Race, Power and Place: The Recreation and Remembrance of African Americans in the California Dream

Alison Rose
History
UC Santa Barbara

This project examined 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. 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. Their struggle over these sites, helped define the practice and meaning of leisure, confronted the emergent power politics of leisure space, and set the stage for them as places for remembrance of invention and public contest. In reconsidering the formation of California’s leisure frontier, this research joins and complicates analysis by historians demonstrating how the struggle for leisure and public space also reshaped the long civil rights movement.