late 90s.

Just last year, the city moved millions of dollars OUT of the Lincoln Beach project. Only to put it BACK a few days later.

ROBLES:  it was made a way bigger deal than it was 

That’s Cheryn Robles (Sharon Row-bless), the city's project manager for Lincoln Beach. I talked to her to get the city’s take on all these criticisms.

ROLES: the funds get shifted all the time and it's not like we've lost any money, um, and if anything, we're still pursuing additional funding sources 

Robles said the city knows people are skeptical — and it’s trying to build trust.

ROLES: there's a lot of reasons for people to distrust, and so,  it's just a constant, it's just a constant challenge to help people understand like, you know, we have the best intentions, we're dedicated to delivering the project that the people want. 

But while Robles said the city is onboard, she also agreed that Lincoln Beach wouldn’t be reopening without the work of three people. The Three Amigos.

ROLES:  it was because of the advocacy of the residents who had already started like working, um, you know, because of like Reggie Sage and Bliss, it's because of their activism. You] know, they, they petitioned the council to try to get the city to allocate the funding.

Music 

And when I talk to Sage, one thing is clear: the three amigos are not going to let the city back down, like it did in the 90s.

SAGE: Just try to pick up the torch and let's keep this fire burning as, until, until we open that gate, you know, and so that's my lifelong commitment right there,

SCENE - EARTH DAY CONCERT(BLYSS SINGING starts under).You met Trisha Wallace earlier, also known as Bliss. She’s one of the Three Amigos. It’s Earth day, and Blyss stands on a stage wearing a black dress and sparkly silver boots. Singing about her love for Lincoln beach. Surrounded by abstract art of the beach that she painted herself.

BLYSS (SINGING):  Call me revolutionary,  I prefer resolutionary. I'll be on the beach, chillin with my peace, Caring for your feet, you know me, DUCK UNDER AND FADE OUT 

Blyss has helped organize this concert at a performing arts center in another New Orleans neighborhood. The point of it is to tie together the health of the earth to what’s good for the people of New Orleans East.

Blyss is hopeful -- She's also head of the mayor’s community advisory board for the Lincoln Beach project. She says from her perspective things are moving along pretty well. She feels like despite the struggles, real progress has been made on bringing Lincoln Beach to the public. She told me before she got on stage that she wants the concert to honor that.

BLYSS: celebrating connections. And the hard work that we've done. We've done a lot to bring this to light and also to make sure that it's developed in a way that  will embrace the community versus shutting us out. 

Blyss likes imagining the children who will soon enjoy the beach. She says having the beach is a piece of freedom they deserve.

BLYSS: And I've watched several Children just as soon as they see it, they know what to do. They run straight to the water 

*BLYSS SONG STARTS* And she sings about that.

BLYSS: I want to see the babies, Rowing them boatss, fishing with the poles, Swimming as long as they want so you know You gotta make a way, come on out of there It's (Duck under)

SCENE - SAGE AT THE BEACH WITH KIDSBlyss's singing about kids on the beach reminded me of something Sage told me. *Fade down* Back at Lincoln Beach, as we sat on chairs, looking at the water, I asked him are there any specific kids he has in mind when he thinks about reopening the beach? He told me about a few he caught trying to steal one of his kayaks.

SAGE:  And of course I was upset. I'm like, y'all could get really hurt over this stuff because it's my property. Y'all should be in school somewhere. 

Later Sage went to see where the kids lived.

SAGE: But when I went rolling in the street, that's the street I'm talking about. Literally not a fly on the street. It's ugly on the street is dumping on the street. Abandoned cars. So I felt even more sad for them. I really did like drop a tear because They really have nothing to look up to. And I can only imagine what's going on, like, on that street at night, or, or their homes, you know what I'm saying?

So, you know, those kids like that really, like, uh, they need this place.

*Music*

As we left the beach, Sage offered to buy me a mango snoball. So we walked back over to the more rowdy side of the beach. Sage was immediately swarmed by a group of kids from a family that he knew. He said hi and the smallest — probably around 5 years old — followed us over to the snoball stand.

CHILD: What up man? You good?

Sage told the kid he was talking to a reporter. You tell her, he said to the boy. Tell her about Lincoln Beach.

And he did. He told me about roasting marshmallows on the beach with Sage.

CHILD: So look, he would, uh, he would, uh, burn a marshmallow with us. 

EVA: A marshmallow?

CHILD:  He would burn it with us.

*Maybe music up slowly?* That's who the three amigos are fighting for. They want the beach open not only for the elders who want to be able to relive their memories at the beach,. But also for the kids of New Orleans, who have never experienced it.

The ones who don’t have a safe place to hang out. The ones who need somewhere to cool off as climate change makes the summers hotter and hotter. The ones who don’t know how to swim. The ones who have lived around water their whole lives, but are scared of it.

They deserve to have a place they can go to have fun in the summertime. A place to get a snowball and roast marshmallows.

—--

OUTRO

Thanks for listening to Sea Change. This episode was reported and hosted by Eva Tesfaye. I’m Carlyle Calhoun, the managing producer. This episode was edited by Rosemary Westwood with help from me, Halle Parker, Tyler Pratt, and Ryan Vasquez.

Joseph King voiced WEB Dubois. Garrett Hazelwood is our fact-checker. Our sound designer is Emily Jankowski and our theme music is by Jon Batiste.

Special thanks to the Amistad Research Center at Tulane Univeristy and Sage Michael Pellet for sharing their archives.

Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We're a part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. SeaChange is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. WWNO's Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux and the Greater New Orleans Foundation. We'll be back in two weeks!

Eva Tesfaye covers the environment for WWNO's Coastal Desk. You can reach her at eva@wrkf.org.