Wave-ing Away Stereotypes: The Rise of Black Surfers
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By John Schilling
Almost a decade ago, Rockaway Beach resident Lou Harris looked into his mailbox and found something that didn’t belong. As Harris sifted through his mail, he came across an issue of The Surfer’s Journal, a magazine belonging not to him but his nextdoor neighbor.
Like a good neighbor, Harris delivered the magazine to its rightful recipient but not before flipping through its pages, only to find a profile on Tony Corley, the founder of the California-based Black Surfing Association. As Harris read the article, he became more and more intrigued by the organization’s mission of bringing about racial equity and representation to the white-dominated, water sport.
“I was tripping out,” Harris said. “I was like, ‘Wow, Black people surf? There’s a Black surfer?’”
Today, Harris, 51, is a part of that mission, as the leader and founder of the Black Surfing Association East Coast Chapter in Rockaway Beach. Since 2016, through the organization, he has provided countless free surf lessons, surfboards, wetsuits, clothing, and shoes to kids in need. But this endeavor took patience and perseverance.
Harris, a Long Island native, began surfing shortly after moving to Rockaway in 2007 when he was 35. Prior to discovering the Black Surfing Association and — in his own words — that “Black people surf,” Harris had spotted Brian “BJ” James, a Black surfer catching waves while walking along the boardwalk.
This unfamiliar sight grabbed Harris’ attention, especially after having just recently given up skateboarding due to the physical toll it took on his body. Even so, Harris, who worked a disability-services job in Manhattan at the time, took advantage of his sick days in order to spend some time observing Rockaway’s surfers during their morning routines. Whether it was watching them stretch along the shoreline and practice their balance or head into the water and crash before catching any waves, Harris paid close attention to each surfer’s every move and wrote down his observations.
“I’d bring my notebook and a pen, and I would sit here and I would just watch what everybody did,” Harris said. “Here I am a newbie, a Black dude, for one. I’m not just getting in the water, acting like an idiot,” he recalled. “And, they appreciated that.”
In the years that followed, many of these surfers took Harris under their wings, mentoring him in the sport and giving him lessons on ocean conservation and beach cleanups. These lessons taught Harris the importance of removing pollutants from the ocean to keep the waves both clean and safe for all to enjoy. Today, Harris still passes this knowledge onto others, encouraging his surfers to stuff the floating trash they come across into the sleeves of their wetsuits.
Aside from these early mentors, Harris says it was coming across his neighbor’s issue of The Surfer’s Journal that really put into perspective for him that he wasn’t an exception to the typical sea of white. The magazine opened him up to a world filled with Black surfers even if it wasn’t exactly seen as a sport or activity Black people did.
Shortly after the 2014 mail mix up, Harris had yet another epiphany that emanated from tragedy. Marcell Dockery, an African American kid from Coney Island, started a fire in his home, resulting in the death of Police Officer Dennis Guerra, a 38-year-old Far Rockaway native. When asked why he started the fire, the 13-year-old told investigators it was because he was “bored” (Dockery was sentenced to 19 years to life in prison for murder, assault and arson in 2016).
Upon hearing this, Harris was floored and immediately sprung into action by contacting Tony Corley on Facebook with a simple pitch: expanding the Black Surfing Association to the East Coast. After explaining his motivation, Harris received Corley’s blessing, and before he knew it, he was catching waves with Rockaway’s Black youth, as a form of both recreation and activism.
As more Black kids have started to pursue surfing, Harris says it has never resulted in any pushback from white surfers during his eight years in operation or his almost 17 years as a Rockaway Beach resident. Instead, Harris recalls that any negative feedback he received was from young Black people in the community, who poked fun at the idea of a Black man surfing.
“I never heard [anything] stupid from my white neighbors,” Harris said. “They would say, ‘Hey Lou, how is the water? Any waves today?’ But then you see Black people and it’s, ‘Yo man, what are you doing with that surfboard? Black people don’t surf.’”
