American Beach, once a paradise for African-Americans, is now sandwiched by gated hotels and condominiums. But one self-described "free spirit" isn't ready to give up on the past.
By MARCUS FRANKLIN
Published August 2, 2004
[Times photo: Erik Jacobs]
"They've tried every trick to get us off of here," says MaVynee Betsch, 69, a classically trained former opera singer with 7-foot dreadlocks that she carries in her arm. "They want this so bad I can hear it at night."
[Times photo: Erik Jacobs ]
The intersection of Lewis and Gregg at American Beach used to be a popular hangout spot when the beach was in its heyday. Now, the only business that exists is a hotel.
[Courtesy of Florida State Archives]
Hundreds gather on American Beach for the Afro-American Life Insurance Co. outing in 1937. The company maintained six cottages for employees to use as reward for extraordinary sales and service.
[Times photo: Erik Jacobs ]
Whit and James Boland of Louisville, Ky., play near the southern edge of American Beach that borders Amelia Island Plantation to the south. The two were visiting their grandparents who live on Amelia Island.
[Times photo: Erik Jacobs]
Tony Osbon tees off with his partner David Price at the Amelia Island Plantation golf course.
AMERICAN BEACH - On a recent hot and sunny afternoon, two friends lounged here alone in the shade of a colorful umbrella, staring out at the Atlantic Ocean with some disappointment.
Carolyn Wade Brown of Chicago and Monedia Elzey of Philadelphia had come to this historic black beach resort 40 miles north of Jacksonville hoping to get a taste of its golden years. Maybe sample a treat from the Sweet Tooth Ice Cream and Candy Shop. Or take in the barbecue- and seafood-tinged scents wafting out with the music from the Ocean Rendezvous nightclub.
Instead, the women not only found both shuttered, they also discovered that Chico, the photographer, had long stopped snapping pictures of tourists; buses and cars no longer parked eight deep; and celebrities no longer frolicked with throngs along the sandy beach. American Beach had long ago begun its slide into history.
"We expected to see a lively, vibrant atmosphere, a Martha's Vineyard kind of thing down here," said Elzey, a 48-year-old doctoral student, referring to the Inkwell, a Vineyard beach popular among African-Americans. "But obviously we haven't found it yet. There's nobody but us."
At its pinnacle during legal segregation, American Beach on Amelia Island served as a 216-acre paradise for the black upper crust and, to a lesser degree, their working class brethren. The beach, founded in 1935 by African-American insurance executives, jumped between Easter and Labor Day as visitors traveled from as far as California to frequent nightclubs and restaurants and rest at luxury motels and cottages.
Today, however, visitors will find the beach significantly shrunken and sandwiched by gated pastel resorts and condominiums. Plywood covers some windows, and homes stand in various conditions - some battered by harsh weather and abandonment, others newly built. The massive crowds and gaiety captured in so many black and white photographs are, for the most part, gone.
But for more than two decades, one woman has remained set on preserving American Beach and its history. Vacationers Elzey and Brown sighted the eccentric 69-year-old MaVynee Betsch, a descendant of one of the insurance executives. The classically trained former opera singer with 7-foot dreadlocks that she carries in her arm appeared on the beach wearing black pants, a tube top, flip-flops and seashell jewelry. Facing the Atlantic, the woman known as "the Beach Lady' ' outstretched her arms, taking in the breeze.
"They've tried every trick to get us off of here," Betsch said earlier during an informal tour in which she mocked the sameness of the "cheaply built" development flanking American Beach. "They want this so bad I can hear it at night."
* * *
For some, the Great Depression was not a disaster, but an opportunity.
Abraham Lincoln Lewis, a former lumber mill laborer, mechanic and foreman, was co-founder and president of the Afro-American Life Insurance Co. when the company's Pension Bureau began taking advantage of foreclosures in 1935, buying land that would become American Beach.
