Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park Advisory Committee audio recordings collection, 1974-1977

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Summary

Creators:
Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park Advisory Committee.
Abstract:
Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park was California’s first state historical park designated to African-American pioneers. The Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park Advisory Committee audio recordings collection consists of 22 audiocassette of regional meetings, public hearings, and oral history interviews with the townspeople of Allensworth.
Extent:
.75 linear feet (1 box)
Language:
Languages represented in the collection: English
Preferred citation:

Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park Advisory Committee Audio Recordings Collection, MS 208, African American Museum & Library at Oakland, Oakland Public Library. Oakland, California.

Background

Scope and content:

The Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park Advisory Committee audio recordings collection consists of 22 audiocassettes. These recordings provide insight into the concerns and activities of the Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park Advisory Committee, which was organized to support and advise the State Parks Commission as to the development of the Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park. Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park was California’s first state historical park designated to African-American pioneers and along with George Washington Carver State Park in Bartow, Georgia, one of the first parks in the nation dedicated to African-American history. Recordings include regional meetings, public hearings, and oral history interviews with the townspeople of Allensworth.

Biographical / historical:

While working as a draftsperson for the California State Parks department in 1969, landscape architect Cornelius "Ed" Pope noticed that there were no state parks in California dedicated to the history of African-Americans in California. Inspired to sustain the momentum of the Civil Rights Movement in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, Pope identified Allensworth, California, the first, last, and only town in California founded, financed, and governed by African Americans as an ideal historic district to fill that absence. Pope had attended elementary school in Allensworth while his family lived in Colonel Allen Allensworth’s former home from 1938 to 1940. Together with Eugene and Ruth Lasartemay of the East Bay Negro Historical Society, Pope successfully lobbied state park officials and state legislators to consider the feasibility of a State Historic Park at Allensworth, helping to shepherd the project through the community review process.

Appointed in October 1969 by California Department of Parks and Recreation director William Penn Mott, Jr., the Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park Advisory Committee was established to “provide for the public a historical prospectus of the Black American, his role, his contributions, and concerns.” Members of the Advisory Committee included Elena Albert, Cecil Berkley, Hattie Crawford, Earle Fletcher, Marcella Ford, Edward France, chairman Dr. Kenneth Goode, vice-chairman Alfred Green, secretary Kathryn Green, Dr. Ernest Hartzog, Gemelia Herring, James Holloway, Grandvel Jackson (President of the San Francisco branch of the NAACP), Marty Jenkins, Leamon King, treasurer Eugene Lasartemay, Ruth Lasartemay, Gaynelle Miles-Green, Frances R. Miller, Cecil B. Murrell, C.J. Patterson, Ben F. Peery, Cornelius “Ed” Pope, George W. Pope, Willie Pope, Jefferson Pierro, Josephine B. Smith, Dr. Robert Thornton, Royal E. Towns, Dr. Robert Trotter, Flo Williams, Vassie D. Wright, and Margaret Wheaton. The committee was chaired by Dr. Kenneth Goode, Assistant to the Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, while Alfred Green served as chairman for the Subcommittees on Land Acquisition and Site Planning. Green, a building contractor in Los Angeles, had also assisted in authoring the 1969 Watts Redevelopment Project Plan.

In 1971, the legislature requested the Allensworth Feasibility Study, which confirmed Pope’s earlier findings of the glaring deficit of African-American sites within California’s state park system and in 1972 the Allensworth Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places. By 1973, the state had acquired the land, and the Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park Advisory Committee, under the direction of Dr. Kenneth Goode, began work on further land acquisition and site planning. In May 1976, the state Department of Parks and Recreation approved plans to develop the park, and on October 9, 1976, the park was dedicated. The Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park Advisory Committee continued to operate under Al Green and later Alice C. Royal to proceed with preservation, restoration and development of the park. Under Alice C. Royal the Advisory Committee produced staffing reports and resource management plans and promoted the Allensworth townspeople as beneficiaries of the park under the Allensworth Citizens Council. Alice C. Royal is the author of Allensworth, the Freedom Colony: A California African American Township.

Allensworth, California, was founded in 1908 through the California Colony and Home Promoting Association by former slave and retired army chaplain Lieutenant Colonel Allen Allensworth, together with Professor William A. Payne, retired miner John W. Palmer, African Methodist Episcopal Church Minister Dr. William H. Peck, and real-estate specialist Harvey Mitchell. Admirers and contemporaries of Booker T. Washington, Allensworth and his colleagues sought to acquire land and create a self-sustaining African-American colony away from socioeconomic stagnation and racial segregation. Although the community only flourished for a short time, over the next decade some three hundred African-American pioneers had established a self-sufficient farming community with its own school, church, businesses, and municipal government.

Processing information:

Processed by Sean Dickerson.

Arrangement:

Series I. Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park Advisory Committee cassette tapes

Rules or conventions:
Finding aid prepared using Describing Archives: a Content Standard

Access and use

Restrictions:

No access restrictions. Collection is open to the public.

Materials are for use in-library only, non-circulating.

Terms of access:

Permission to publish must be obtained from the African American Museum & Library at Oakland.

Preferred citation:

Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park Advisory Committee Audio Recordings Collection, MS 208, African American Museum & Library at Oakland, Oakland Public Library. Oakland, California.

Location of this collection:
659 14th Street
Oakland, CA 94612, US
Contact:
(510) 637-0198
aamlo@oaklandlibrary.org
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