The Ink Well

The historical marker identifies it as, “A Place of Celebration and Pain,” but what was the Ink Well? Why was it important to the African American community?

Before 1927, when the NAACP brought a lawsuit that insisted African Americans have the right to access any public beach in California, the beach between Pico Boulevard and Bicknell Street was known at “The Ink Well” by the local white community. The term was a derogatory one that expressed white paranoia about sharing the water with black swimmers. Most African Americans knew it as the Bay Street Beach and it served as a safe space for a community suffering under Jim Crow restrictions in L.A. and throughout America. The beach was due west of what was in the teens and twenties a largely black neighborhood (in the area that’s now the Santa Monica Civic Center).

Legal battles over blacks on the beach heated up in the 1920’s when white business owners blocked plans to build a black resort and subsequently built the opulent Casa del Mar, which didn’t welcome blacks. The decade ended with a successful series of civil rights protests and court decisions which affirmed blacks’ rights to public access. And although Southern California was in many ways better than the southern states African Americans left behind, it would be decades before the color lines were erased in the sands of California beaches.

You can read more about The Ink Well / Bay Street Beach (including an account of black surfing pioneer Nick Gabaldon) in the work of Alison Rose Jeffries.