Fight over old black self-help community in CA
ALLENSWORTH, Calif. —- It is an unlikely place for a utopia: this cracked-earth landscape of two-lane roads in the Central Valley, so remote that the lilting staccato of freight trains can be heard from miles away.
Yet it was here, nearly a century ago, that Allen Allensworth, an escaped slave from Kentucky who became the nation’s highest-ranking black Army officer at the time, forged an idealistic community dedicated to Booker T. Washington’s principles of self-help and self-determination. In 1908 he established Allensworth Colony, which flourished for a fleeting moment in the California heat and dust.
About 220 miles southeast of San Francisco, the colony drew pilgrims like Cornelius Pope, now 77, who recalls his sense of revelation upon entering the two-room schoolhouse, where everyone was black and photographs of Abraham Lincoln and Booker T. Washington hung on the walls. As the child of migrant cotton pickers, Mr. Pope had lived in cow barns and tents with dirt floors...
Now the site of Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park, with its array of board-and-batten buildings restored and rebuilt, California’s first planned black community continues to exert a powerful pull, especially among former residents like Mr. Pope, who helped champion the park’s creation in the 1970s.
So the prospect of a giant dairy with over 16,000 cows and waste lagoons planned near the park’s periphery has elicited a wave of emotion among those protective of its history, including several former residents and black R.V. clubs that gather regularly to speak about the park to the nearly 10,000 tourists drawn here each year.
“You can relocate cattle,” said Nettie Morrison, the mayor of the adjoining hamlet named for the colony. “You can’t relocate history.”
Read entire article at New York Times
Yet it was here, nearly a century ago, that Allen Allensworth, an escaped slave from Kentucky who became the nation’s highest-ranking black Army officer at the time, forged an idealistic community dedicated to Booker T. Washington’s principles of self-help and self-determination. In 1908 he established Allensworth Colony, which flourished for a fleeting moment in the California heat and dust.
About 220 miles southeast of San Francisco, the colony drew pilgrims like Cornelius Pope, now 77, who recalls his sense of revelation upon entering the two-room schoolhouse, where everyone was black and photographs of Abraham Lincoln and Booker T. Washington hung on the walls. As the child of migrant cotton pickers, Mr. Pope had lived in cow barns and tents with dirt floors...
Now the site of Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park, with its array of board-and-batten buildings restored and rebuilt, California’s first planned black community continues to exert a powerful pull, especially among former residents like Mr. Pope, who helped champion the park’s creation in the 1970s.
So the prospect of a giant dairy with over 16,000 cows and waste lagoons planned near the park’s periphery has elicited a wave of emotion among those protective of its history, including several former residents and black R.V. clubs that gather regularly to speak about the park to the nearly 10,000 tourists drawn here each year.
“You can relocate cattle,” said Nettie Morrison, the mayor of the adjoining hamlet named for the colony. “You can’t relocate history.”
Related Links
Col. Allensworth's Utopia (slide show)