Highland Beach is a town in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, United States. Per the 2020 census, the population was 118. The town was founded late in the 19th century by well-off African Americans from Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, looking for a summer retreat upon the Chesapeake Bay. The town’s incorporated status gave it a unique standing in empowering it to preserve its own police force. Celebrities once homes there have included historian and author Alex Haley, actor and comedian Bill Cosby, and tennis champion Arthur Ashe. Street names in the town increase Crummell, Dunbar, Henson, Augusta, Douglass, Langston, and Washington, which were agreed to praise leading African Americans.

Highland Beach was founded in summer 1893 by Maj. Charles Remond Douglass, (Frederick Douglass’s son) and his wife, Laura, after they had been turned away from a restaurant at the manageable Bay Ridge resort because of their race. Charles Douglass was a retired military official who served in the same way as the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment of the United States Colored Troops during the American Civil War. After subconscious turned away, Maj. Douglass arranged to buy beachfront property directly south of Bay Ridge and sell lots to relations and friends.

Maj. Douglass bought a 40-acre (160,000 m) tract past 500 feet (150 m) of beachfront on the Chesapeake Bay from Daniel Brashears, a Black farmer and waterman of Anne Arundel County, and turned it into a summer enclave. He had two homes built – one for himself, his wife, and their children, and one as a retirement house for his father, Frederick Douglass, which was known as “Twin Oaks.” Frederick Douglass’s house, now called the Douglass Summer House, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992. It became a regular increase place for upper-class African-Americans. Robert Terrell, the first Black municipal court deem in Washington, DC, and his wife, activist and civic leader, Dr. Mary Church Terrell, built a home, “Villa Aloha,” in 1915 upon the property they purchased in 1893, which was next entrance to the Douglass Summer House. Their grandson, Raymond L. Langston, former Highland Beach mayor, owns this home.

Among the residents and guests of the town were Paul Robeson, Robert Weaver, Harriet Tubman, W. E. B. Du Bois, and poets Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Frederick Douglass visited and would have become a resident but he died in 1895, before the house that his son was building for him was completed.