Unsung Afram male pioneers, legends and heroes that most (you) never heard of

IllmaticDelta

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I did one for the women--> Unsung Afram female pioneers, legends and heroes that most (you) never heard of


Now here goes one for the men that have been forgotten/lost to more mainstream black male figures



The Man Who Killed "Jim Crow"

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Charles Hamilton Houston

Charles Hamilton Houston (September 3, 1895 – April 22, 1950) was a prominent African-American lawyer, Dean of Howard University Law School, and NAACP Litigation Director who played a significant role in dismantling the Jim Crow laws, which earned him the title "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow".[2] He is also well known for having trained future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.[3]

Charles Hamilton Houston, a renowned civil rights attorney, was widely recognized as the architect of the civil rights strategy that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education. He was also a mentor to Thurgood Marshall who successfully litigated the pivotal Brown case.

Houston was born on September 3, 1895 in Washington, DC to parents William Houston, an attorney, and Mary Houston, a hairdresser and seamstress. He attended M Street High School (later Dunbar High School) in Washington, DC. Following graduation, he enrolled at Amherst College in Massachusetts where he was the only black student in his class. Houston was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the national honor society there. Upon graduating in 1915, he was selected to deliver that year’s valedictory address.

After graduating from Amherst, Houston returned to Washington. He joined the U.S. Army in 1917 and was trained in the all-black officers training camp in Fort Des Moines, Iowa in 1917. Houston was later deployed to France. While there, Houston and his fellow black soldiers experienced racial discrimination which deepened his resolve to study law.

Following his military discharge in 1919, Houston entered Harvard Law School. He excelled in his studies and became the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. As a law student, Houston was mentored by future Supreme Court Judge Felix Frankfurter. In 1922 as Houston graduated with high honors, Frankfurter nominated him for the prestigious Frederick Sheldon Fellowship, which allowed him to study law at the University of Madrid.

Upon his return from Spain in 1924 Houston practiced law with his father, William, at Houston & Houston, and began teaching in Howard University Law’s evening program. Eventually he became Dean of the Howard University Law School.

Houston’s legal accomplishments eventually captured the attention of Walter White, the chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1935 Houston was hired as Special Counsel to the Association. Eventually he brought into the NAACP one of his Howard University law students, Thurgood Marshall. The pair traveled through the South in the early 1930s and noted the inequalities of black school facilities. In response they developed the legal strategy which challenged school segregation, first calling for the equalization of facilities for black students and then eventually calling for full integration.

Houston and Marshall first applied their strategy in 1935 when they took the Pearson v. Murray case, one of the first challenges to racial exclusion in public universities. Donald Gaines Murray, an Amherst graduate, was denied admission to the University of Maryland School of Law on the basis of his race. Houston and Marshall successfully argued that the state had violated Murray’s rights by failing to provide an adequate law school for his studies while denying him admission to the sole state law school on the grounds of race.

Houston continued to work with Marshall for the next fifteen years, laying the groundwork for the eventual Brown decision. Charles Hamilton Houston died on April 22, 1950 in Washington, DC at the age of 54, four years before the Supreme Court handed down the fateful decision that he had spent a lifetime planning and pursuing.










 

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1895: A Turning Point in Black History | PBS LearningMedia

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William Monroe Trotter, sometimes just Monroe Trotter (April 7, 1872 – April 7, 1934)

was a newspaper editor and real estate businessman based in Boston, Massachusetts, and an activist for African-American civil rights. He was an early opponent of the accommodationist race policies of Booker T. Washington, and in 1901 founded the Boston Guardian, an independent African-American newspaper he used to express that opposition. Active in protest movements for civil rights throughout the 1900s and 1910s, he also revealed some of the differences within the African-American community. He contributed to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Trotter was born into a well-to-do family and raised in Hyde Park, Massachusetts. He earned his graduate and post-graduate degrees at Harvard University, and was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key there. Seeing an increase in segregation in northern facilities, he began to engage in a life of activism, to which he devoted his assets. He joined with W. E. B. Du Bois in founding the Niagara Movement in 1905, a forerunner of the NAACP. Trotter's style was often divisive, and he ended up leaving that organization and founding the National Equal Rights League. His protest activities were sometimes seen to be at cross purposes to those of the NAACP.

