LEFT: James ‘Bay’ McBride Jr. drowned in 1956 while swimming at an unguarded beach. It was illegal for him to use the ‘whites only’ beach off Atlantic Avenue.
BELOW: Bay’s mother, Rosabelle McBride, visits his grave.
Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
Teen’s drowning echoes
through city’s civil rights history
RELATED: Oral history project being planned
By Ron Hayes
After church on that Sunday afternoon — May 13, 1956 — a bunch of teenagers gathered on a stretch of sand south of Delray Beach.
“I was a junior in high school and I drove my father’s truck,” Walter Stephens remembers. “Gas was 25 cents a gallon back then.”
Where private homes and condos stand today, there were only dunes.
“Nothing but woods,” Stephens says. “We made a path.”
No private homes, no condos. No lifeguards.
“None of us could swim. We’d just get in the water and play.”
Among the teenagers playing in the water that afternoon were brothers Jaycee McBride, 11, and James, 15, whom everyone called “Bay.”
As they frolicked and splashed in the waves, Jaycee McBride was caught in a rip current and swept away from the shore.
“He was going up and down, only about 50 feet out,” Stephens recalls. “We didn’t know what to do. We just stood there and watched, but Bay was the type of guy who’d do anything for you. That’s why he tried to save his brother.”
Grabbing an innertube, James McBride went in after Jaycee and managed to push him out of the treacherous undertow, only to be caught in the current himself.
“We got Bay once he got out of the undercurrent,” Stephens explains, “but we had no idea how to do CPR or nothing. It was sickening because we just sat there and watched him die.”
That Sunday was Mother’s Day, and James “Bay” McBride and his friends had been swimming south of the city’s guarded beach because — being black — they had to.
“We finally flagged some cars down, and the fire department came and got him.”
On that Mother’s Day afternoon, Bay McBride’s mother was returning from the hospital, where she’d been visiting a sister-in-law, when a nephew flagged down her car. The police had come to their house on Southwest Seventh Avenue.
Rosabelle McBride was 32 that day. She will turn 91 this month. Her hearing is poor and her voice thin, but her memories are, for the most part, sharp.
“I really don’t know where that name ‘Bay’ came from,” she says. “We just always called him that since he was a baby. He was interested in going places and doing things. We bought him a bicycle and he would put his younger brother, Alan, on the handlebars and ride through the community and just look around and come back.
“I remember he saw all the houses being built and he said, ‘My mother wouldn’t want her own home.’ We were poor and had to rent, but Bay didn’t know we couldn’t afford our own home, so he just thought I didn’t want one.
“He was so nice in Sunday school, and kind. He was a lovable person. Everybody loved him.”
Delray Beach’s efforts to de-annex the black neighborhoods attracted national media attention.
A grainy report by Miami television station WTVJ still exists.
Rosabelle and Jaycee McBride pose at the grave
of James ‘Bay’ McBride shortly after his death in 1956.
The 100-foot strip of beach in Ocean Ridge that was designated for use by blacks.
Photos courtesy of the Delray Beach Historical Society
Integration efforts underway
The struggle to integrate the beach at Delray did not begin the day Bay McBride drowned. The NAACP had sued the city for equal access a year earlier, on April 30, 1955, but his death ignited a battle that flared intermittently for the next eight years.
The rest of the story survives in faded newspaper clippings at both the Spady Cultural Heritage Museum and the Delray Beach Historical Society, personal memoirs and a grainy, 12-minute television report by Ralph Renick on Miami’s WTVJ.
In 1954, Delray Beach bought a 100-foot strip of rocky beachfront from Ocean Ridge, just north of Briny Breezes, and dubbed it “Negro Beach.” Now they spent another $7,278 to install portable toilets and lighting, and $3,728 more to hire three armed deputies.
The beach satisfied no one.
Ocean Ridge residents complained that the blacks were driving down property values, and the black beach goers were offended by both their segregation and the small, rocky stretch they’d been granted.
Many blacks, like Walter Stephens and his friend, Bay McBride, preferred the deserted stretch about a mile south of town.
