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CHAPTER 1
Historical Context of Leisure, the California Dream, and the African American Experience during the Jim Crow Era
Beautiful Southern California ...
— Eagle, December 5, 1908
The American West and California have been investigated and mythologized as places of opportunity, hope, and a leisure lifestyle by scholars and writers, as well as by civic and business boosters of all sorts. From the late eighteenth century to the dawning of the twenty-first century, throughout its Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. history, diverse groups of people from around the world have embraced this imagery, particularly those attracted as tourists and new residents to Southern California. Over the last few centuries people moved to Southern California for the mild climate and the landscape, accompanying various industrial employment opportunities in cattle ranching, mining, agriculture, petroleum, tourism, movies, and technology. In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, transcontinental train travel allowed the American West to become the tourist destination of choice, as the railroads were marketed to affluent Euro-Americans with leisure time. Railroads transported these consumers to swanky beach and inland resorts in California, as well as to luxurious rustic resorts built in national parks and similar locations. More water sources were being engineered, agriculture flourished, Los Angeles developed a deep-water harbor in San Pedro, and the Panama Canal opened by 1915, transporting more people and goods to California. Since this period, the region has consistently promoted a romantic ideal of leisure as a lifestyle or "as a permanent way of life" in Southern California, as well as an attraction for tourists and migrants. Leisure became a distinctive defining feature of place and of American citizenship and culture, as an integral part of the modern life that was a measurement of fulfillment, self-determination, and uplift.
The nineteenth century was a time of transition in the U.S. economy, from self-employment in small-scale, competitive capitalism to bureaucratic, corporate employment of middleclass men. Working-class and immigrant men, as well as middle-class women, challenged middle-class men over who should control public power and authority, and, in turn, the nation's destiny. Victorian ideals of self-restraint, self-control, and postponed gratification were changing and, as historians Cindy S. Aron, Gail Bederman, and Kay Davis note, American men and women used leisure in the performance of various sorts of religious, intellectual, and therapeutic social practices as leisure became a way of defining class identity. Middle-class men in particular used their leisure time to participate in strenuous, active, and competitive physical endeavors, and to display their economic success, reinforcing their newly evolved sense of manliness and patriarchal power. Similarly, middleclass women exercised new forms of personal autonomy in experiencing a wider range of amusements and pleasures, along with new forms of social intercourse than were normally unavailable to them at home.
As historians James J. Rawls and Walton Bean have observed, the advertising campaigns of the railroads and the contributions of independent writers promoting "California's charms and embellished ... romantic heritage" propelled Southern California as a major tourist attraction and contributed to several real estate booms. Influential in the development of the region was the idea that "California offered leisure as a way of life." Charles Lummis, a writer and Southern California booster, popularized this notion in books and articles in the magazines Land of Sunshine and Out West. Lummis envisioned and promoted leisure as a defining ideal, as central to social life as work, eating, and sleeping. He and other boosters, including the new Hollywood entertainment industry of the early twentieth century, showcased the regional landscape in weekly film and newsreels and extolled "Southern California as the playground of the world, a place where Americans would finally learn to embrace leisure." Through their work and social routines, residents could improve themselves and their community in the process. Others could gain the benefits of the region by visiting.
But as Californians undertook leisure, many found it limited, and themselves excluded from "the way of life." Racial and ethnic group communities (African Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Native Americans, and Jews) encountered restrictions by the white majority population, which prevented them from fully taking advantage of the state's opportunities and amenities. From Lummis's time well into the twentieth century, race, power, privilege, and wealth often inflected leisure opportunities as well as determined who was able to take advantage of economic and social opportunities in Southern California. Leisure became a site to separate, segregate, control, and regulate people, places, and opportunities. White boosters broadcasted this rhetoric of leisure lifestyle pleasures through the mass media, speaking to white consumers to create a sense of place in the California social and physical landscape that excluded Jews and communities of color. In the white boosters' messages, communities of color were situated — if at all — as laborers, rather than as neighbors or social equals.