In 1914, he had a highly publicized meeting with President Woodrow Wilson, in which he protested Wilson's introduction of segregation into the federal workplace. In Boston, Trotter succeeded in shutting down productions of The Clansman in 1910, but he was unsuccessful in 1915 with screenings of the movie The Birth of a Nation, which also portrayed the Ku Klux Klan in favorable terms. He was not able to influence the peace talks at the end of World War I, and was in later years a marginalized voice of protest. In 1921, in an alliance with Roman Catholics, he got a revival screening of The Birth of a Nation banned. He died on his 62nd birthday after a possibly suicidal fall from his Boston home.


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Junius George Groves (April 12, 1859 – August 17, 1925)


was an American farmer and entrepreneur remembered as one of the wealthiest black Americans of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Known as the "Potato King of the World" by 1902, Groves optimized potato growth methods, out-producing anyone else in the world to that point. His vast financial success—‌analyzed further in Booker T. Washington's The Negro in Business (1907)—‌was utilized to help combat racism by providing economic opportunities for other black Americans.

 

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Scott Winfield Bond (1852–1933)

Scott Winfield Bond was a successful landowner, farmer, and businessman at a time when the total number of African-American farm owners and their average acreage declined both in the state and in the nation. He was among wealthy Arkansans in the period before the New Deal.

Scott W. Bond was born enslaved in Livingston, Mississippi, near Canton. His mother, Ann Bond, was enslaved as a domestic. His mother married fellow slave William Bond when Scott was eighteen months old. On the eve of the Civil War, the white Maben-Bond family moved their enslaved property from Mississippi to Fayette County, Tennessee, and finally to Cross County, Arkansas. Bond’s mother died during the Civil War, and Bond moved with his stepfather to Madison (St. Francis County) and remained in his household until about 1875. He left his stepfather on good terms and with a quilt his mother gave him before her death.

Bond engaged in business opportunities that facilitated his farming and gained a reputation for prudence. He opened a store in Madison in partnership with his stepfather and Abe Davis, with Bond operating the store. Undercapitalized, he closed the store after several months. Eventually, he bought the Madison Mercantile Company as sole proprietor and maintained the store to supply his farms. He also purchased four additional town lots. By 1915, he owned five cotton gin plants, a sawmill, and a gravel pit that supplied the Rock Island Railroad. The number of his farms had increased to twenty-one, with a total of 5,000 acres. The farm on which the Bond family resided was called “The Cedars.”

Bond was a member of the National Negro Business League (NNBL) established by Booker T. Washington in 1900. Bond addressed the annual meeting of the organization in New York City in 1902 and secured Washington’s pledge to visit St. Francis County. The following year, the NNBL held its annual meeting in Little Rock (Pulaski County). After the conference, Bond was Washington’s host on a visit to Madison. The occasion included a public address by Washington and a barbecue in his honor at Bond’s home farm.

Three of the Bond’s sons—Waverly T., Theophilus, and Ulysses S.—joined their father in managing his ventures. By the time of Bond’s death in March 1933, he owned and farmed 12,000 acres in and near Madison, raised livestock, and operated a large mercantile store, several cotton gins, a gravel pit, lumber yard, and sawmill. It was reported that he was fatally injured by one of his registered bulls. He was eighty-one years old. Bond is buried at Madison.
 

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Dana Albert "D. A." Dorsey (1872–1940)


Dana A. Dorsey, better known as D.A. Dorsey, was a Georgia man who arrived in Miami to work as a carpenter on Flagler’s railroad. He saw a need among fellow workers for housing, so he got into real estate. He purchased land in Overtown and redeveloped it into affordable housing.

Through years of development, reinvestment and entrepreneurship, Dorsey became Miami’s first black millionaire. He owned property in Dade and Broward counties, Cuba and the Bahamas. He later built the Dorsey Hotel, the first black-owned hotel in the city, and founded the first black bank. Dorsey even bought and sold present-day Fisher Island.

