TYBEE ISLAND, Georgia — Thousands of Black students expected to attend an annual spring celebration this weekend on Georgia’s largest public beach will be greeted by dozens of additional police officers and barricades that will close nearby streets. Although the beach remains open, officials are blocking access to nearby parking lots.
Tybee Island east of Savannah has seen the April beach party known as Orange Crush since students at Savannah State University, a historically black school, started it more than three decades ago. Residents regularly grumbled about loud music, trash strewn in the sand and revelers urinating in courtyards.
Those complaints culminated in fear and outrage a year ago when a record crowd estimated at more than 100,000 people flooded the 3-mile-long island. That left a small police force to deal with a flood of emergency calls reporting gunfire, drug overdoses, traffic jams and fistfights.
Mayor Brian West, elected last fall by Tybee Island’s 3,100 residents, said roadblocks and added police aren’t just to limit crowds. He hopes the crackdown will drive Orange Crush away for good.
“This has to stop. We can’t have this crowd anymore,” West said. “My goal is to end it.”
Critics say local officials are overreacting and appear to be singling out black visitors to a southern beach that only white people could use until 1963. They note that Tybee Island draws large crowds on the Fourth of July and other summer weekends when visitors are largely white, as are 92% of the island’s residents.
“Our weekends are full of people all season long, but when Orange Crush comes they close the parking lot, bring in extra police and act like they have to take charge,” said Julia Pearce, one of the island’s few black residents and leader of a group. called the Tybee MLK Human Rights Organization. She added: “They believe black people are criminals.”
During the week, workers installed metal barricades to close off parking meters and residential streets along the main road parallel to the beach. Two large car parks at a popular pier will be closed. And Tybee Island’s roughly two dozen police officers will be supplemented by about 100 deputies, Georgia State Troopers and other officers.
The safety plans were influenced by tactics used last month to reduce crowds and violence during spring break in Miami Beach, which was observed by Tybee Island’s police chief.
Officials insist they are taking action to prevent a repeat of last year’s Orange Crush party, which they say became a public safety crisis with crowds at least twice as large as normal.
“To me, it has nothing to do with race,” said West, who believes city officials previously did not take a stronger stance against Orange Crush because they feared being called racist. “We cannot let that be a reason to make our citizens unsafe, and that is not the case.”
Tybee Island police reported a total of 26 arrests during Orange Crush last year. The charges include one armed robbery with a firearm, four fighting in public and five driving under the influence. Two officers reported being pelted with bottles, and two women told police they had been beaten and robbed of a bag.
On a gridlocked highway about a mile from the island, someone shot a gun at a car, wounding one person. A white man was charged in the shooting, which officials blamed on road rage.
Both supporters and opponents of Orange Crush say it is not the students who are causing the biggest problems.
Joshua Miller, a 22-year-old senior at Savannah State University who plans to attend this weekend, said he wouldn’t be surprised if the crackdown was at least partially motivated by race.
“I don’t know what they have in store,” Miller said. ‘I don’t go there with bad intentions. I just go out and have fun.”
Savannah Mayor Van Johnson was among the black students from Savannah State who helped launch Orange Crush in 1988. The university dropped its involvement in the 1990s, and Johnson said the celebration “went off the rails” over time. But he also told reporters he was concerned about the “overrepresentation of police” at the beach party.
In Nickie’s bar from 1971 & Grill near the beach general manager Sean Ensign said many neighboring shops and eateries will close for Orange Crush, although he will remain open and sell takeaway food as he did last year. But with nearby parking lots closed, Ensign said its profits could take a hit, “possibly a few thousand dollars.”
This isn’t the first time Tybee Island has focused on the Black Beach party. In 2017, the city council banned alcohol and amplified music on the beach only during the Orange Crush weekend. A discrimination complaint to the U.S. Department of Justice led city officials to sign a non-binding agreement to impose uniform rules for large events.
West says Orange Crush is different because it is promoted on social media by people who are not licensed. A new state law allows local governments to recoup public safety costs from organizers of unauthorized events.
In February, Great Britain Wigfall was denied a permit for space on the island for food trucks during Orange Crush. The mayor said Wigfall has continued to promote events on the island.
Wigfall, 30, said he is promoting a concert in Savannah this weekend, but nothing on Tybee Island involving Orange Crush.
“I have no control over it,” Wigfall said. “Nobody has control over the date people go there.”