For the past six years or so, on the first Saturday in June, dozens of inner-city kids venture splashing and laughing into the gentle waist high peaks near California’s Santa Monica Pier to get their first taste of surfing. Many of these kids will have never before even visited the beach. What was once perhaps a far-flung and exotic pastime, surfing, for those kids growing up outside the typical beach community, becomes a touchable, livable activity.

Those kids venture to the coast as a celebration of Nick Gabaldon Day, a feel-good memorial first put on in 2013 by the Black Surfer’s Collective, in partnership with Heal the Bay, a Southern California environmental group, and L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas. The day is about honoring Gabaldon, introducing kids who wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to the outdoors, and is a reminder that something as open as the beach was once segregated too.

Gabaldon is often considered the nation’s first documented black surfer; whether he was or not is difficult to prove, though he was likely the first black surfer to ride waves at California’s legendary Malibu. Gabaldon was born in the Santa Monica area of Los Angeles in 1927. He loved the beach as a kid, and bodysurfed a stretch of beach along Santa Monica’s Bay Street, also called “Inkwell Beach,” a section of beach that was open to black swimmers when Southern California beaches were still segregated.