Entry · catalog no. 1143
the Inkwell
/ /ðə ˈɪŋkwɛl/ /thuh INK-wel
proper noun · Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; and Black beaches nationally · 1950s
✓ Verified
1.
The town beach at Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard, at the foot of Tuckernuck Avenue — the gathering place of Black summer residents and visitors since the late nineteenth century, and one of the most recognizable Black social spaces in the country. It is a public beach and always has been; the name is a community name laid over a municipal one, and older Vineyard residents still call it the Town Beach, some of them pointedly. It carries its own institutions: the Polar Bears, who have swum there each summer morning since 1946, Juneteenth gatherings, HBCU reunions, and a stop on the island's African American Heritage Trail.
“Her family had been going down to the Inkwell every August since her grandmother was a girl.”
2.
More broadly, a stretch of beach where Black people swam during segregation, and the name attached to it. Santa Monica had an Inkwell at Bay Street, used from roughly 1905 into the 1960s and now a listed historic district; other Inkwells existed elsewhere. In each case the name marks the water Black people were permitted, or the water they went to because they were unwelcome everywhere else.
“Every coast had an Inkwell — the one stretch of sand where nobody was going to run you off.”
Origin & Attribution
The origin is genuinely contested, and this entry does not resolve it. The most widely repeated account — and the one matching the documented pattern at Santa Monica and other Jim Crow-era Black beaches — is that white bystanders coined it as a slur about the skin of the swimmers, and Black beachgoers later took it and wore it. A second account, given firsthand by Jessica B. Harris, who has summered on Tuckernuck Avenue since the late 1950s, holds that at Oak Bluffs the name began as an in-joke among the Black swimmers themselves, spoken privately and never in mixed company, and only later became public. A third ties it to Harlem Renaissance writers who summered in Oak Bluffs; Harris treats that one as doubtful. Longtime residents disagree, sometimes sharply, and some refuse the name outright. What is not in dispute is what followed: whichever mouth it came from, the community it described took it up, and it is now printed on shirts and hats and said with pride. The era is mid-twentieth century for Oak Bluffs — one lifelong resident recalls the name did not yet exist there in the 1940s — and the Jim Crow decades for the general sense.
1890
Black families begin buying summer property in Oak Bluffs and gathering at the town beach
1946
The Polar Bears are founded at the beach; the morning swim becomes a standing institution
1994
Matty Rich's film The Inkwell is released and the name goes national
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; and Black beaches nationally · 1950s
Spoken by
Black summer communities of Martha's Vineyard; Black Americans nationally
$THEINKThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady32 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
66/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1994
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
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The Bronx, NY
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Philadelphia, PA
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Citations & Sources
■
Jessica B. Harris, "The Inkwell," Martha's Vineyard Magazine, 1 August 2017 — firsthand essay by a lifelong Oak Bluffs summer resident laying out three competing origin accounts
magazine · firsthand
■
"The Inkwell: Wading into its history," Vineyard Visitor, 4 June 2024 — first-person account by a Black Oak Bluffs native; records the derisive-coinage account held by Polar Bears elders
news · reported
■
Bay Street Beach Historic District, National Register of Historic Places nomination, California Office of Historic Preservation, 2019 — federal documentation of the Santa Monica Inkwell
report · archival
■
+ Cite a sourceMatty Rich, dir., The Inkwell (Touchstone Pictures, 1994)
film · feature
See also