When Harris told his mother about these encounters, she reminded him that those children “didn’t have the same upbringing” as him. Growing up, Harris’ father was an advertiser, a career that allowed Harris and his siblings to pursue any activity they wanted as long as they tried their hardest at whatever it was. While Harris didn’t find surfing until later in life, he determined that the skepticism from young Black people in the community perhaps stemmed from the lack of opportunities, resources, and encouragement that he enjoyed at a young age.
“That’s when it hit me,” Harris added. “It’s not about me, it’s about them. There’s a bigger picture here.”
Prior to Harris starting the Black Surfing Association East Coast Chapter, the low number of Black surfers throughout the United States was hard to ignore. According to a 2022 report from the Surf Industry Members Association (SIMA) in conjunction with ActionWatch, there were only 211,749 Black surfers compared to 329,929 Hispanic surfers and over 2 million white surfers in the U.S. in 2014.
The report, however, has found that the number of Black surfers has increased by 50% since then, with over 423,000 Black surfers making up 11.5% of the actual surfing population throughout the country. As expected, surfing in the U.S. still remains predominantly white with over 2.2 million Caucasian surfers, making up 61% of the population.
Harris attributes this progress in diversity not only to his work with the Black Surfing Association but reversing misconceptions about surfing when it comes to race and representation in general. In Harris’ view, the segregation that exists in surfing began with the segregation of pools in the U.S. in the mid-20th century when Black people were limited to their own designated pools. This often resulted in the pool being hosed down, or involved white swimmers antagonizing Black swimmers with racist vitriol, something that carried over to the ocean and other bodies of water.
While outlawed in 1964, segregation, Harris says, still continues to dissuade Black people from enjoying the ocean or other public bodies of water as their white neighbors do, for fear of retaliation.
“They dumb it down to, ‘Oh no, we’re scared,’” Harris said. “That’s what’s programmed in your brain, that’s what people want you to think,” he added. “If Black people, us as a whole, had the same opportunity as white people to swim, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
In analyzing the diversity of surfing, however, some scholars trace Black people’s connection to the sport as early as enslaved Africans’ interactions with water in the 16th century. According to Dr. Andrew Kahrl, a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia, many West African communities settled near oceans and other bodies of water, allowing many of those later enslaved to become “adept at swimming and diving” and, therefore, more profitable for slaveholders. At the same time, Kahrl explains that the ocean remained “a watery graveyard,” a constant reminder of the Black lives lost at sea from trying to escape bondage.
While not directly linked to surfing, Kahrl offers this history as a possible explanation for Black people feeling dubious about the sport and choosing not to pursue it. Still, he also notes that Black surfing emerged much earlier than people realize with the advent of Black resorts among the Black middle and upper classes during the Jim Crow era. This was particularly true in New Hanover County, North Carolina, where African Americans from all over enjoyed annual surfing competitions at Freeman Beach.
“To the crowds that flocked to see the surfers brave the waters and display their dexterity on the waves, surfing was not seen as a ‘white’ activity,” Kahrl wrote in “A History of African Americans on the Water and by the Shore: Whitewashed and Recovered,” a 2016 article in the Journal of American Ethnic History. “They were not assimilating into a white sporting culture. They were engaging in sports that had a long history among those who had lived and played by the sea for centuries.”
In his work, Kahrl explains further that Black people surfing is far from a new idea, yet Black surfers remain victims of stereotypes and discrimination in the water today. While Harris says he has enjoyed an overwhelmingly positive experience as Black surfer in Rockaway, the challenges other Black surfers face are not lost to him.
Most recently, Andrew Mills, a Black surfer, had his surfboard stolen in Jupiter Beach, Florida in August 2023 after an argument with a group of white surfers. The next day, Mills found it nailed to a tree, something he referred to as “a lynching” and one of many examples of racism he has faced while surfing.
“I can give you countless situations where I try to stand up for myself and something like this happened,” Mills said in a statement on his personal Instagram regarding the incident. “It’s the same in the water, I meet someone new, say hi, and they act like I don’t exist. Then, try to talk down [to], accuse, and push me off their beach from the beginning.”
