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UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Leisure’s Race, Power and Place: The Recreation and Remembrance of African Americans in the California Dream Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0cm2m7vs Author Jefferson, Alison Rose Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA Leisure’s Race, Power and Place: The Recreation and Remembrance of African Americans in the California Dream A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by Alison Rose Jefferson Committee in charge: Professor Randy Bergstrom, Chair Professor Emeritus Douglas Daniels Professor Mary Hancock Professor George Lipsitz December 2015 The dissertation of Alison Rose Jefferson is approved. ____________________________________________ Douglas Daniels ____________________________________________ Mary Hancock ____________________________________________ George Lipsitz ____________________________________________ Randy Bergstrom, Committee Chair December 2015 Leisure’s Race, Power and Place: The Recreation and Remembrance of African Americans in the California Dream Copyright © 2015 by Alison Rose Jefferson iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to thank everyone who helped me over the years to uncover the research, which formed the bases of this dissertation. I especially want thank all my professors and colleagues who supported and/or guided me in the production of knowledge for and writing of this manuscript, and my parents (now deceased) who provided the foundational support of my life’s journey. iv VITA OF ALISON ROSE JEFFERSON DECEMBER 2015 EDUCATION • Doctor of Philosophy in History, University of California, Santa Barbara, December 2015 • Master of Historic Preservation, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 2007 • Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, Pomona College, Claremont, California, 1980 PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT • 2012: Teaching Assistant, Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara • 2009-2012: Guest Lecturer, University of California, Santa Barbara and Texas A&M University • 2006-2009: Historian/Project Manager, Historic Resources Group, Los Angeles California • 2005-2007: Assistant Exhibit Curator/Independent Consultant, Automobile Club of Southern California/California African American Museum, Los Angeles PUBLICATIONS • Walking Tour Review: “Ricki Stevenson’s Black Paris Tours. The Public Historian, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Fall 2015), 154-158. • Exhibit Review: “Wisconsin Black Historical Society and Milwaukee’s Bronzeville Cultural Entertainment District.” The Public Historian, V. 35, No. 4 (Fall 2012), 93-98. • “African American Leisure Space in Santa Monica: The Beach Sometimes Known as the ‘Inkwell,’ 1900s-1960s.” Southern California Quarterly, V. 91, No. 2 (2009), 155-189. • Co-Author with Christopher D. Jimenez y West, Matthew W. Roth and Morgan P. Yates. Intersections of South Central Los Angeles: People and Places in History and Contemporary Photographs. Los Angeles: Automobile Club of Southern California, 2008 HONORS AND AWARDS • Alternate and Honorable Mention List, Ford Foundation Doctoral Fellowship Competition, 2014-15 • University of California, Santa Barbara: 1) Affiliates Graduate Dissertation, 2) History Associates Robert Kelley, 3) History Department Regent’s Dissertation and Humanities Fellowships, and 4) Social Science Research Grant, 2013-14 FIELDS OF STUDY • Major Field: Public History with Mary Hancock • Sub-Field 1: Historic Preservation and Community History with Randy Bergstrom • Sub-Field 2: American History and the African American Experience in the West with Douglas Daniels • Cognate Field: Public Memory with George Lipsitz v ABSTRACT Leisure’s Race, Power and Place: The Recreation and Remembrance of African Americans in the California Dream by Alison Rose Jefferson In “Leisure’s Race, Power and Place…,” I examine how African Americans pioneered leisure in America’s “frontier of leisure” through their attempts to create communities and business projects, as southern California’s black population grew during the nation’s Jim Crow era. With leisure’s reimagining into the center of the American Dream, black Californians worked to make leisure an open, inclusive, reality for all. My study reconsiders how they made California and American history by challenging racial hierarchies when they occupied recreational sites and public spaces at the core of the state’s formative, mid-twentieth century identity. Black communal practices and economic development around leisure created these sites, marking a space of black identity on the regional landscape and social space. Through struggle over these sites, African