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Vendors across the island are already pushing a variety of Obama souvenirs in anticipation. T shirts that play on the iconic Shepard Fairey poster of Obama read RELAX instead of HOPE; others say I VACATIONED WITH OBAMA ON MARTHA'S VINEYARD. Sharky's, a Mexican restaurant in Oak Bluffs, is offering "Obamaritas" and "Barack O. Tacos." Even the Buddhist-themed gift store Glimpse of Tibet is peddling notebooks featuring a picture of Obama with the Dalai Lama...
...Martha's Vineyard is the most integrated community I have ever experienced," says Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. The island's minority population isn't huge (of its 65,000 summer residents, only about 3,000 are black), but it is extraordinarily well integrated. The Vineyard has long been the summer home of black luminaries including Gates, Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (who honeymooned here in 1934). "That is why I like it here," Gates told TIME after returning from his White House beer summit with Obama and Sergeant James Crowley, the Cambridge...
African Americans have been coming to Martha's Vineyard since the 18th century, according to historian and resident Robert Hayden; many current black residents can trace their homes back for generations. While the first African slaves arrived on the island in the 1700s, freed blacks came to work in the service industry after the Civil War, and later they came as entrepreneurs. Eventually they were absorbed into an emerging community of African-American professionals, many of whom summer in picturesque Oak Bluffs, an oceanfront town of quaint gingerbread homes. "They were not segregated in the island community, as blacks were...
Gates attributes the island's racial accord to the fact that Martha's Vineyard is "one of the oldest, if not the oldest, places in America where African Americans can own beachfront property." Residents also never got too hung up on the issue of racially integrated beaches, which elsewhere had offended the propriety of some whites. (See pictures of world leaders on vacation...
Business owners are also excited. Nancy Gardella, executive director of Martha's Vineyard's Chamber of Commerce, remembers how former President Bill Clinton's summers on the island gave a "tremendous boost" to the local economy and helped "turn the tide" on the island's real estate market in the early 1990s. She hopes Obama will be a regular visitor "for the next seven years...