Harris warns his students about moments like these despite never having experienced it for himself. Still, he pairs such conversations about racism in surfing with lessons about navigating riptides, never turning your back to the water, keeping the beach clean, and utilizing swimming as a survival skill, noting that threats to Black surfers come in different forms.
Ensuring the safety of his young surfers is paramount to Harris, who had an unfortunate experience while surfing on Beach 114th Street in Rockaway a few years ago. While paddling with a student, Harris noticed something strange floating in the water, and as he came closer he realized it was the body of Black boy who had disappeared in the water on Beach 87th Street earlier that day.
Upon noticing the boy’s lifeless body, Harris immediately told his student to swim back to shore and flagged down the beach’s lifeguards, a moment he looks back on as “traumatizing” as he realized the ever-present dangers of the ocean.
“I didn’t go in the water for like a month after that, two months after that,” Harris recalled. “I gained a big respect for Mother Nature that day.”
While such a tragedy could happen to anyone, the drowning held a much larger significance in the grand scheme. Rockaway experienced a surge in drownings of seven total instances in 2019, making for the highest number of drownings in the neighborhood in a decade.
Since then, Rockaway has experienced three more drownings, and in most instances, the drownings have been people of color. This is reflective of a larger nationwide trend, according to the CDC, as Black or African American persons experienced nearly a 24% increase in unintentional drowning deaths from 2019 to 2020, one of the largests increases in the report second only to “young adults aged 20 to 24 years” with a 44% increase.
Harris believes such instances are the result of a lack of water safety education on all fronts, something he provides in his lessons and during occasional school visits in Rockaway. One statistic he often cites during these sessions is that Black children are “five-and-a-half times more likely” to drown than others, an estimation that comes from a 2021 report by the American Academy of Pediatrics and is credited to a “lack of early training” and “poor swimming skills.”
This finding is consistent with an earlier report from the USA Swimming Foundation, which found that about 64% of African American children “have no/low swimming ability” due to socio-economic factors from low household income to the fear of drowning.
“People don’t realize that, and that’s a staggering statistic,” Harris said. “People forget about them,” he added.
For Harris, these experiences, along with the general Black surfing experiences, are complicated in terms of media representation, usually manifesting only through the lens of injustice or tragedy.
This became particularly obvious to him in 2020 shortly after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of since-disgraced police officer Derek Chauvin. Upon hearing of Floyd’s passing and receiving numerous messages from the parents of his surfing students, Harris decided the best way to respond was with his surfboard. As a result, Harris announced that the Black Surfing Association East Coast Chapter would host a paddle out, a type of memorial that often involves surfers swimming out on their boards, typically to honor surfers who have died. While Floyd was not a surfer, Harris set out to give him this memorial while also calling attention to the larger issue of the Black lives lost to police brutality and white supremacy in 2020 and the years before.
Less than two weeks after Floyd’s murder, Harris was one of 350 people on the beach, from eager surfers of all ages and races grasping their boards to spectators raising up signs. As the group gathered together and headed for the water, an assembly of news crews from CNN, Rolling Stone and other publications watched from the shore alongside the public.
In hosting the paddle out, Harris had seemingly made a name for himself, as his story began to spread across the masses and invitations began to pour in from interview requests on “Good Morning America” and “The Today Show” to opportunities to compete on reality television shows. Harris even caught the attention of actor Jonah Hill, an avid surfer himself, who ended up donating $5,000 worth of surfboards to the organization in early 2023.
“That [paddle out] turned me into a superstar that day,” Harris said, noting the craze hasn’t stopped in the years since. “You wouldn’t believe the emails I get from people wanting me to do stuff…It’s crazy.”
While leading the Black Surfing Association’s East Coast Chapter has proven to be a fruitful experience for Harris, he notes that it comes with some frustration. Even with the copious amounts of invitations and media coverage he receives, most, if not all of it, tends to center on the fact that he’s “a Black surfer.” Harris says being “a Black surfer” has become an inescapable label that feels empowering yet also counterproductive in undoing the myth that Black people don’t surf, adding that white surfers are rarely, if at all, labeled as “white surfers.”