Lewis' house, on the oceanfront, was the first to go up. Other homes followed, along with the Afro Pavilion, which included a restaurant and bath house.
The Pension Bureau built and maintained six cottages for the company's employees and their relatives to use for free as reward for extraordinary sales and service. The Afro, as people referred to the Jacksonville company that opened in 1901, was the first insurance company in the state, black or white, historians say.
"We asked white folks for nothing!" said Betsch, Lewis' great-granddaughter.
The bureau sold oceanfront lots to doctors, entrepreneurs and lawyers eager to buy. Railroad workers, housekeepers and custodians bought up property at the "no-water end," away from the Atlantic.
By the 1950s, more than 100 homes occupied the beach with a half-mile-long shoreline, twisted oaks and sand dunes.
"(T)he finest beach resort city for members of the race anyplace," an early advertisement bragged. "(M)embers of the race everywhere are proud of it."
"You know why my great-grandfather called this American Beach?" Betsch asked. "He said, "White folks talk about democracy, (but) all the rich people live together, all the middle class and the poor. Only at American Beach will you have this diversity,"' she said, pointing to homes she said were owned by a housekeeper, a retired state supreme court justice and a federal judge. "It was something for everybody."
Those who didn't own homes could rent at the A.L. Lewis Hotel and Lee's Ocean-Vu-Inn.
Then the beach's fortunes changed. On the Thursday after Labor Day in 1964, Hurricane Dora, barreling from the west coast of Africa, made its violent advent on American Beach. The storm ripped the front off Evan's Rendezvous and Tino's Restaurant, and damaged homes.
The crowds dwindled. Business and homeowners rebuilt.
Still, the crowds failed to show up.
Then the culprit became clear: black flight. With the passage earlier in July of the Civil Rights Act, many denizens and, especially, their offspring began exploring locales previously off limits: Miami, Daytona Beach, and in Georgia, Savannah and St. Simons Island.
The thing designed to right a wrong had led to the beach's near-demise.
"As people began to analyze it, they realized it's not Dora, it's freedom," said Marsha Dean Phelts, 60, author of the book An American Beach for African Americans.
In the 1970s, Lewis' offspring sold their homes and property, according to Phelts, who visited the beach as a child with her family. Eighteen years ago, Phelts, a retired Duval County school librarian, made the beach her permanent home.
Now the pressures of development and coveted waterfront property are the biggest threats to what's left of American Beach, whose story in some ways mirrors famed novelist Toni Morrison's latest book, Love.
Almost 100 acres have been lost to development that includes Osprey Village at Amelia Island Plantation, a retirement community with a golf course.
The Amelia Island Co. also has laundry and maintenance facilities on American Beach, which now is bookended by the company's Amelia Island Plantation at the south and the Summer Beach and Ritz-Carlton resorts at the north.
A decade ago, Carol J. Alexander, executive director of the Ritz Theatre & La Villa Museum in Jacksonville, and her husband bought land on American Beach, where they plan to build a home. At the time, their property tax bill ran about $300. Today, it's $1,200.
"It stands on sacred ground that is threatened," said Alexander, who is African-American and who stumbled upon Betsch and the beach while her husband conducted training elsewhere on Amelia Island. "People are finding the treasure.
"Even though MaVynee has done a fabulous job of telling the history nationwide and locally, there is that economic handicap: People who are interested can't afford to come there now because expensive property has closed in on either side. The only people who can come there are the wealthy."
* * *
MaVynee Betsch, the daughter of an insurance company vice president and a college treasurer, studied at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music before spending a decade in Germany performing operas such as Salome, Carmen, and Madame Butterfly. Her sister is Johnnetta Betsch Cole, former president of Spelman College.
She returned to American Beach in the 1970s and lived in her family's oceanfront home. She says she and her siblings no longer own the home because of inheritance taxes. She gave away her money to causes such as saving butterflies, and at various times lived on a chaise longue and in an RV along the oceanfront near homes once owned by her family.
