Tindley Villa
company · active attested 1938
A boarding house at South Berlin, Worcester County, Maryland, kept by the Rev. A. E. Martin and advertised through the summer of 1938 in the Baltimore Afro-American as '10 Minutes of Ocean City', with special rates for ministers, teachers, fishing parties and week-end parties, and fried chicken and sea food daily. It is the earliest Black holiday lodging near Ocean City that this campaign has documented in the Black press.
In the record (1)
1940 · 1940-08-10
Fifty-one issues of the Baltimore Afro-American were searched for 1940 and the one item that may name a Black resident of Ocean City has the name cut off
All fifty-one issues of the Baltimore Afro-American held in the Google Books archive for 1940 were located and keyword-swept: 1,210 queries, 865 raw hits, zero failures. The clean full-year negatives are as valuable as the hits. The fragment stem 'Sinepux' returns nothing in any 1940 issue. 'Tindley' returns six issues and every one of them is Tindley Temple, an African Methodist Episcopal church in Philadelphia - not Tindley Villa, the Black lodging house at South Berlin that advertised itself all through the summer of 1938 as ten minutes from Ocean City. 'Henry Hotel' and 'Jackson Mission' produce no coherent match anywhere in the year. Four candidates survive. An issue of 3 August carries what reads as a letter dateline, 'Ocean City, Md.'. An issue of 27 August has a musical quartet at 'Ocean City, Md., where they will be for the next couple of weeks.' An issue of 18 May carries an isolated caption the OCR renders 'MRS. ALICE DENNIS DENNIS.' with no recoverable surrounding text - the name of the West Ocean City bride whose marriage the same paper announced on 16 December 1939. And an issue of 10 August carries a society column on a Black beauty-culturists' convention which names someone 'of Ocean City' among named Black women from Chicago, Atlanta and Brooklyn, and the personal name itself falls outside the returned snippet.
The thread's charge is that Black Ocean City was recorded by other people or not at all. Here is the shape of that in one year: the town's own council minutes name nobody, and the Black newspaper that would have named someone is searchable but not readable - Google will return the words around a name and will not serve the page the name is printed on. The strongest lead in the year is a woman identified in the Afro-American as 'of Ocean City' at a beauty-culturists' convention in August 1940, and the campaign cannot say who she was because the snippet stops one word short.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Source · checked 2026-08-11