Dorsey sold land to establish Miami’s first park for blacks, and donated land for the city’s first library for blacks and the site of Dorsey High School, which is now D.A. Dorsey Technical College. Today, the D. A. Dorsey house at 250 NW 9th Street is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, and is owned by The Black Archives History and Research Foundation of South Florida. Dorsey also left a philanthropic legacy in the community.

When Dorsey died in 1940, flags were lowered to half-staff all over Miami. He was buried in Lincoln Memorial Park, Miami’s African American cemetery during segregation.

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Atlanta's First Black Millionaire






Alonzo Franklin Herndon (June 26, 1858 Walton County, Georgia – July 21, 1927)


was an African-American entrepreneur and businessman in Atlanta, Georgia. Born into slavery, he became one of the first African-American millionaires in the United States, first achieving success by owning and operating three large barber shops in the city that served prominent white men. In 1905 he became the founder and president of what he built to be one of the United States' most well-known and successful African-American businesses, the Atlanta Family Life Insurance Company (Atlanta Life).

Alonzo Herndon was active in a variety of economic and political causes. He was a founding member of Booker T. Washington‘s National Negro Business League in 1900. Five years later he was one of the original members of the W.E.B. DuBois-led Niagara Movement. Herndon also used his wealth to support local institutions and causes, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), Atlanta University, the First Congregational Church, the Southview Cemetery, and the Atlanta State Savings Bank.


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William Madison McDonald (June 22, 1866 – July 5, 1950),




nicknamed "Gooseneck Bill", was an African-American politician, businessman, and banker of great influence in Texas during the late nineteenth century. Part of the Black and Tan faction, by 1892 he was elected to the Republican Party of Texas's state executive committee, as temporary chairman in 1896, and as permanent state chairman in 1898.

During this period, McDonald was also elected as top leader of two black fraternal organizations, serving as Grand Secretary of the state's black Masons for 50 years. In 1906 he founded Fort Worth's first African-American-owned bank as an enterprise of the state Masons; under his management, the bank survived the Great Depression.[1] The black chapters of Masons banked with him, McDonald made loans to black businessmen, and he became probably the first black millionaire in Texas.[2]




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Joseph Charles Price (February 10, 1854 – October 25, 1893)


was a founder and the first president of Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina. He was one of the greatest orators of his day and a leader of African Americans in the southern United States. His death at the age of 39 cut short a career that might otherwise have vied with that of Booker T. Washington.

Joseph Charles Price was born free in Elizabeth City, North Carolina on February 10, 1854 to a slave father and a free mother.[1] His mother was named Emily Pailin and his father was Charles Dozier, a ship's carpenter. Dozier was sold and sent to Baltimore and Emily married a man named David Price, whose name Joseph took. When he was nine, he moved with his mother to New Bern, North Carolina, which had become a haven to free blacks after it was occupied by the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861-1865). That year he enrolled at St. Andrew's School led by James Walker Hood, who would be an important influence upon Price.[2] He also attended St. Cyprian Episcopal School, which was known as the Lowell Normal School of New Bern and was ran by the Boston Society.[1]

In 1871 he began his career as a teacher in the public school of Wilson, North Carolina. After four years he enrolled at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. At Shaw he converted the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and was granted a license to preach. He then enrolled in Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania to study classics. He graduated valedictorian from the classical department at Lincoln in 1879 and from the theology department in 1881. In 1880 he was a delegate to the M.E. General Conference in Montgomery, Alabama, and in September 1881 was a delegate to the Ecumenical Conference in London, England. He remained in England for one year raising money for the Zion Wesley Institute which would be used to help build Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina. Among his patrons back in the United States, particularly met during a fundraising tour of California, were businessman William E. Dodge,[1] Alexander Walters, Senator Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins Jr., Mrs. Pleasant,[3] and Stephen V. White[4] Price was then installed as president of the school and was professor of oratory, mental and moral science, and theology.[5] He was also a noted figure in the 1881 North Carolina prohibition campaign.[6]


