For generations the black elite of Washington came here more than anywhere else to escape the city heat and humiliation of racially oppressive customs and laws in the capital. Well-known residents and guests included the early civil rights leaders W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington; the singer-activist Paul Robeson; the poets Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar; Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice; the author Alex Haley; and Robert C. Weaver, the first black cabinet secretary.  “It was a wonderful place,” Mr. Langston, 69, said. “We could get away from the segregation and degradation of where you could and couldn’t go. All our friends and parents knew each other. It was a very carefree life for youngsters. It was very special.”  It still is, by all accounts, but it is different. For one thing Highland Beach is no longer all black. The 2000 census, which some residents dispute, counted a 52.3 percent white majority. “We have a few white people, not so many, and they’re really nice,” said June Y. Johnson, 63, a native Washingtonian who began coming to “the Beach” as a teenager and now owns a summer place here. “People can live anywhere now.”  An incorporated municipality, Highland Beach in the last census had a year-round population of 109 and 80 homes, of which 27 were deemed seasonal, recreational or for occasional use. Full-time residents include commuters and a growing number of retirees, like Mr. Langston.  In recent years some of the smaller homes have been replaced by larger ones, but most are still modest cottages. Only occasionally does a house come up for sale, and then, as often as not, it is sold privately to friends or relatives.  “I’m a youngster in terms of length of living there,” said Ted Hudson, a retired literature professor who lives mostly in Silver Spring, Md. “I was there in the 1960s, and 40 some years now and I’m still a youngster, as it were, as a resident. I’ve barely passed newcomer status, if you understand the term.” Nonetheless he and his wife, Geneva, are active in the community, she as president of the Highland Beach Citizens Association.  “My family was not a ‘prominent Negro family,’ in the sense that we had connections with people who owned such places,” Mr. Hudson said. “But in segregated Washington you got to know all strata of people. We had neighbors whose folks had a place there. I was renting down there for years before someone came to me and said: ‘We have someone willing to sell a lot. Thought we’d let you know.’ So very quietly I bought property. That’s how property changed hands if it didn’t stay in the family. I was an acceptable type.”  For visitors the town used to have a hotel and a guest house, but no more. The hotel is now a private home, and there is not a single bed-and-breakfast.  The town’s zoning law excludes commercial enterprises. “It’s too small, and we don’t have the infrastructure,” said Craig Herndon, 62, a retired Washington Post photographer who is on the planning and zoning commission and commutes to Washington for a teaching job at Howard University.  Highland Beach still has its annual Fourth of July parade and picnic on the beach and a Labor Day reunion that attracts families with roots if not also current addresses here. The beach itself and adjoining park are well maintained, but there is little if any swimming because of pollution, said Mr. Langston, a former mayor and the current commissioner of public works.  The roads and lanes of Highland Beach are open, but there is no street parking, which effectively restricts public access to residents and their guests.  Before integration, Mr. Langston said, “we had delivery of food, ice, the essentials, to avoid having contact with the surrounding community.” Things began to change in the 1960s with the end of segregation. “The kids wanted to go everywhere they couldn’t go before,” he said. “So it was really quiet here for many, many years.”  But then, after the first blush of integration, “the kids,” grown to adulthood and raising a new generation of children, rediscovered Highland Beach.  “Ten years ago it was so busy down there because everyone had come back and had their kids there,” Ms. Johnson said. “Now our kids are not going down. They’re not that interested. You go to Highland now, it’s dead as doornail.” Yet it’s still there, and, Mr. Langston said, residents of other black beach communities threatened by development visit the town to learn how to deal with the pressures of growth and change.  That Highland Beach survives at all is testament to the town’s desire to preserve and perpetuate its history. In the 1980s the Douglass home, in disrepair, was bought by a white architect and his wife from Annapolis who worked to restore it. In 1995 the state and county acquired the home and deeded it to the town. The residents turned it into a museum, which attracts Douglass scholars, school groups and other visitors — by appointment only — from as far away as Norway, Texas and California.  And sometimes people from closer by stray onto the beach itself, as happened one recent day when a woman from a neighboring community landed her canoe there and got out to walk her two canine passengers, though a road sign prohibits parking, pets and picnicking without a permit and warns that “violators will be prosecuted.” Mr. Langston hopped into his golf cart and politely informed the interloper that she was out of bounds.  “She was very nice about it,” he reported a few minutes later. “She’s from Bay Highlands, and she says she’s new here.”  A picture caption in the Escapes pages on Friday with an article about Highland Beach, Md., a town founded by the son of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass that became an enclave for the black middle class, misstated the given name of a woman shown with her sons in front of a tent. She is Belinda Elvan Nixon, not Sabrina Nixon.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C28 of the New York edition with the headline: A Welcoming Enclave With Roots in a Snub. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
In 1892, Frederick Douglass’s son founded Highland Beach, a bayside town that became a bastion of the black middle class.