The Forgotten Black History of Martha’s Vineyard
The island has always been more than a summer playground
In 1855, an old, frail, dark-skinned woman sat confined to her room in Edgartown, MA, as the most powerful men in the seafaring hub came to beg her blessings. The town, on the eastern coast of Martha’s Vineyard, was a bustling center of maritime industry where fishermen, cargo shippers, and whalers plied their trades. It was the whaling men who’d travel the cobblestone streets of the town, weaving between elegant, stark-white captain’s mansions and smaller, simpler houses to make their way to the woman’s doorstep, bearing gifts.
No one knew how old she was — some said nearly 100 — but for decades, Edgartown’s whalers had relied on her power. They’d come to her just before setting off on months- or even years-long voyages to places as far flung as the West Indies and the Azores in search of hulking creatures that might either make them their fortunes or kill them. The men were afraid. But it was said that the woman they called Black Nance had power over the sea, and that her blessing could protect them from the worst fates: illness, injury, and the fury of the whales themselves, which could drag boats and their crewmen down to the depths even after being harpooned.
She wasn’t entirely benevolent. According to an obituary in the Vineyard Gazette, when tragedy struck vessels whose captains had doubted her power, she’d go out into the streets in righteous, rageful celebration. There, passersby would see her “shaking her long, bony fingers at all unbelievers in her magical powers, and pouring forth the most bitter invectives upon those whom she looked upon as her enemies.” Though she was a strange figure, she was both feared and respected.
Her real name was Nancy Michael, and she had risen up from slavery to become part of the fabric of the maritime community in Martha’s Vineyard. Her story is just one moment in the lesser-known Black seafaring history on the island, which complicates the commonly held picture of Black life there. Today, Martha’s Vineyard is primarily known as a summer playground for the wealthy, including the Black elite, with prominent figures like the Obamas having become regulars along with a host of Black executives, elected officials, filmmakers, artists, and professionals like doctors and lawyers.
While it’s true that Black middle and upper class families have been summering on the island for more than a century now, the island’s Black history doesn’t begin and end with summer. There’s a working class history that’s all too often left out of the discussion, and several of the most significant figures in that history worked along the water. To understand today’s Black Vineyard, you first have to understand the people whose lives revolved around the sea.
From slavery to captainship
The earliest Black residents on Martha’s Vineyard were enslaved. Nancy herself was born a slave, and was kept in bondage until well after Massachusetts had abolished the practice. After being freed, she suffered through years of poverty, eventually relying on the town for support. Not much else is known about her life, though by the time she was an old woman she had developed a reputation as a possible witch whose powers could prove useful to men on the sea.
During Nancy’s lifetime, free Black seamen were an integral part of the island’s seafaring industries, working as deckhands or dock workers unloading cargo. But a few would rise to much higher positions. Among them was Nancy’s own grandson, William Martin, whom she raised because his mother was often absent and in trouble with the law.
Growing up in Nancy’s shadow, William seemed to inherit her connection to the sea. He joined whaling voyages and eventually became the first Black whaling ship captain on Martha’s Vineyard. Over the course of his career, he brought back more than 2,658 barrels of sperm whale oil, along with other valuable cargo such as whalebone. Much like his grandmother, he was respected by fellow seafarers — the racial dynamics on whaling ships didn’t necessarily follow the same rules as existed on land. Authority followed skill and hierarchy rather than skin color.
But for William, some degree of that respect ended at the water’s edge. When he returned to Martha’s Vineyard after a successful voyage, he was still a Black man, and was treated accordingly. While Edgartown was full of imposing Greek Revival mansions where other whaling captains lived in high style in between voyages — the same kinds of houses cleaned by his wife Sarah, who worked as a domestic — Martin himself wasn’t permitted to live there. Instead, he and his wife made their home in Chappaquiddick among the Wampanoag community, which Sarah was descended from.
Martin took his last whaling voyage in 1893, as the whaling industry collapsed with the discovery of cheaper alternatives to whale oil for lighting and other uses. By the time he died in 1907, the Vineyard’s seafarers, including the many Black sailors and dockworkers, had largely turned to fishing and freight shipping. It wasn’t until the years between 1920 and 1930 that the maritime industries took a darker turn, right around the same time the Black population of the island was increasing.
A new era
Once Prohibition began and the transport and sale of alcohol became illegal, it turned out that Martha’s Vineyard’s position as a seafaring hub meant it was perfectly situated for all the illegal innovations that would come out of the era. None was more dramatic than Rum Row: a line of liquor-loaded “motherships” stretching all the way from Florida to New England, all parked just over three miles offshore, where international waters began and the US no longer had jurisdiction to enforce the Volstead Act.
Anyone with a ship or a boat — from fishing steam trawlers to speedboats and schooners — could cross the water, purchase anything from a single bottle of Canadian whiskey to a hundred cases of Bahamian rum, and run it back to shore under cover of darkness. Since Vineyard fishermen already had boats and knew the coastal waters well, they were especially apt to become runners. And though the Coast Guard patrolled the waters, fishermen hauling contraband had tricks to outwit them: a story in a local newspaper described how they’d return to port with liquor hidden beneath layers of fresh fish in chopped ice.
The historical record is mum on the extent to which Black fishermen on the Vineyard got involved with the rum-running trade. Runners of all races tended to keep their mouths shut, so many stories from the era have been lost. But there was a critical mass of Black residents on the island at that time — by 1920, they were around 10% of the population, with more than 100 based in Oak Bluffs alone. And we do know that Black residents continued to work in maritime industries well into the 20th century. Census records from 1900 to 1930 show several Black fishermen, deckhands, and even a Black member of the Coast Guard — all jobs that would’ve positioned them for direct involvement in rum-running, on one side of the law or the other.
But during those same years, whatever might’ve been happening on the water, a new Black Vineyard was emerging on land. The number of Black summer residents, coming in from cities like Boston and New York, was rising. But when they arrived, they found some of the same discrimination that Nancy Michael and William Martin would’ve experienced in their times. In the 1920s, the hotels on the island didn’t accept Black guests. In addition, Black workers were kept largely out of sight even when they worked at local white-owned businesses, being barred from customer-facing positions at stores on main roads like Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs.
Those limitations inspired many Black Vineyard residents — both seasonal and year-round — to build their own businesses: they opened rooming houses to welcome Black vacationers, ran restaurants and laundry businesses that catered to summer clientele, and more. Many of those businesses helped Black families build wealth that allowed them to return to the island year after year, buy homes, and build new traditions.
As the 20th century wore on, a maritime culture that had once been grounded in whaling ships and fishing boats began to give way, at least in part, to the ferries and leisure cruisers that make up the modern summer destination. Today, the Black experience on Martha’s Vineyard is a far cry from what even a powerful conjure woman like Nancy Michael might’ve been able to imagine in her day. But her role was an early symbol of Black presence and power on the island. Though the industries may have changed, Black Vineyarders’ relationship with the sea has endured.
Ashton Lattimore is the executive editor of The Preamble, and an award-winning author of historical fiction. Her forthcoming novel, Runner, is set in Prohibition-era Martha’s Vineyard and tells the story of a young Black woman who takes over her family’s rum-running operation after her father disappears in a mysterious shipwreck.
