Word: islanders
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that the storm--the ninth in this year's Pacific typhoon season--destroyed 6,000 homes and inflicted $1.3 billion in damage. Morakot also breached dikes in the northern Philippines, flooding several villages (above), and walloped Taiwan with 74-m.p.h. winds, killing at least 62 people and causing the island's worst floods in 50 years...
From the Kennedys to the Clintons to the unfortunate shark victims of Jaws, Martha's Vineyard, an island off the Massachusetts coast, has long conjured visions of well-heeled, sunburned Caucasians swarming its beaches and boardwalks in Top-Siders and pastel shorts. Yet when President Barack Obama and his family descend on this dune-swept summer playground the last week of August, they'll also find an island of rich diversity and harmonious race relations...
...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...