“I hate that,” Harris said. “At the end of the day, they’re not used to seeing Black surfers,” he added. “But when you see it, you remember it.”
Despite this frustration, Harris has continued his pursuit of providing surf lessons to young Black surfers, as well as all young surfers that cross his path. Perhaps surprisingly, despite leading the Black Surfing Association’s East Coast Chapter, he says he tends to end up teaching more white kids, something he’s happy to do because he says it represents the organization’s emphasis on “diversity” over exclusivity when it comes to participating in the sport.
“I don’t care if you’re Black, you’re white, you’re Asian, you’re Muslim, you’re gay, you’re straight or trans,” Harris explained. “If kids want to come surf, I’m not going to shut down any kid,” he added. “It’s open to everybody. It’s a melting pot.”
With that in mind, Harris’ work has not gone unnoticed throughout the Rockaway community as other local surf schools and businesses say they have seen an increase in surfing diversity, especially when it comes to race and gender.
Mike Reinhardt, one of the owners of Locals Surf School, says he has noticed more and more women and people of color taking part in the sport since the school first opened in 2012, adding that their slogan has always been “surf lessons for all.”
“You can make surfing for you,” Reinhardt said. “And I think people are discovering that…you definitely see more people of color, you know, ages, genders, everything in the water, which is great.”
Reinhardt’s experience is consistent with the 2022 SIMA report, which estimated that female surfers in the U.S. made up 35% of the country’s estimated 3.8 million surfing population in 2020. In addition, the report found that there is slightly more diversity among female surfers compared to male surfers, as the former is 53% Caucasian while the latter is 69% Caucasian. When it comes to female surfers alone, the report found that 13% were Black compared to 11% in male surfers.
One of these Black female surfers is Danielle Black Lyons, who resides in Southern California and has earned a respectable following on TikTok for her surfing-based content. Black Lyons, 41, caught her first wave over 20 years ago, ascribing her late entry to the sport due to the lack of visibility for Black female surfers. She’s hoping to change that with her videos and as a founding member of “Textured Waves,” an all-female African American surfing collective.
“I never saw anyone who looked like me surfing,” Black Lyons told Refinery29 earlier this year. “Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, there weren’t a lot of Black and brown people in the water. And I think that definitely prohibited me from initially pursuing the sport.”
For Nigel Louis, the owner of Station RBNY surf shop, part of the goal of opening his store in 2016 was increasing the visibility of Black surfers. Originally from Barbados, Louis says he aims to undo many of the stereotypes associated with surfing from “ease of access” to the refreshing sight of seeing someone like him behind the counter.
“We have people from everywhere,” Louis added, referencing Rockaway’s surf scene. “I would almost argue that New York probably has some of the most diverse surfing in the entire U.S.”
Along with these anecdotes and promising statistics, Harris says he’s eager to keep the Black Surfing Association’s East Coast Chapter going but also acknowledges the strain it has put on his body. In September, he underwent surgery to repair a torn meniscus in his left knee, just two years after healing from a torn meniscus in his right knee.
While healing from the surgery, he says he is looking forward to riding the waves once more in the coming months and welcoming more surfers into the sport along the way. But he’s also unsure of how much longer he will lead the Black Surfing Association’s East Coast Chapter.
Even with his knee pain, Harris says what keeps him motivated to continue is not just the mission but the continued progress he’s witnessed over the last few years. Aside from the growing number of Black surfers, Harris points to memories of his surfers catching a wave for the first time or showing enthusiasm for his lessons, whether it’s telling their friends what a riptide is, or taking time to remove litter from the ocean during their surfing sessions.
With this in mind, Harris remains confident that the skills and lessons he has passed on to his students as “Mr. Lou” will carry on to future generations, regardless of when he decides to finally hang up his board once and for all.
“It makes me feel good to see the kids that I taught can now go surf by themselves,” Harris said. “When I’m dead and gone, the stuff that I’m teaching these kids, they’re not going to forget it.”