In the 1870s, Price married Jennie Smallwood of New Bern. The couple knew each other since childhood and had five children,[2] William, Louise, Alma, Joseph, and Josie.[7]

Price died at his home in Salisbury of Bright's disease on October 25, 1893.[10][11] The Dictionary of North Carolina Biography reports that, "W. E. B. Du Bois, August Meier, and others felt that it was the leadership vacuum created by Price's death into which Booker T. Washington moved, and that had he lived, the influence and reputation of Price and of Livingstone College would have been as great or greater than that achieved by Washington and Tuskegee."[2] At his passing George C. Rowe wrote a noted poem in his honor.[7][12] Other noted tributes to him were published in the New York Independent and Christian Advocate, the Boston Journal of Education and elsewhere.[13]

Price's oration was so renowned, he is considered one of the greatest voices of the nineteenth century, and the London Times called him "The World's Orator".[7] He was voted as one of the "ten greatest negroes" of the year in the September 20, 1890 edition of the Indianapolis Freeman.[14]

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William Hooper Councill (July 12, 1849 – 1909)



was a former slave and the first president of Huntsville Normal School, which is today Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University in Normal, Alabama.[1]




He was born a slave in Fayetteville, North Carolina, ion July 12, 1849. His father escaped to Canada in 1854 and made several unsuccessful attempts to free his family.[2] He was taken to Huntsville, Alabama, by slave traders in 1857. He and his mother and brothers were sold as slaves from the auction block, at Green Bottom Inn to Judge David Campbell Humphreys. At this auction he saw two of his brothers sold in 1857, and never heard from again.[3] During the American Civil War, he and his brothers were taken into rural areas to keep them from the Union Army, but before the end of the war they escaped to Union lines. They attended the Freedmen's Bureau school opened by northerners in Stevenson, Alabama, in 1865 and remained until 1867, when he began teaching, the first person to teach a school for black students outside of a city in North Alabama - a position which caused frequent trouble with the Ku Klux Klan.[2]


In only twenty-two years from slavery’s chains, William Hooper Councill would rise to become an editor of his own newspaper, an author, a religious leader, a famed orator, a politician, a lawyer, and a civil rights pioneer, standing his ground on the battlefield of prejudicial practices years before Homer Plessy and Rosa Parks.

Sold on an auction block in the Deep South, Councill would return to that very site and become the first ex-slave in America to found and to become president of a school for higher learning, known today as Alabama Agricultural & Mechanical University, opening the door for Booker T. Washington to teach in Alabama six years later.

Councill, a remarkable man was highly revered, and according to former Secretary of Alabama Frank Julian, was “the greatest man of the Negro race…. Undoubtedly the greatest benefactor of his own people that the Negro race has ever produced.”

This compelling biography reveals conditions in the segregated South and revisits the strategies Councill used in order to help elevate his race, while also attempting to mend the racial divide among all men in the country he loved. Read and learn about William Hooper Councill, a man whom the world once knew; explore his story of sacrifice, and witness the impact that his work generated that is still producing today. His life effort is truly a “glorious work well done.







 

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William Jefferson White (December 25, 1831 – April 17, 1913)




was a civil rights leader, minister, educator, and journalist in Augusta, Georgia. He was the founder of Harmony Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia in 1869 as well as other churches. He also was a co-founder of the Augusta Institute in 1867, which would become Morehouse College. He also helped found Atlanta University and was a trustee of both schools. He was a founder in 1880 and the managing editor of the Georgia Baptist, a leading African American newspaper for many years. He was an outspoken civil rights leader.



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Thomas V. Gibbs (1855–1898)

served in the Florida House of Representatives for Duval County in 1885 and 1887. In 1885 he participated in the Florida Constitutional Convention. Gibbs was a cofounder of the State Normal College for Colored Students. Today, the school, now Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU), is one of the nation's most prominent historically black schools.

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History of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU)

Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University was founded as the State Normal College for Colored Students, and on October 3, 1887, it began classes with fifteen students and two instructors. Today, FAMU, as it has become affectionately known, is the premiere school among historically black colleges and universities. Prominently located on the highest hill in Florida’s capital city of Tallahassee, Florida A&M University remains the only historically black university in the eleven member State University System of Florida.

