Atlantic Beach was established in the early 1930s, in defiance of Jim Crow laws and against the social and economic gravity of the segregated South. Black entrepreneurs - many with roots in Gullah communities that stretched from coastal North Carolina down through Georgia - opened hotels, juke joints, novelty shops, and dance halls along a handful of streets just behind the dune line. Visitors came up Highway 17 from Charleston and Savannah and Jacksonville, down I-95 from Washington and Baltimore, across SC 9 from inland Carolina farms. They came to do what white beachgoers did at Myrtle: walk in the surf, dance to a band, eat seafood, kiss in the dark. The difference was that at Atlantic Beach they did not have to do any of it while measuring whether they were being watched the wrong way. Just up the road in Myrtle Beach stood Charlie's Place, where in 1950 the orchestra leader Charlie Fitzgerald was dragged from his property and beaten by Klansmen — some sixty of them fired hundreds of rounds into the building — who did not approve of how thoroughly his integrated audience was enjoying itself. Big-name Black performers - including, by various accounts, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, James Brown, and Louis Jordan - played the town's clubs over the years. The musicology runs deep. The shag - South Carolina's official state dance - has roots in the dance floors of mixed audiences along the segregated Carolina coast.

What protected Atlantic Beach during segregation eventually made it economically vulnerable. The town's footprint - five blocks long, two blocks deep, hemmed in on every side by what would become the city of North Myrtle Beach - left it without the land base to expand when integration in the late 1960s and 1970s reopened the rest of the Grand Strand to Black visitors. Tourists who had once driven specifically to Atlantic Beach now had a hundred miles of beach to choose from. Many of the old hotels closed. The block-square downtown that had been the beating heart of a refuge became something quieter, a place visited mostly by descendants of the families who had stayed. The 2010 census counted 334 year-round residents; by 2020 the number was 195. The town has been resistant to annexation by North Myrtle Beach, which surrounds it on three sides and would happily absorb the oceanfront. Atlantic Beach has consistently said no.

Since 1980, Atlantic Beach has hosted the Atlantic Beach Bikefest each Memorial Day weekend, drawing tens of thousands of Black motorcyclists from across the Southeast. It is one of the largest gatherings of Black bikers in the country, and it brings a brief crush of cash and visitors back to the small downtown blocks. It also brings, every year, a fresh round of the argument that has been going on around Atlantic Beach for nearly a century: whose town this is, who gets to enjoy it, and what kind of policing is appropriate at a Black-organized event when the same scale of crowd at a white event a few miles up the beach would draw less attention. The state has at various times tried to manage Bikefest with traffic controls and increased patrols that the town's residents and the visiting bikers have viewed, with reason, as targeted in ways that the white Harley rally on the same weekend at Myrtle Beach is not. The town has weathered every iteration. The festival continues.

Atlantic Beach today is small, sometimes struggling, and unmistakably itself. The mayor's office runs out of a modest building on Ocean Boulevard. The original Black-owned hotels are mostly gone, though a few mid-century motels remain. The beach, the actual sand, runs along the eastern edge in a wide white strip that connects without break to the much busier sand at North Myrtle on either side. The town remains a popular destination for Black families who come because their parents and grandparents came, because the history matters, because some places earn the right to keep being themselves. The Black Pearl is, more than anything else, an act of memory - a 0.2-square-mile statement that during the long stretch of years when most of the American beach was closed to Black Americans, there was at least one place that was not. The Gullah families who built that place, and the visitors who made it work, did not need a monument. The town itself is the monument.