The African American making of leisure in Southern California built upon a long history of human pursuit of recreational experiences, as well as upon the struggle for freedom and equality. Not until after the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, however, did vacations become a pursuit that Americans beyond the wealthy or elite could imagine undertaking, as critical markers and entitlements of middle-class status. As soon as African Americans could afford extended leisure after their freedom from enslavement, they traveled to Euro-American resorts, first on the Eastern seaboard, and later in other places domestically and overseas.
African Americans became part of the development of resort towns in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, as year-round residents, service workers, or entrepreneurs in such places as Newport, Rhode Island; Saratoga, New York; and Cape May, New Jersey. By the late nineteenth century a small but growing African American middle class could afford to travel for vacations, mirroring the resort-based leisure consumption of white middle- and upper-class Americans. Several vacation sites throughout the United States catered to an African American clientele during this period, with varying degrees of success and longevity. Hillside in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania; Sag Harbor, New York; Highland Beach, Maryland; and Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts were open for business in the mid-Atlantic and northern coastal states. Idlewild, Michigan, was one of several retreats in the Midwest. The South featured more than one beach area that served African American vacationers, including American Beach at Amelia Island, Florida, and the Gulfside Resort outside Biloxi, Mississippi.
Ideas, practices, and expectations of leisure in the United States informed and challenged the vision and practice that African Americans pursued in the Southern California region early in the twentieth century. As historians have analyzed and interpreted leisure as a cultural production of social practice and consumption, they have recognized the leisure of African Americans as a product of distinctive initiative and resourcefulness, cultural self-expression, self-determination, and political activism amid systematic exclusion and dispossession of public rights. African Americans made leisure integral to culture, community, and struggle in California during the twentieth century. This history is layered with stories about group and individual circumstances, and chronicles about migration patterns, socioeconomic status, cultural practices, educational and employment opportunities, and social power. These multifaceted stories took place in both private and public spaces, and the narratives of these experiences and histories intersect and overlap. They are inseparable from one another in their composition and reflection of the structural racial exclusion and class exploitation imposed on African Americans along with other peoples of color.
Historical remembrance and analysis of leisure generally has focused on sites owned and patronized by whites, while African American leisure spaces have been mostly unrecognized. African Americans, like other Americans who moved to California, embraced the booster dream of a leisure lifestyle and contested attempts of what the California Eagle newspaper identified as "confinement to ... sordid forms of recreation and play" to assert self-determination in leisure. Astute African American entrepreneurs and civic builders recognized how this embrace of leisure combined with real estate and other business opportunities could create income and wealth. As was the case with leisure and residential resort spaces near Eastern, Midwestern, and Southern cities with relatively large African American populations that sprouted up in the early twentieth century, the race-specific leisure spaces of Southern California grew, because there were entrepreneurs and residents in particular areas offering services and accommodations to African American visitors. African American regional social networking and community building, as well as cultural traditions and economic development around leisure pursuits, occurred at these sites, marking a space of black identity on the regional landscape and social space. From this, as historian Andrew Kahrl asserts, "the development of attractive and accessible black beaches and leisure sites free from white harassment emerged as a major political issue in the long civil rights movement."
Black Angelenos asserted self-determination to participate in popular leisure and cultural, social, and economic trends that were considered modern by the 1920s, including activities in exurban communities that they built so they could control the property for their enjoyment of these activities and contest white racism. Particularly, they were challenging the white racist labeling of African Americans as laborers and as inferior.
Scholars have argued that leisure and resorts, while produced by the social economy of industrial capitalism, created a novel cultural political form. Resorts and leisure spaces, as sites of transitory recreational consumption, depended on a market of visitors mostly from other communities. Entrepreneurs and civic leaders captured attractive public space and amenities in order to attract these visitors. Sources of resort life and their production have therefore typically been geographically diverse and fragmentary, reflecting distinctive aspects of the place of their making — conditions that may complicate many scholars' research in African American leisure making and the contention against it.
In contrast to the city where black Angelenos lived, these California waterfront and pastoral places where they went to relax included Bruce's Beach in Manhattan Beach; Santa Monica's Bay Street beach near Pico Boulevard (a.k.a. the "Inkwell"); Lake Elsinore in Riverside County; the Parkridge Country Club in Corona, Riverside County; Val Verde in Santa Clarita Valley, Los Angeles County; and a few others.