Americans helped define the practice and meaning of leisure for the region and the nation, confronted the emergent power politics of leisure space, and set the stage for them as places for remembrance of invention and public contest. Through archival, personal collections, oral history and site visit research this dissertation presents case studies of southern California, leading African American leisure destinations (Bruce’s Beach/Manhattan Beach, Bay Street/Santa Monica, Lake Elsinore, the Parkridge Country Club/Corona, Eureka Villa/Val Verde and a few others) flourishing from the 1900s to 1960s. Oceanfront and inland places illustrate a range of kinds of leisure production, purposes and societal encounters, and the diversity of black social life in this vi historical era. As these histories recover the social relations and community formation of leisure, they bring the voices of more prosperous black Californians, whose actions have been understudied in much of the research on southern California and black urban history, generally. At leisure/recreational spaces, systematized white racism in ethnically diverse Los Angeles was most consistently targeted at African Americans. Yet they proved this regional style of racism more readily challengeable than elsewhere in the country. Their actions are the local stories of the national narrative of mass movement to open recreational accommodations to all Americans. In reconsidering the formation of California’s leisure frontier, my research joins and complicates analysis of the long civil rights movement by demonstrating how the struggle for leisure and public space also reshaped it. In extending the story beyond dispossession through public memory and reclamation of history a generation later, this dissertation reveals a persistent struggle tied to and actively reappropriating these leisure destinations for contemporary place making and justice aims. This dissertation presents the historic context of black Angeleno community formation and the development of each southern California leisure destinations from their beginnings early in the twentieth century. Two stories will be told: first, the creative assertion of full social and civic membership, and social and economic invention by African American leisure community agents in making leisure; and second, the subsequent story of memory of that leisure. Because the Jim Crow era’s enterprise and constriction have largely been erased, I examine the story of the sites’ evolution and heritage of how they are remembered to show how their recovery to public memory and historic preservation/heritage vii conservation is today restoring the understanding of them as places of commerce, social networks, community, identity, contestation and civil rights struggles. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 2 - Historical Context of Resorts, Leisure Space and Vacationing 56 3 - Before Beach Blanket Bingo: The Politics of Remembering African 92 American Leisure and Removal in Los Angeles County at Bruce’s Beach 4 - Race, Real Estate and Remembrance in Santa Monica’s Ocean Park 188 Neighborhood, 1900s–1960s 5 - Lake Elsinore: A Southern California Resort Town Mecca for African 257 American Pleasure Seekers 6 - Welcome to the Parkridge? Adventures of African Americans in Southern 340 California Exurban Country Club and Subdivision Development During the 1920s 7 - Eureka! Race, Leisure, Subdivisions, Promoters and Gambling on the 411 California Dream 8 - Conclusion / Epilogue 497 Bibliography 516 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 - Bruce’s Beach 2003 Plaque Text. 149 Figure 2 - “Letters,” Easy Reader newspaper, Thursday, July 20, 2006. 174 Figure 3 - City of Manhattan Beach, Staff Report: Proposed Plaque Language 177 – November 8, 2006. Figure 4 - The Manhattan Beach City Council approved a large plaque to 186 honor the African American family that once operated a resort at what is now a city park known as Bruce’s Beach. Figure 5 - Bay Street/Inkwell Plaque Text. 253 Figure 6 - Map Key for Figure 7. Selective sites in the Lake Elsinore 273-274 African American Resort Community, 1920s-1960s. Figure 7 - Letter from Journee W. White, Corona Courier, April 20, 1928. 391 x INTRODUCTION Our arrival at this juncture of western African American history has come after a long, controversial intellectual journey. Until the 1960s the images of the West centered on Fredrick Jackson Turner’s ideal of rugged Euro-American pioneers constantly challenging a westward-moving frontier, bring civilization, taming the wilderness, and, in the process, reinventing themselves as ‘Americans’ and creating an egalitarian society that nurtured the fundamental democratic values that shaped contemporary American society. This interpretation