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Right to Jobs and Health

Allensworth Freedom Colony

An Experiment in African American Self-Determination

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By Mickey Ellinger Photos by Scott Braley

century ago, in a dusty corner of Tulare County, California, black visionaries planned and developed a town governed Aby its black residents. The settlers’ goal was utopian in the highest sense: to show the rest of the United States what African Americans could do in a secure self-governing community built by their own efforts without interference, harassment, or persecution. Their bold experiment attracted U.S. Army soldiers and veterans, small business owners, skilled artisans, professionals, and farmers from all over the United States. Residents named the town Allensworth to honor the colony’s founder and chief promoter, Colonel Allen Allensworth, whose life journey from slavery to a high rank in the U.S. Army epitomized the capacities and dreams of African Americans.

The town ran its own school that taught world were followed closely in the national black press. And history and fostered black pride, and was praised by even though many residents worked on neighboring I the state superintendent of schools as the best school white-owned ranches, they were committed to eco- Photo: in the San Joaquin Valley. Residents practiced a nomic self-reliance for themselves, their families, and deeply held but inclusive Christianity. They estab- the Allensworth community. The Praise Dancers of the East Bay Church of lished institutions of self-government and participat- Allensworth, like dozens, possibly hundreds of Religious Science in Oakland perform in ed in local government and civic life. They farmed African American towns in the South and Midwest, 2008 at the and founded small businesses. The town’s fortunes was a conscious effort to pursue the dream of freedom Allensworth State Park.

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Right to Self-Determination

I Photo: Soldiers were a large percentage of early Allensworth settlers. Some docents in Allensworth Park, like Emmet Hardin, portray themselves as buffalo soldiers.

26 in an unrelentingly repressive society. Slavery had been abolished for 40 years, but the federal government aban- doned Reconstruction in 1877, pulling out United States troops. Segregation was upheld by the United States Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1895. State legislatures effectively disenfranchised black voters in the South, and the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black people, espe- cially black landowners. Between 1882 and 1908, when Allensworth was founded, 3,347 people were lynched in the United States, according to the Tuskeegee Institute. The vast majority were black men. Some mostly white towns went so far as to expel their black residents com- pletely. In 1908, while Colonel Allensworth and his part- ners were buying land, a white mob in Springfield, Illinois, hometown of Abraham Lincoln, burned dozens of buildings in the African American community, lynched two men, and drove most of the 2,500 black citizens into the night. Still, people were determined to find ways to make the most of their new-found freedom. Crusading journalists like Ida B. Wells exposed the crimes of lynching, and Negro political leaders proposed strategies for progress. In the late 1870s and beyond, tens of thousands of people

founded self-governing African American communities, I Photo: George Meadows was lynched in Jefferson County, Alabama on January 15, 1889. In 1908, the year that the town of Allensworth was founded, there were 97 lynchings recorded in the United States, 89 of them African Americans. Photograph by L. Horgan, Jr., 1889.

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Right to Self-Determination

some in the South, more in the Midwest and the Oklahoma Territory. Between 1879 and 1881 alone, 60,000 people left the South. Historians estimate that as many as 100,000 people migrated between 1879 and 1910. Cartoonist and historian Morris Turner has identified more than 200 African American towns and settlements, most founded by people hungry for land and seeking a haven from white violence. Two currents of thought guided the struggle for freedom. In the growing urban African American communities, the struggle focused on gaining equal civil rights, such as the right to testify against white people, to receive a public education in integrated schools, and to vote. W.E.B. Dubois and his followers articulated this strategy and embodied it in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909. Booker T. Washington was the chief spokesman for the emphasis on self-reliant economic development. Washing- ton was criticized for not directly opposing segregation, but his ideas resonated with black businessmen and farmers all over the country. African American towns were laboratories for Washington’s strategy, and while Allensworth residents and practices supported both currents of liberation thought, Colonel Allensworth and other town founders saw them- I Photo: Allensworth attracted many skilled tradesmen. Docent John Chew working at selves as followers of Washington. the Allensworth Park blacksmith shed.

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I Photo: The library at Allensworth was part of the Tulare Free Library system and was heavily used by the residents.

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Right to Self-Determination

Early residents had warm memories of life in Allensworth. Elizabeth Payne Magee, a daughter of town founder William Payne and the first teacher at the Allensworth school, told an interviewer, “One of the out- standing things I remember about Allensworth was the library. It was the best equipped small library that I have ever seen, and I spent many happy hours in there, reading and taking books out. And all of us read a great deal. There were no illiterate children in that area. Everybody read and enjoyed reading and studying, and we all sang, and many of us played instruments… it was an unique town.” Helatha Smith, who also lived in Allensworth as a child, recalls, “We played croquet and we played ball- 28 games with the boys. They were always running, playing blind man, and all of those crazy games where you got to run all over the place.

I Photos: According to a United States Department of Agriculture survey, “The soil in this area is highly saline with severe limitations for most crops.” But very little land was available for purchase by African Americans in 1908 and the founders hoped that abundant water would ameliorate the problem. (Top) Allensworth State Historic Park from the north. (Middle) Pierro family farm in the current town of Allensworth. (Bottom) Allensworth from the air.