These days, Betsch - a self-characterized "free spirit," and environmentalist, feminist, political activist and consummate promoter of American Beach and her own efforts - lives in a second-floor apartment in a lemon-yellow building with a view of the Atlantic.
The house is packed with stacked plastic milk crates that serve as file cabinets for thousands of books, newspapers, magazines and other memorabilia about her great-grandfather, American Beach, Africans and African-Americans. Much of it could end up in the Nassau County community center museum scheduled to open in January. Thanks to Betsch's efforts, half the building will be reserved for exhibits on the beach's history, which the A.L. Lewis Historical Society, the nonprofit Betsch founded, will maintain.
Only recently did she agree to get a home telephone at the urging of her sister, Cole, president of Bennett College for Women in North Carolina and chairwoman of the United Way of America's board of trustees. Cole recently bought oceanfront property in American Beach for $500,000.
"We're such a contrast," the Beach Lady said.
With Betsch's championing, American Beach joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2002. In 1992, it became the first stop on the state's Black Heritage Trail.
"American Beach was a vestige of history that was being pushed into oblivion," Russ Rymer, author of American Beach: How "Progress" Robbed a Black Town - and Nation - of History, Wealth, and Power, said in a telephone interview. "One rarely discussed aspect of integration was that the people who profited most were white businessmen. The people who suffered the most was the black bourgeoisie who lost their businesses and their major institutions.
"For all the great uncontestable necessary good that's come out of desegregation, no one has ever addressed that cost, that it devastated the black business structure, which is an epic tale."
Rymer, 52, who once lived on Amelia Island, said much of the beach's history would have been "lost to memory" if not for Betsch. She speaks about the beach everywhere she goes, whether before grade-schoolers or university students, family reunions or anyone who is interested. She posts historical facts on utility polls throughout the neighborhood.
"I'm going to make sure they know this is a black beach," she said of the handwritten postings.
She also is known for taking to microphones at county commission meetings to rail against the evils of development.
For her efforts, Sen. Bill Nelson last month nominated Betsch for induction into the Florida Women's Hall of Fame, describing her as the "educated and sophisticated" but "colorful and unconventional" "rescuer of American Beach."
Since its sharp decline after the Civil Rights Act, American Beach's popularity has ebbed and flowed. In the 1980s interest surged again, with people buying homes and making erratic attempts to restore the past glory. Recently, some have built new beachfront homes and bed and breakfasts. But Betsch is critical of some of the results.
"Unfortunately, we mimic rich white folks," she said as she surveyed a newer American Beach home with a swimming pool and poorly placed windows unconducive to taking in ocean breezes.
In the past decade or so, area teenagers and young adults gathered at the beach on Sundays. Some would "get out of hand," as Betsch put it, sometimes clashing with police. Those gatherings also dwindled.
On the afternoon Elzey and Brown, the women enjoying a "girls' vacation," sat on American Beach, they were alone, even as crowds gathered in front of the resorts and condos in the distance.
"I expected to see a lot more people out here," said Brown, a 45-year-old internal auditor for BP who with her friend read about the beach on the Internet. "There were people out here earlier today, but they weren't black."
Although black residents from across the country still own most of the roughly 100 homes, a few whites own homes and property.
"No more than about 25 families live here year-round," Betsch said. "The rest (visit) on weekends, holidays, for weddings or special occasions."
The resort has never returned to the apex seen in the 1950s.
But the point isn't to make the beach what it once was, Betsch insists. "American Beach is evolving," she said. "It's becoming much more of a spiritual place. We recently had a gorgeous funeral. The Gulf Stream will take you back to Africa."
Betsch said when she dies she wants her body cremated and half her ashes sprinkled in the Atlantic, the other half on NaNa, the 60-foot sand dune she has worked to save, along with almost 9 surrounding acres, from development.
"I'm going to haunt these (white developers) even when I'm gone."