Alfred Straghn, a young man just starting in the funeral business at the time, handled James McBride’s funeral.
“I went up there,” remembers Straghn, now 86, “and I told my wife, ‘I’m going to take one dive in the water and come back home.’ ”
He snorts. “I split my head on a rock!”
News of furor went national
On May 20, 1956, the Sunday after James’ death, about 35 black residents staged a “wade-in” by the Seagate Club while perhaps 100 whites looked on until Police Chief R.C. Croft closed the beach.
The next week, the all-white City Commission voted 3-1 to ban blacks from both the beach and a municipal pool at the southwest corner of Atlantic Avenue and A1A. The sole dissenter: Catherine Strong, 45, a former mayor.
“No member of the Negro race shall go upon the beach or into the swimming pool,” the ordinance stated.
And then a second ordinance was passed allowing police to search cars for weapons.
Barricades were estab-lished at the Atlantic Avenue bridge, at Casuarina Road and on what is now George Bush Boulevard. Both black and white motorists were stopped, and Croft proudly displayed the “weapons” that were confiscated: knives, machetes, a bailing hook, a small pistol and a single hunting rifle.
“They were tools!” says Dennis Murray, who took part in the protests. “They found machetes and a shotgun in a trunk. Back then, if you saw a rabbit, you’d shoot it.”
Week after week, the city’s black residents staged “swim-ins” at the beach.
Next the city voted to de-annex the black section of town, exiling about 3,600 black residents, and the measure was sent to Tallahassee. Again, Strong was the only dissenting vote.
The furor had grown so loud that Jet, the national black news magazine, featured a story about James McBride’s death and the ongoing confrontations with police.
Finally, on July 2, 1956, a resolution was reached when the City Commission, in a secret meeting, agreed to a petition from the Negro Civic League, led by Carver High School coach C. Spencer Pompey to drop the de-annexation effort and build a swimming pool in the city’s black neighborhood.
The agreement was made public with WTVJ’s Renick serving as a moderator.
Two weeks later, a bid was let for the building of a pool and a biracial committee was formed, led by Coach Pompey.
In October 1960, the “Negro Beach” was annexed back by Ocean Ridge and its mayor, J.J. MacDonald, announced, “All our moves and acts are aimed at getting the Negroes off our beach.”
In 1963, the land at the “Negro Beach” in Ocean Ridge was sold to a private developer.
Again, blacks staged “wade-ins” at the Delray municipal beach, but times had changed, and two years later, on July 4, 1964, the matter was resolved once and for all when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, guaranteeing equal access to all public facilities.
Strong, the City Commission member who stood alone against the segregated beach, died that same year. In 1965, the Catherine Strong Civic Center was opened on Southwest Sixth Street.
Faith, hope, love and memories
Walter Stephens, who watched his friend drown nearly 60 years ago, is 73 now and retired after 30 years as a cable splicer for Florida Power & Light Co.
“A boy drowned with no lifeguard protection,” he says. “That’s what initially sparked the issue.
“After that, we all learned to swim.”
James “Bay” McBride, the youth who drowned, has rested in the Delray Beach Memorial Gardens on Southwest Eighth Avenue for 58 years. He would be 73 if he’d survived the undertow.
Jaycee McBride, who did survive, is 70, retired from the Ford assembly line and living in Kansas City, Mo.
Their sisters, Charlotte Darlene Oliver and Patricia Arnette, weren’t even born when James and Jaycee went swimming.
Arnette teaches English to foreign speakers at Highland Elementary School.
Oliver is a corrections officer at the county jail. On her bicep she has a tattoo of a family tree. Under the heading Faith, Hope, Love are the names of family members who are gone. The first name says simply, “Bay.”
Their mother, Rosabelle, worked for many years as a maid to white families in Delray Beach, then became a cook, first at Highland Elementary School and then Plumosa Elementary School.
Today, she lives in the home she owns on Northwest 11th Avenue, just across the street from Pompey Park and the swimming pool activists fought to have built all those years ago.
“I hated to lose my son’s life,” she will tell you, “but I’m happy that he helped achieve integration for the black race.
“He died for a good cause.”
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