"The Inkwell Calls": The History, Tradition, and Fellowship of Black Families at Martha's Vineyard
- Tanya Murphy
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
Every August, something extraordinary happens on a 96-square-mile island off the coast of Massachusetts. Thousands of Black families, some returning for the fiftieth consecutive summer, others making the journey for the very first time, descend upon the town of Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard. They come for the beach. They come for the film festival. They come for the five-to-sevens, the morning swims at the Inkwell, the porches and the cookouts and the conversations that stretch past midnight. But more than any of this, they come for something that is harder to name, and perhaps more necessary than anything else.
They come for each other.
At The Society for ADHD, we spend a great deal of time talking about the evidence that community connection is essential to mental health and wellbeing, especially for neurodivergent individuals. This week, we want to honor a tradition that has embodied that truth for well over a century, and to invite our community to reflect on what it means for all of us.
A History Rooted in Resilience
The African American presence on Martha's Vineyard did not begin as a leisure tradition. The first Black people on the island were enslaved individuals, domestic workers, and whalers, laborers in an economy that offered them neither rest nor recognition. In their time off, the women among them began gathering in the enclave of Oak Bluffs, and some families, when they could, purchased property there. That act of ownership, deliberate, hard-won, and defiant in the context of a nation that had systematically denied Black land ownership, was the seed of everything that followed.
By the early twentieth century, Oak Bluffs had become a documented refuge for middle-class Black families during an era of brutal segregation. In 1912, Charles Shearer and his wife Henrietta, Charles being the son of an enslaved woman, opened the first inn on the island catering to African American visitors. Shearer Cottage became the island's premier Black gathering place, hosting luminaries including composer Henry T. Burleigh, who summered there every year and persuaded his circle of New York artists and intellectuals to join him. The Green Book, Victor Hugo Green's essential travel guide for Black Americans navigating the dangers of Jim Crow-era travel, listed Shearer Cottage as a recommended safe haven.
The tradition grew across the decades, deepening with each generation. Frederick Douglass delivered speeches on the island. Civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. gathered there for strategy and restoration. Writers like Maya Angelou, who described Oak Bluffs as a safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned, found in its shores the particular peace that comes from being among your own people without the constant weight of performance or vigilance.
Inkwell Beach: Where Generations Meet
At the center of the Oak Bluffs tradition is Inkwell Beach, named by white residents during the Jim Crow era as a slur, and reclaimed by Black beachgoers as a badge of pride and belonging. For generations, the Inkwell has been a place where children meet at the water's edge and, through the alchemy of summer, become lifelong friends. Where grandparents watch grandchildren play in the same waves they themselves played in as children. Where strangers become family across a weekend.
Since the 1940s, the Polar Bears of Martha's Vineyard have gathered at the Inkwell every morning from July 4th through Labor Day for a communal swim, a ritual of health, fellowship, and continuity that has persisted across generations. It is one of the most quietly radical acts imaginable: Black joy, expressed daily, in a body of water, without apology.
The Connection to ADHD, Rest, and Community Healing
Why does this story belong in a blog series about ADHD? Because at The Society for ADHD, we understand that rest and community are not luxuries, they are medicine. Research on stress and the nervous system consistently shows that chronic stress impairs the very executive function networks that ADHD already challenges. For Black individuals with ADHD who carry the additional burden of minority stress, environments of genuine safety and belonging, places where the nervous system can truly exhale, have measurable neurological and psychological benefits.
Martha's Vineyard is, among other things, a place where Black families, including my own, have historically been able to lower the vigilance that racism requires. Where the hyperarousal of navigating a racially hostile world can briefly, beautifully rest. Where identity is not a negotiation. The healing that happens in that space, the laughter, the storytelling, the intergenerational connection, the simple pleasure of existing without apology, is not incidental to mental health. It is mental health.
Not everyone can travel to Martha's Vineyard. But every one of us can ask: where is our Inkwell? Where is the place; the porch, the park, the faith community, the backyard cookout, where we can gather with our people and let the weight down? Finding and protecting those spaces, for ourselves and for our children, is an act of profound self-care.
Carrying the Tradition Forward
The tradition of Black families at Martha's Vineyard is not simply nostalgia. It is a living, growing legacy, one that expands each August with new families making their first journey, new children taking their first ocean swim, new bonds forming across the generations. It is the African-American Heritage Trail, now with nearly 40 sites of historical significance, teaching the island's history to everyone who walks it. It is the Martha's Vineyard African American Film Festival, now in its mid-twenties, celebrating Black film and culture and pulling together artists, advocates, and community members every August. It is the still-family-operated Shearer Cottage, now more than a century old, a living monument to Black entrepreneurship, resilience, and the radical act of claiming rest.
As you move through August, we invite you to honor the tradition of making space, for rest, for community, for joy that is not earned by productivity but claimed simply by being alive and together. That is what the Inkwell has always been about. And it is what The Society for ADHD is building, in our own way, every single week.
JOIN THE SOCIETY FOR ADHD
Community is our Inkwell. Join The Society for ADHD and be part of a gathering place where every neurodivergent person, and everyone who loves them, can arrive exactly as they are and know they belong.
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