Established white racism in Los Angeles, when manifested in recreation space, was most consistently targeted at African Americans, though the racial and ethnic mix of the Southern California region included whites of various European ethnicities; Americans of Mexican, Latinx, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and other Asian descent; and California American Indians and Native Americans from other regions, as well as African Americans. While the structural discrimination of Los Angeles and the region was constant and tough, the color line was fuzzy due in part to the inconsistent definition and observance of California's 1893 statute and other subsequent legal reform by the 1920s that legally abolished most forms of racial discrimination. African Americans proved this discrimination more readily contestable than elsewhere in the country (such as the South, where there were actual discriminatory laws regularly and consistently enforced by public authorities) through everyday assertions of presence in the use of space and facilities, as well as other forms of challenge, such as civil disobedience and legal action. As the shape of race and racism shifts depending on historical time period, geography, and context, scholars are just beginning to investigate and comprehend the distinctive history of the varied ways that experiences of discrimination impacted different communities of color and marginalized groups, and that the narrative about the Los Angeles region — and the greater American West in general — during the Jim Crow era had important differences from those in states in the East.
The modern era, of African American building of California, particularly for the more educated and resourceful class, began in the exodus from southern states in the 1890s, in what historian Douglas Flamming has identified as a "quiet, persistent procession" due to the racial inequality, political violence, disenfranchisement of black voters, lack of economic opportunities, and de jure Jim Crow segregation perpetrated and condoned by white southerners. California presented a complex web of laws and practices regulating housing, land ownership, labor, and marriage for communities of color, but when compared to the prospects in the Jim Crow South, these barriers did not dissuade African Americans from settling in California, or from launching leisure consumption businesses there. As historians Lawrence B. DeGraaf, Kevin Starr, and other scholars have observed, many of these black residents were drawn to California for the same dreams and reasons as whites: hope, opportunity, freedom, economics, better schools, better quality of life in a temperate climate, and a sublime landscape. Many in the African American population by the 1920s, as well as those who continued to migrate to the region until 1940, had the resources to enjoy life and leisure pursuits in Southern California.
This Pacific Coast place presents a way to consider African Americans' dynamic reconstruction of social and political life in the rapidly changing twentieth-century U.S. milieu. As DeGraaf and Taylor assert, since Asian Americans and Mexican Americans had a much larger numerical presence in the Far West, this has led observers to largely ignore African Americans' presence until World War II — a pivotal period in their history in the state. This time of extraordinary growth of the black Angeleno population specifically suggests that the experience of African Americans offers an especially important window into the transformation of California in this era. From 1920 to 1940 the population of Los Angeles grew explosively from 576,700 to 1,504,277, while the African American community grew even more rapidly from 15,579 to 63,774. By 1950 as the population of Los Angeles reached 1,970,358 (a growth of 30 percent), African American numbers grew by almost eleven times to 171,209. This larger population of black Californians, led by civic luminaries who captured regional and nationwide recognition, built on the community's earlier contestation history to become a major visible subject of civic discourse and action.
By the mid-1920s Los Angeles became the most important urban center for African American life, politics, and business in the West. Since 1900 Los Angeles had maintained the largest black population in California, of just under 2,200 (less than 1 percent of city's population), and it was one of the two substantial African American centers in the western United States. These initiatives contributed to defining and promoting the Southern California metropolis as a place of opportunity for African Americans in that era. This progress was symbolized by the 1918 election of Republican Frederick Madison Roberts (1879–1952) as the first African American assemblyman in California, representing the 62nd District in Los Angeles (1918–34). This California Assembly District, which included the Central Avenue district of Los Angeles, was where most African Americans in the region lived until the post–World War II years. While whites continued to make up the majority and ethnic Mexicans and Japanese were equal to African Americans in numbers, Flamming observes, "culturally and politically, black Angelenos [prominently] placed their stamp on the district" by the mid-1920s. The characteristics of the people and social dynamics within the black Angeleno community were different in many ways from eastern and northern cities to which African Americans migrated in the twentieth century's early decades.
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Excerpted from "Living the California Dream"
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Copyright © 2020 Alison Rose Jefferson.
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