An American Beach for African Americans
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
In the only complete history of Florida’s American Beach to date, Marsha Dean Phelts draws together personal interviews, photos, newspaper articles, memoirs, maps, and official documents to reconstruct the character and traditions of Amelia Island’s 200-acre African American community. In its heyday, when other beaches grudgingly provided only limited access, black vacationers traveled as many as 1,000 miles down the east coast of the United States and hundreds of miles along the Gulf coast to a beachfront that welcomed their business.
Beginning in 1781 with the Samuel Harrison homestead on the southern end of Amelia Island, Phelts traces the birth of the community to General Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, in which the Union granted many former Confederate coastal holdings, including Harrison’s property, to former slaves. She then follows the lineage of the first African American families known to have settled in the area to descendants remaining there today, including those of Zephaniah Kingsley and his wife, Anna Jai.
Moving through the Jim Crow era, Phelts describes the development of American Beach’s predecessors in the early 1900s. Finally, she provides the fullest account to date of the life and contributions of Abraham Lincoln Lewis, the wealthy African American businessman who in 1935, as president of the Afro-American Life Insurance Company, initiated the purchase and development of the tract of seashore known as American Beach. From Lewis’s arrival on the scene, Phelts follows the community’s sustained development and growth, highlighting landmarks like the Ocean-Vu-Inn and the Blue Palace and concluding with a stirring plea for the preservation of American Beach, which is currently threatened by encroaching development.
In a narrative full of firsthand accounts and "old-timer" stories, Phelts, who has vacationed at American Beach since she was four and now lives there, frequently adopts the style of an oral historian to paint what is ultimately a personal and intimate portrait of a community rich in heritage and culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This nostalgic folk history of a Florida beach that welcomed generations of vacationing blacks throughout the grim era of segregation and Jim Crow is so rich in anecdote, character study, customs and the abundance of nature (not to mention the 106 b&w photos) that it could almost serve as a tourist guidebook--right down to the homespun recipes, among them directions for roasting pigs' feet that was borrowed from a local cook. But Phelts, a Jacksonville librarian, has a serious purpose here: to describe this stretch of property and the need for preserving a 200-acre African American community that began in 1781 with the Samuel Harrison homestead on the southern end of Amelia Island. Phelts's account centers on Abraham Lincoln Lewis, a wealthy black businessman who, in 1935, as president of the Afro-American Life Insurance Company, purchased and developed the tract of seashore known as American Beach, which would become a resort mecca dotted by hotels such as the Ocean-Vue-Inn. Phelts, now a resident, writes of her childhood trips there in the 1950s that "going to American Beach was the equivalent of going to Disney World today." This is a lively story of a place marked by community, sociability and food, where generations of families found an oasis from racism. Phelts draws the reader so thoroughly into the everyday life of American Beach that by the final chapter, when she describes the natural disasters, white development and, most tragically, recent police violence (including the shooting of four unarmed African American men between 1990 and 1994) that threaten the community, one feels one's own childhood has been menaced.
