Tybee Island Wade-Ins

During the Civil Rights movement, Tybee Island's wade-ins, together with sit-ins, kneel-ins, and boycotts of Savannah businesses, eventually secured African-Americans equal access to public recreational facilities. At a mass meeting of the Savannah NAACP, W.W. Law praised the protesters and urged Black residents to withhold support from segregated businesses on Broughton Street. Because of potentially explosive racial tensions and anticipated large numbers of protesters, the Tybee prison camp near the present-day police station was reopened. The success of the peaceful protests helped persuade Savannah community leaders to negotiate an end to segregation, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called Savannah "the most desegregated city south of the Mason-Dixon line." By the time President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964, Savannah Beach had been integrated for 8 months. Despite these gains, racial tension has remained over regulation of the Black college students' spring break celebration known as Orange Crush, named after Savannah State University's color orange. On June 19, 2015, the Tybee MLK Human Rights Organization began an annual Juneteenth celebration to observe both the historic Tybee wade-ins and the first Juneteenth on June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, when the last remaining enslaved African-Americans in the United States learned from Federal Troops that they had been freed two years earlier by the Emancipation Proclamation. In July 2020, more than half a century after the wade-ins and 133 years after the city's founding, Tybee City Council acknowledged the city's history of racially discriminatory practices by approving a Resolution Promoting Justice and Equality, which among other directives established June 19, Juneteenth, as an annual city holiday.

Tybee Island, Georgia · United States