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Right to Self-Determination

“We played baseball too. Sometimes the girls would play the boys and then other times we would play mixed. We had girls that were really good players. We had one girl, Cecelia Hall, she wasn’t afraid to try to stop a ball. She was good, she always played shortstop. Most of the girls would get out of the way as soon as the ball was going, but she wouldn’t. She’d just stop the ball.” The people of Allensworth faced enormous obstacles, some faced by most small farming towns in agribusiness California, some particular to their lack of economic and political power: I Few land companies would sell to African Americans, and the town’s overpriced alkaline soil was not generous. I Photo: Allensworth was sited at an existing grain depot that brought trade and I The water supply dwindled and the land company jobs to the town. Farmers six miles north in Alpaugh paid to have a spur line built so that they could load directly, and the grain depot left Allensworth in 1914. reneged on its agreements to supply it. 29 I Farmers north of Allensworth built a spur line that took away the revenue from the grain depot at Allensworth; train traffic fell. I In a completely unforeseen tragedy, Colonel Allensworth was killed by two white motorcyclists while walking on a Monrovia street. I While the colony was still mourning the Colonel, the plan to found a vocational school at Allensworth was defeated by indifference in the California legislature and opposition from black leaders in San Francisco and Los Angeles, who feared that a school in Allensworth would undermine their efforts to integrate education.

The Disappearing Black Farmers Black farmers were becoming an endangered population throughout the United States. Farm ownership declined steadily after 1920, when almost a million black farmers still owned land in the South. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, farmers in the South were forced back into sharecropping. In Allensworth, work on white-owned farms became the only work available. Cotton had come into the I Photo: Jefferson Pierro with first grandson Leo Tompkin at the family farm. Jefferson and Geneva Pierro moved their large family to Allensworth in 1953. San Joaquin Valley and Allensworth became a place people Several of his children attended the "old" Allensworth school, which is now lived in during the cotton season, and then moved on. in the park. Photo courtesy of David Pierro, 1976.

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Right to Self-Determination

I Photo: Running around like crazy is still a popular pastime with young visitors to Allensworth Park.

Today, in California as elsewhere in the United States, black people are overwhelmingly urban. There are fewer than 500 black farmers in the state; they mostly farm small acreages of specialty crops for urban farmers’ markets. The struggle for African American economic equality has moved to the cities, but the history of Allensworth still resonates with black Californians, who have supported the town’s reincarnation as a state historic park. In 1969, Ed Pope, who lived in Allensworth as a 30 child in the 1930s, was working for the State Depart- ment of Parks and Recreation, preparing graphs and charts for the annual report on the state’s historic sites. “All the different ethnicities were represented, but nothing at all on black people,” Pope says. “I I Photo: Each celebration at Allensworth Park includes music and dance. Many visitors bring went over to the capitol and lobbied Merv Dymally sunshades, tables, and picnics for the day. and Willie Brown. By the time I got back to my office, my phone was jumping off the hook. Merv Dymally said, ‘What’s this about 127 sites and no Allensworth, the Freedom Colony representation of black people? Taxation without rep- By Alice C. Royal resentation! Let’s get on it.’” Pope sums up the situa- tion with a smile. “It was 1969. Not that much Mrs. Alice C. Royal, who earlier, the Black Panthers had been in the Capitol was born in Allensworth Rotunda. Let’s just say the Legislature was in a listen- in 1923, is the author of ing mood.” The Park was dedicated in 1976, and Allensworth, the Freedom more than 20 historic buildings have been painstak- Colony. This article is ingly repaired or rebuilt. based on the book. For Today the park comes to life during special events. the full story of this exper- Groups come by bus and train to absorb the history iment in African American self-determination, visit and imagine themselves living in the town. Docents Heyday Books. in period dress portray early residents and explain the www.heydaybooks.com. furnishings of the buildings and their use in daily life. One frequent visitor told us this story: “I remem- ber the very first time that I came through here, and

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Right to Self-Determination

I Photo: Gemilia Herring, the last of the early residents of Allensworth, with her daughter Josephine Triplett. Mrs. Herring died shortly after celebrating Allensworth’s and her own centennial.

the announcer—she was one of Allensworth’s grand- daughters—said, ‘I’m going to tell you something — we’re family up here. Mothers, let your children go. We don’t have any axe murderers, we don’t have anybody who’s going to hurt them, let them go. This is their place. This is what I’m telling you. And if they do something, every parent here is going to take them back to you. We expect you to uphold what we have said.’ That did it. I said, ‘This is home!’” The town of Allensworth still exists just south of the park. Its few hundred mostly Latino residents still struggle for a reliable water supply and a healthy 31 environment. In 2007, townspeople and park support- ers worked together to defeat a plan to permit two huge dairies nearby that would have added to air and water pollution problems. I Photo: Rev. Mutima Imani, of the East Bay Church of Religious Science in Oakland leads a As lifetime resident Sam Pierro sums up, ceremony inside the First Baptist Church building. “Allensworth served as a beacon of light to people, because there’s a vein of struggle that goes through the black community. There are obstacles that seem insurmountable. When Allensworth founded the town, he was trying to build something to address that, because he was coming out of slavery, and what was happening to blacks continued on. They killed him six years after the town started. All the adversi- ties that were stacked against Allensworth, they con- tinued on. We had to face it, all the stuff that we had to undergo. But it gave us a certain strength; it was a blessing to us. A difficult life, but a blessing to us. I appreciate it. That gives me as a person something to hold on to.” I

Mickey Ellinger is a freelance writer. Scott Braley is a freelance

photographer. They worked with Mrs. Royal to create I Photo: Artist Sam Pierro was born in Allensworth and frequently does a rendition of Martin Allensworth, the Freedom Colony. Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech at the park.

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