UC Santa Barbara

In this dissertation I examine 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, my research joins and complicates analysis by historians demonstrating how the struggle for leisure and public space also reshaped the long civil rights movement. Val Verde, Santa Monica's Bay Street Beach/Inkwell, Manhattan Beach's Bruce's Beach, Lake Elsinore and the Parkridge Country Club in addition to the Pacific Beach Club in Huntington Beach and other sites. I document the history and public memory of the sites, which includes a heritage conservation component.