NEW HANOVER COUNTY — A piece of local history is getting more attention from the New Hanover County school board after one member requested it be added to the district’s curriculum.
READ MORE: Foust ‘appalled’ at proposed NHCS conduct policy, spars with board member over historical accuracy
Last week, school board member Pat Bradford asked for the story of New Hanover County’s Seabreeze and Freeman resorts to be added to the curriculum beginning in the 2026-2027 school year. The board unanimously agreed.
Rebecca Taylor, former director of the Federal Point Historic Preservation Society, presented the history of Seabreeze to the school board on July 30.
Seabreeze and Freeman Beach were two beach resorts established in New Hanover County in 1922 and 1951, respectively, though many consider them the same. The two locations were summertime destinations for Black vacationers during the Jim Crow era, when beach resorts were racially segregated.
The resorts were built on a portion of 100-plus acres of land, purchased in the mid-1800s by a free Black and Indigenous couple, Alexander and Charity Freeman. The family and its descendents lived in the area, from Kure Beach to Monkey Junction; the Rachel Freeman School of Engineering is named after a family ancestor.
Seabreeze consisted of hotels, restaurants, an amusement park and multiple juke joints, bringing in national jazz and R&B acts, which also peppered Freeman Beach. Hurricane Hazel and beach erosion, exacerbated by a man-made inlet from Snows Cut to Carolina Beach, as well as decreasing visitors contributed to the decline of the resorts. By the 1970s, all hotels were gone and only a handful of bars remained.
Per Taylor’s presentation to the board, education on the Seabreeze and Freeman Beach will center on how the middle-class, Black Freeman family found success in a difficult era and contributed to their community. While during the resorts’ heyday, it was providing Black visitors a safe place to stay, some of the land is now being preserved in a park for the public’s enjoyment.
The Town of Carolina Beach closed in 2022 on a decades-long deal to purchase and preserve Freeman Park, which included settling with several of the Freeman’s remaining heirs. One of them is deceased rapper Tupac Shakur’s godmother, Assata Shakur, a.k.a. Joanne Deborah Chesimard, a fugitive on the FBI’s most wanted list.
The Seabreeze landmark was bestowed with a North Carolina Highway historical marker in May at 7617 Carolina Beach Road near its intersection with S. Seabreeze Road.
According to Chief Academic Officer Patrice Faison, some social studies or history classrooms have been exposed to the Seabreeze story as part of the local history component of the state’s curriculum.
At the board’s July 30 agenda review meeting, Faison told the board she discussed incorporating Seabreeze into the district’s Career and Technical Education classes.
“We’d like to incorporate first-person oral-history gathering with technology; student video and audio production,” Bradford said to Port City Daily last week.
PCD asked the board member what prompted her to bring forth the Seabreeze instruction proposal.
“I learned the story,” Bradford said. “It is important for our students to be taught local history, especially when it is not only of local, but state and national importance as this is.”
Though the board has wrestled with teachings involving race in the past, last week’s Seabreeze discussion didn’t face any controversy. Taylor said the story had a “happy ending,” as opposed to 1898, referring to the Wilmington massacre and coup, which led to the murder of multiple of Black people, among others pushed out of the county by white supremacists on Nov. 10, 1898.
In 2022, Republican board member Pete Wildeboer, now chair, raised the flag on the district’s lessons on 1898, claiming to hear parental complaints about the facts involved.
“I think there’s a lot of thought right now around 1898 that there were a bunch of really bad Republicans that chased around Democrats,” Wildeboer said. “But the truth of the matter is that it was the exact opposite: A lot of African Americans back then were Republicans, and they were chased by Democrats.”
Wildeboer’s statement is true, though the parties we know today were not the same as in 1898; the post-Reconstruction period in America was a power struggle between pro-civil rights Republicans and Southern white Democrats who opposed equality.
More recently, the school board reviewed a policy that included direct language from a Republican-proposed bill in the General Assembly. The language would set parameters on what beliefs could be taught in the classroom, one of which is that “All Americans are not created equal and are not endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. U.S. Constitution, among other things.”
Former Superintendent Charles Foust and some board members at the time were concerned this policy would infringe on educators’ historical lessons involving racism. It passed in February, with Republicans Bradford, Wildeboer, Melissa Mason and Josie Barnhart.
The move to include Seabreeze in the curricula also comes in the wake of criticisms from the Black community stemming from the firing of Foust last month. E.B. Davis, Kojo Nantambu and Derrick Anderson, prominent advocates for Black residents, released a co-authored letter condemning the NHC Republican Party’s celebration of Foust’s ousting and NHC Democratic Party for taking Black people’s vote for granted while being complacent on issues that affect them.
PCD talked to Anderson and Dorian Cromartie, the latter a descendant of the Freeman family. Both thought race played a part in the all-white school board’s firing of Foust, the first Black superintendent of the district, along with the unsatisfactory climate survey results revealed before the board voted to fire Foust.
Tips or comments? Email info@localdailymedia.com.
Want to read more from PCD? Subscribe now and then sign up for our morning newsletter, Wilmington Wire, and get the headlines delivered to your inbox every morning.
