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In the 20th century American South, many state parks were segregated, excluding Black Americans from participating in popular forms of outdoor recreation. Though the parks were desegregated thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it still has far reaching impacts on today’s visitorship to these spaces.

As part of the , Trevor Egerton, a history doctoral candidate studying race and outdoor recreation in the 20th century American South, visited three formerly segregated state parks in Tennessee and South Carolina to interview local residents and workers and explore archival documents. The program connects selected students with a dedicated librarian and provides a stipend to cover additional research expenses.

Egerton discusses his interest in this topic, the value of traveling for research and some of the challenges he’s faced.

What inspired you to focus on race and outdoor recreation in the 20th century American South?

I first became interested in this topic after taking a long car camping trip across the American West, where I visited Utah’s five national parks. I found myself wondering: Why is (nearly) everyone I am seeing around me white? Why, in particular, are Black Americans seemingly not visiting what some have called “America’s Best Idea” to near the same degree as other groups of Americans?

Three years later, while doing summer research for my senior thesis at the Texas State Archive, I found a Longview Journal newspaper clipping from Feb. 9, 1951, explaining that the Texas Legislature planned to “turn over Caddo Lake State Park near Marshall for exclusive use by Negroes. This includes cabins, a group camp, and excellent fishing and picnic areas (bold in original).” Caddo Lake was never officially set aside for Black Texans, with the proposal getting ensnared in legislative bureaucracy before the Brown v. Board of Education decision rendered the whole scheme legally moot three years later.

Nonetheless, this clipping brought back my questions from a few years prior and I quickly learned that, although there were 40 Black-only state parks across the American South between 1935 and 1964, historians had only written about them sparingly. These parks, therefore, offered a potential path to understand how race has mediated the relationship between southerners, state governments, outdoor recreation and nature. Through them, I could explore how African Americans fought for recreational spaces of their own and see what a focus on outdoor recreation added to existing scholarship on the “Long Civil Rights Movement.”

Although these questions ended up only playing a small role in my thesis, I knew researching segregated, Black-only state parks was a path I wanted to pursue in graduate school.

How has the fellowship program impacted your ability to pursue this research?

With CAAAS’s support, I was able to conduct three weeks of research in Tennessee and South Carolina during June, visiting four archives across those two states while searching for information on T.O. Fuller and Edisto Beach State Parks. This research, while not finished, has already been the basis for a conference paper and will hopefully be the building blocks for multiple dissertation chapters. Without their critical support, I likely would not have had the time and funding to complete this research, putting me behind the curve as I transitioned to being a candidate this semester.

“By exploring outdoor recreation’s diversity in the past, I hope to demonstrate the complex and important roles identity plays and will play in outdoor recreation’s future.”

How do you see your research contributing to a broader understanding of African and African American studies or global scholarship in your field?

I see my work first and foremost as an important intervention in our understanding of the relationship between identity and outdoor recreation. In popular media and by many proponents, outdoor recreation is often seen today as either a space outside of identity or (explicitly or implicitly) as a white-only or white-dominated space. By exploring outdoor recreation’s diversity in the past, I hope to demonstrate the complex and important roles identity plays and will play in outdoor recreation’s future.

Beyond these larger ideas, I also play a small role in the larger debate around the topics and chronology of Black Freedom Struggle in the mid-20th century. For one, I demonstrate that concern over access to outdoor recreation—and outdoor recreation as a community space for Black southerners—played an important role in Civil Rights struggles from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Additionally, I see how the fight for outdoor recreation does and does not fit within what historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall terms the “Long Civil Rights Movement.” I largely conclude that outdoor recreation does not fit within the “Long Civil Rights” framework given some technical temporal and geographical issues.

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced while conducting your research, and how have you overcome them?

Some of the challenges I’ve faced include searching for funding and physically finding the necessary documents. For funding issues, CAAAS has been a fantastic resource. Without them, much of the research I conducted over the summer would have not been possible. In terms of finding the documents, I have struggled to find information about the African American Civilian Conservation Corps crew that built T.O. Fuller State Park in the late 1930s and early 1940s. I am still looking for a cache of documents on this crew that I believe are somewhere in the National Archives in D.C. To help get around the current gap in information, however, I have relied on local archives in Memphis, newspaper records, and other, more orthogonal sources, to fill gaps while I continue to find more information.

“Working with University Libraries has been a treat. I have had a useful and deeply helpful meeting with Librarian Katrina Allmendinger in September that helped outline my research goals and talk through the ways that Norlin can help as I get deeper into research.”

How has working with the University Libraries, particularly with the offer of the support of a dedicated librarian, impacted your research process?

Working with University Libraries has been a treat. I have had a useful and deeply helpful meeting with Librarian Katrina Allmendinger in September that helped outline my research goals and talk through the ways that Norlin can help as I get deeper into research. Additionally, I hope to use the archives at Norlin. Norlin, as Rare Book Librarian Deborah Hollis has told me, has some African American travel books that I hope to look at soon. Ultimately, the support and funding from the library will provide robust support as I continue my research.

“I find that visiting the places I am writing about can really help shape or color my writing and understanding of these places.”

What role do you believe travel and access to primary source materials play in making your research more robust or meaningful? Can you say more about the travel that you did for research?

My research would be impossible without travel. First and foremost I need to go to archives and physically examine the primary source documents I was writing. Without archival research trips to the American South and to Washington D.C., my research could not happen and I would not be able to write a dissertation. Beyond this, since I am writing specifically about state parks, I find that visiting the places I am writing about can really help shape or color my writing and understanding of these places. While there, I learn a lot of details that I might not have learned even with deep archival study and can talk to current stakeholders and learn the relationship between the past and pressing contemporary issues.

What advice would you give to other graduate students who are just starting their research in similar fields?

The biggest piece of advice I have is to spend as much time as possible in or around the communities that you are writing about and working with. Living in Colorado, I am not really able to go down to the South as much as I would like. But, for those who can, being there, being present, and demonstrating a commitment to the communities you are working with is the first step, in my opinion, to doing good historical work.