In 1884, Thomas Van Renssaler Gibbs, a Duval County educator, was elected to the Florida legislature. Although his political career ended abruptly because of the resurgence of segregation, Representative Gibbs was successful in orchestrating the passage of House Bill 133, in 1884, which established a white normal school in Gainesville, FL, and a colored school in Jacksonville. The bill passed, creating both institutions; however, the stated decided to relocate the colored school to Tallahassee.
 

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Abraham Lincoln Lewis (1865–1947)

was an American businessman. He founded the Afro-American Life Insurance Company in Jacksonville, Florida, and became the state's first African American millionaire. He also founded the National Register-listed community of American Beach, founded as a prestigious vacation spot for blacks during the period of racial segregation.

Along with seven other business associates, Lewis founded the Afro-American Insurance Association in 1901. The company headquarters burned down in the Great Fire of 1901, but Lewis and the others relocated the business to Lewis' home and renamed it the Afro-American Life Insurance Company. During this time Lewis served as treasurer, and he became the president of Afro-American Life in 1919. Eventually the company acquired Chathorn Mutual Life Insurance Company and expanded into Georgia.

Lewis helped to found both the Negro Business League and the National Negro Insurance Association. He was a heavy contributor to black colleges such as Jacksonville's Edward Waters College as well as Bethune-Cookman College.

Due to the Jim Crow laws of the day, blacks were not allowed to enjoy many basic recreational amenities. A.L. Lewis realized the need for African Americans to have recreational activities for their families, so he founded the Lincoln Golf and Country Club, which featured a clubhouse and facilities. In 1935, Lewis purchased 200 acres (0.81 km2) of Nassau County beachfront land along the Atlantic Ocean. Blacks were not permitted on most beaches in Jacksonville, and it was Lewis' dream to create a community where African Americans could visit and own reasonably-priced homes along the ocean. This community, which he named American Beach, was a thriving vacation spot throughout the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Summers at American Beach were known for being jammed with families, churches and children. The beach included hotels, restaurants and nightclubs as well as homes and other businesses.

A.L. Lewis died in 1947 and was interred in the family crypt in a historic black Jacksonville cemetery. The grave is along the road with a plaque marker placed by the city inscribed with his biography. There is a street as well as a youth center named in his honor. Lewis married Mary Kingsley Sammis, the great granddaughter of Zephaniah Kingsley, a slaveowner and trader, and his wife and former slave Anna Magjigine Jai, whose homestead on Fort George Island is preserved as Kingsley Plantation.[1]

In recognizing the 2016 Harambee Celebration awardees, we remember and pay homage to Florida’s first Black millionaire, Abraham Lincoln Lewis.

Abraham Lincoln Lewis was born on March 29, 1865 in Madison, West Florida. Although he grew to be a very successful man, Lewis had a difficult start. Lewis was the son of Robert Lewis, a South Carolina blacksmith who was a slave on one of the many plantations in Madison. Both of Lewis’ parents struggled throughout their lives and did not know how to read or write, which was a result of a law that made it a crime to teach slaves to read. However, when the slaves were freed, things began to change. The couple named their son Abraham Lincoln in gratitude for the president who set them free; Lincoln never used this name and instead chose to be called A.L. Lewis. Rising above from the hardships, Lewis dedicated his life to overcome and compensate for the segregation imposed on blacks. Lewis joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1884 and served in several capacities as a member. He worked diligently in a Masonic Order and through his business acumen, the Masonic Temple of greater Jacksonville was built in the early 1900’s.

