Paradise Lost...

A Piece of History Lands in a Contemporary Fight

Photo:Jim Wilson/The New York Times
The home of Allen Allensworth, who in 1908 founded the colony that bore his name, is now part of a state park in the Central Valley of California.
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
Published: March 7, 2007

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.
Col. Allensworth

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.
“She taught me how to read and write,” he said of Alwortha Hall, his teacher, who was named after the town. “It was the first true happiness I’d ever known.”

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.”

Allensworth was the westernmost black settlement among the scores founded as refuges from lynch mobs, segregation laws and dependency sharecropping. Among them were Nicodemus, Kan., now part of the National Park Service, and Boley, Okla. (current pop. 1,126), then the most bustling of about 50 all-black towns.

Collectively, the communities represent an under-recognized chapter of American history that began in 1879 with the “exodusters” who migrated from the South to escape racial oppression after Reconstruction. “Most of these places have been forgotten,” said Jeffrey A. Harris, diversity director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “It’s a perspective on history that’s been washed out of the general narrative.”

This is a corner of California with milk in its veins: Tulare County is the country’s largest producer, with more than 300 dairies — a literal cash cow. The county’s Board of Supervisors has tentatively approved the dairy complex, and a final vote will be on March 20. Assemblywoman Wilmer D. Carter, a member of the black caucus, recently introduced a bill that would prohibit any animal-feeding operation within five miles of the park.

Although many mysteries about the colony remain, what is known is that as a slave, Mr. Allensworth was sold and taught to read and write by his new master’s son. He escaped and joined the Union Army; later, he served as a delegate to the Republican National Conventions in 1880 and 1884. For 20 years, he was a chaplain for the 24th (Colored) Infantry, one of the famed all-black “Buffalo soldier” regiments. His dream was to create a place where African-

Americans could control their own destiny and Buffalo soldiers could retire.
The colony thrived at first, with a 75-cents-a-night hotel, restaurants, general stores, a library, a girls’ glee club, a theater club and a debating society, and its own branch of the N.A.A.C.P. “Of all the all-black towns of the period, none were as well-conceived,” said Dr. Lonnie Bunch, director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

Alice Royal, born in 1923 — “the year electric lights went on in Allensworth” — said she recalled walking at night, committing the constellations to memory. “Even the night was an education,” Mrs. Royal said.

The grand plans included a vocational school that would be the Tuskegee of the West.
But the colony’s troubles soon began. There were legal disputes with the white-owned company that sold Mr. Allensworth’s association the land over promised water allotments from wells. By the time they were resolved, the water table had dropped precipitously. The Santa Fe railroad, which stopped on the land bought by Mr. Allensworth, refused to change the name on the local depot, then called Solita, claiming Allensworth was too long to fit on the sign.

In 1914, the railroad bypassed Allensworth entirely, essentially strangling its economy. Perhaps the biggest blow came later that year when Mr. Allensworth died after being struck by a motorcycle driven by two white youths — an “accident” that is still being researched by historians. By the 1960s, arsenic contamination in the water had turned the place into a ghost town.

“There was nothing but old rag-tag houses you could see clear through,” Mr. Pope said. “There was not even a sign that said Allensworth, not even any arrow.”

Previous plans for land close to the park have included a turkey farm and an industrial food grease dump. Luke Cole, director of the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, said such land uses were “about as close to intentional discrimination as you can see.”

In recent years, the environmental impact of megadairies on the San Joaquin Valley, with some of the country’s worst air quality, has led to lawsuits and a push for tougher regulations. Concerns include air pollution resulting from waste lagoons and the contamination of aquifers.
“It’s not the dairy itself — it’s the position of the dairy,” Mrs. Royal said. “Especially in hot and windy times, it’s a stench out of this world. Nobody will want to come picnicking or celebrating in the park.”

Samuel Etchegaray, a 64-year-old rancher, wants to build the dairy, and in recent weeks, the state, which has invested $8 million in renovations at the park, has enlisted the nonprofit Trust for Public Land to discuss with him the possibility of a conservation easement that would preclude agricultural use.

David Albers, a land-use lawyer in Bakersfield who is representing Mr. Etchegaray, said he and his client were evaluating the trust’s proposal. “If it meets our goals and the state’s goals,” Mr. Albers said, “then there will be a deal.”

David J. Organ, a historian at Clark Atlanta University who is writing a book on Allensworth and other black settlements, said that although the colony was short-lived, its message remains relevant.

“Preservation is the last frontier of the civil rights movement,” Mr. Organ said. “Especially post-Katrina, we have to reconstruct the memories of these communities before we can physically reconstruct them with hammer and nails. That’s the legacy of Allensworth.”