Gladys Barnes, Founder of Harlem in the Hamptons and Legacy Member of SANS Neighborhoods, Dies at 96

Gladys Barnes, one of the earlier residents of the SANS community in Sag Harbor, a founding member of Harlem in the Hamptons, and supporter of many other local organizations and institutions, including the Eastville Community Historical Society, died on March 31 at her home in Ninevah in Sag Harbor. She was 96.

Barnes was part of a group of men and women who created a legacy of strong community ties and traditions in the neighborhoods of Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest and Ninevah, created in the earlier part of the 20th century as a summer beach haven for Black families, at a time when racist policies like redlining made it difficult for Black families to obtain mortgages and purchase homes.

Those communities thrived, thanks in large part to women like Barnes, who treated their neighbors more like family, and put emphasis on creating and sustaining cultural and arts institutions locally.

Along with her friends Beryl Banks and Eunice Jackie Vaughn, who predeceased her, Barnes was a founding member of Harlem in the Hamptons, and she was also a past board member of the Eastville Community Historical Society, which celebrates and preserves the history of the racially diverse Eastville area of Sag Harbor.

Throughout her life, Barnes devoted a significant portion of her time and energy to many organizations near and dear to her heart in both Harlem, the Manhattan neighborhood where she was raised, and in Sag Harbor. She was involved with the Coalition of 100 Black Women, Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church in the Bronx and St. Andrew’s Church in Sag Harbor as well.

Gladys Barnes was the youngest child of Margaret and Arnold Boyle. Margaret hailed from Liverpool, England; Arnold was a merchant seaman from Barbados. The interracial couple settled in Harlem in the 1920s to raise their children.

Barnes’s upbringing in Harlem proved to be formative and set the tone for the way she would live her life as an adult.

“Harlem was a very close community, with strong neighborly ties, and friendships that lasted her whole life,” said Gladys’s daughter, Donnamarie Barnes. “That echoed subsequently in the celebrations we’ve had here in the communities for many years, called Harlem in the Hamptons.”

Barnes became one of many people who lived in the city but spent summers in Sag Harbor in the SANS communities.

She and her husband, Arthur H. Barnes, were newly married in the 1950s when they first visited Sag Harbor. At the time, Barnes was working for a doctor in New York named Binga Dismond, who owned a beach house in Azurest. He invited them for a visit in 1952, during which time the couple stayed at the Ivy Cottage, an iconic bed and breakfast on Hampton Street in Eastville. They fell in love with the area during that visit, and eventually rented and then purchased their own home on Lighthouse Lane.

Donnamarie Barnes spent her first summer in that home as an infant, not yet a year old, in 1955. Three years later, when her younger brother, David, was just 10 days old, he was brought to the summer house for the first time.

The family spent every summer from then on in Sag Harbor, and Donnamarie Barnes recalled how her mother and many other women in the neighborhood made it a special place for their families.

In many families, the mothers would spend the entire summer in the neighborhood, while the fathers would come out on the weekends from the city after working all week to be with their families. “There were gangs of kids on the beach, and all the women who were friends with my mom were called ‘aunt,’” she said. “It was a very social community.”

Gladys Barnes was always at the center of it all, her daughter recalled, not only when it came to casual gatherings during summer days at the beach with other women and their children, but also at evening social gatherings and functions. Donnamarie Barnes said that both her parents were very involved and politically active, supporting arts organizations, attending fundraisers, lending their energy and support for the civil rights movement, and more.

“She was a great organizer,” Donnamarie Barnes said. “She could organize an event just masterfully. And she was a great networker, and a great host of friends for all the different causes she was involved in. She was really good at that and recognized for that, for bringing people together.”

Gladys Barnes was one of several women from the community who have died in recent years but represent an important part of the history of the SANS neighborhoods and the larger history of Sag Harbor. They were pillars of those communities, and Donnamarie Barnes said she hopes that’s something the larger community remembers.

“The community’s recognition as historically Black with decades-old roots, my mother and her friends were creators of that legacy,” she said. “They never thought of it that way, but looking at it now, I think it’s important to recognize it as a cultural legacy.

“I hope all of the village recognizes and is proud of that,” she continued. “This has always been a place of diversity, and now it’s even more important that we acknowledge that these women and men created that, and talk about that history.”

The creation of that legacy, by her mother and other men and women in the SANS communities, heavily influenced Barnes, playing a big role in her eventual career as a local historian. Barnes is the director of history and heritage at Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island and is also a co-founder of the Plain Sight Project, which explores the history of slavery and tells the stories of formerly enslaved men and women on Long Island.

“Connecting the past to the present is what I do as a local historian,” she said. “I think if I didn’t have the foundation of being able to recognize the role my parents played in the development of these communities, I wouldn’t have understood the significance of the deeper past of free people of color emerging from slavery, and the next generation becoming landowners and homeowners in Sag Harbor, raising their families and building communities.”

In addition to her children, Gladys Barnes is survived by two grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and many nieces and nephews.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Eastville Community Historical Society.