In early 1901, Lewis, along with Reverend E.J. Gregg, E.W. Latson, A.W. Price, Dr. Arthur W. Smith, J.F. Valentine and Reverend J. Melton Waldron, founded Florida’s first insurance company, the African American Industrial Benefit Association, later renamed Afro-American Life Insurance Company. Afro-American Life Insurance Company was founded to provide affordable health insurance and death benefits to Florida’s black residents. In May of 1901, the great Jacksonville Fire destroyed the first office of the insurance company just two months after it opened. As a result, the office moved to the home of Lewis, who served as the treasurer of at that time. Lewis became president of Afro-American Life Insurance Company in 1919 and expanded the to have locations throughout Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas. In the 1920s, Lewis began providing mortgages for individual homes. After 80 years of serving black southerners, the company closed its doors in 1987. Although most noted for the Afro, A.L. Lewis started Florida´s first black-owned and operated bottling company and assisted Booker T. Washington in establishing the national Negro Business League. Among his achievements with the insurance company, Lewis was a humanitarian, donating to public and private schools across the country to fund the education of the black youth. In 1926, Lewis also founded the Lincoln Golf and Country Club in Jacksonville. Celebrities from around the country came to the club to play and dine.

In 1935 the Pension Bureau, a pioneering subset of the Afro-American Life Insurance Company, bought 33 acres of shorefront property on Amelia Island which was located in Nassau County, FL. Lewis, the invited company employees to make use of the beach, and hosted company outings there. The Pension Bureau also had the land subdivided, and offered parcels for sale to company executives and shareowners, and to community leaders. Two later land acquisitions expanded the community’s size to 216 acres. In 1940, with many building lots unsold, the Afro offered them for sale to the wider black community. After World War II, home construction took off. American Beach also included hotels, restaurants and nightclubs in addition to homes.

Lewis accomplished much throughout his life and became Florida’s first black millionaire and one of the wealthiest men in the south, sharing his wealth with historical black colleges and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He also served on the Board of Trustees of Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Florida, for over twenty years. Lewis was married to his wife, Mary Frances Sammis, from 1865 to 1923, and together they had one son, James Henry Lewis. After Sammis’ death in 1923, Lewis remarried in 1925 to a woman named Elzona Nobileo. They remained married until Lewis’ death in 1947. Lewis is interred in a nationally historic mausoleum, which became a part of the federal registry in 1997.

Entrepreneur, Founder, Leader, Visionary, Philanthropist. We salute you and your legacy, Abraham Lincoln Lewis!


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American Beach is a historic beach community in northeastern Florida popular with African-American vacationers. It is located north of Jacksonville on Amelia Island in Nassau County. During the time of segregation and the Jim Crow era, African Americans were not allowed to swim at most beaches in Jacksonville, and several black-only areas were created. American Beach was the largest and most popular, and was a community established by Abraham Lincoln Lewis, Florida's first black millionaire and president of the Afro-American Life Insurance Company.[3] It contains American Beach Historic District, a historic district which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.

American Beach was founded in 1935 by Florida's first black millionaire, Abraham Lincoln Lewis, and his Afro-American Life Insurance Company.[4] The plan was for his employees to have a place to vacation and own homes for their families by the shore.[3] Throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, summers at American Beach were busy with families, churches and children. It was a place where African Americans could enjoy "Recreation and Relaxation Without Humiliation". The beach included hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs as well as homes and other businesses.[5]

American Beach played host to numerous celebrities during this period, including: folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, singer Billie Daniels, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, Billy Eckstein, Hank Aaron, Joe Louis, actor Ossie Davis, and Sherman Hemsley . James Brown was actually turned away from performing outside Evans' Rendezvous, a nightclub on the beach. In 1964, American Beach was hit hard by Hurricane Dora, and many homes and buildings were destroyed. The passage of the Civil Rights Act that same year desegregated the beaches of Florida, and American Beach became a less and less popular vacation destination as more African American Jacksonvillians turned to locations nearer their homes.[6]

A.L. Lewis' great-granddaughter MaVynee Betsch, known to locals as the Beach Lady, returned to American Beach in 1977 to fight for its preservation. For years, she planted trees along Lewis street, offered historical tours of the beach, and fought to raise public awareness of the beach and its struggle until her death September 2005. She wanted to make American Beach a monument to black Americans' determination to overcome the obstacles of the Jim Crow era. As of January 2001, American Beach is listed as a historic site by the National Register of Historic Places.
 
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