Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era

Abstract

Vacationing while Black has long been a fraught activity. African Americans who emigrated from the white supremacist regimes of the Jim Crow–era South to distant southern California discovered that merely finding a place to swim or picnic free of racist attack was as difficult there as it had been back home. Alison Rose Jefferson examines five instances in Living the California Dream where Black immigrants to the Los Angeles area created separate resorts to find leisure away from racist threats. All were developed in the early decades of the twentieth century and all faded by midcentury. Jefferson's work is motivated by two equally vital projects. One is to document the history of Black struggle against racism even in the pursuit of leisure. The other is to make a place for that history in public spaces and in American history teaching. Each chapter takes up both of these tasks. Jefferson first reclaims the experiences of “pioneer” entrepreneurs such as Willa Bruce and Charles Bruce who created resorts aimed at Black audiences. She then considers how each has fared poorly in public memory. Jefferson is deeply concerned with how these histories have often repeated the erasures of the original physical sites where African Americans once found respite from their workaday lives.