African-Americans Shaping the California Desert: Homesteading in the Mojave

by Chris Clarke
KCET.org

Journalist Delilah L. Beasley documented African-Americans' contribution to California in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In this era when "urban" has become a coded phrase meaning "African-American," it can be easy to forget that California's desert backcountry has a rich African-American history of its own. Black California history isn't limited to the 213 and the 510: the 760 is pretty well-represented in its own right.

For generations the California deserts represented both opportunity and the possibility of being left alone to live your own life. Both of these siren songs were alluring to many African-Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The deserts of California, namely the Mohave and at Victorville, are government lands, and quite a few colored people have taken up homesteads on this land and are improving them. Some sections have been found to contain oil. Many of the colored people have bought this land and afterwards sold it for a good margin.

So wrote Delilah L. Beasley, the first African-American woman to land a regular writing gig with a major metropolitan daily newspaper, in her 1919 book The Negro Trail Blazers of California. Beasley, quite an interesting figure herself, traveled the length and breadth of the state doing research for the book. The work almost killed her. A poignant note in the preface reads:

During the past year the author has been in very serious ill health and all during the long months of illness there were a few good, staunch friends who voluntarily sent money whenever they wrote and never allowed her for one moment to entertain a thought that she would not get well nor complete the book.

Beasley did live another 15 years after writing that preface, long enough to land a column at the Oakland Tribune, lobby for California's passage of an anti-lynching law, and organize for the establishment of the then-controversial International House at UC Berkeley.

The legacy of the desert homesteaders she mentioned was not always as monumental. The East Mojave's Lanfair Valley, now mostly part of the Mojave National Preserve, offers an example.

In 1910, the first year of homesteading in the Lanfair Valley, six land claims were filed by black people, a respectable proportion of the total number of claims. All in all 17 African-American families homesteaded the valley, most of them in the vicinity of Dunbar - a settlement intended to serve as a center for African-American folks. Dunbar's Post Office opened in 1912, within a month of the opening of another Post Office a tenth of a mile away, in Lanfair. The two offices operated in a kind of de facto racial segregation until 1914, when, according to local historian Dennis Casebier, the U.S. Post Office noticed the redundancy and closed Dunbar's P.O.

Ambitious projects nearby included an orphanage for black youth and the planned community of Harts, billed by its founders G.W. Harts and Howard Folke as "bringing freedom and independence to a limited number of colored people." Neither really got off the ground, though a few young boys did move there from orphanages in the Los Angeles area for a time.

African-American homesteaders proved more resilient. The first half of the decade after 1910 was unusually rainy, and the Lanfair Valley saw a flurry of attempts at wheat farming, some more successful than others. Black families lived with their white neighbors in what must have seemed a liberatingly democratic fashion, the adults helping on each other's farms and the kids sitting together in school. This early integration had its limits, though. As Casebier writes,

In talking with people from that period (black and white) there is an almost categorical denial of any prejudice or discrimination between whites and blacks... In spite of this kind of testimony - which I consider to be honest but somewhat naive - there is evidence of some discrimination.

In speaking of her black neighbors one resident] said "I don't think they ever came to any of our dances." There's a reason for this. I have a copy of the bylaws for the social organization in Lanfair Valley called the Yucca Club and under the heading of who is eligible for membership the bylaws stated clearly that a member could be "any white person in the valley." This is the club that organized the dances.

Also in interviewing black homesteaders (remembering they were children in the teens) they seemed to know little about the community picnics and pioneer celebrations held at Lanfair on the 4th of July and they did not attend them. That tells me that likely their parents did not feel welcome at those gatherings - as they were specifically not welcome at the community dances each month.

Black and white homesteaders had a common enemy in those days: the Rock Springs Cattle Company, which held grazing rights to much of the Lanfair Valley, resented the homesteaders and did its best to chase them out. According to the National Park Service,

The homesteaders experienced constant conflict with the Rock Springs Land & Cattle Company. The company considered Lanfair Valley to be some of the best part of its range, and resented the "intrusion" of settlement. The company denied water to the settlers, forcing them to use the few public springs or dig expensive wells. Cattle trampled carefully nurtured crops, sometimes allegedly after the cowboys cut the nesters' fences. In return, the farmers would occasionally help themselves to beef. The cattle company brought in hired thugs, and rumors swirled claiming some homesteaders' cabins burned to ashes under mysterious circumstances.

In the end it was rain as much as racism that undid the African-American community in the Lanfair Valley: by the second half of the decade the climate reverted to its extremely arid type, wheat crops failed, and one by one homesteaders moved away to better opportunities elsewhere. By 1927 the population had dwindled to the point where the Postal Service was compelled to close the Lanfair Post Office. What remains now is cleared land, foundation stones, and the occasional fence line -- some of it still owned by the descendants of the homesteaders.

But in the few short boom years residents of the Lanfair Valley may well have enjoyed more relative freedom, and less hatred, than any other African-Americans in the U.S. In Casebier's words:

The fertile soil yielded crops with which homesteaders (black and white) could sustain themselves. The children made their own games and toys and played among the wonderland of Joshua trees. From where they lived east of Lanfair a half mile or more -- they could see the smoke of the train rising above the Joshuas and hear the whistle as the train came through twice a day - once early in the morning from Goffs to Searchlight and later in the day back from Searchlight to Goffs. They had a fine school in Lanfair with efficient teachers and friendly students and parents. There were outings to magical places like Fort Piute and Piute Creek and occasional visits to Goffs and sometimes even into Needles.

Chris Clarke is an environmental writer of two decades standing. Author of Walking With Zeke, he writes regularly at his acclaimed blog Coyote Crossing and comments on desert issues here every week. He lives in Palm Springs.

Blacks in valley share history of struggle

Nicole C. Brambila
The Desert Sun




John Carlos (Marilyn Chung The Desert Sun)




Black Americans began moving to the Coachella Valley in the 1940s, wooed by the promise of better jobs and wages. Many of the first were cotton farmers — Texas transplants who first lived on John Nobles' ranch, where they built more than just a home. They created community. For most, their stories aren't retold in textbooks, but their contributions are celebrated during Black History Month in February. Here are their stories.

John Carlos sprinted for a medal and into history.

In 1968, during the Olympic medal ceremony for the 200-meter dash in Mexico City, gold medalist Tommie Smith and Carlos, the bronze medalist, bowed their heads and raised black-gloved fists — a sign of solidarity — to protest racial inequality at home.

“I don't think anybody took into account that we were very nonviolent in our action,” said Carlos, 64, who will retire from Palm Springs Unified School District in 2011 after 23 years with the agency. “It resurrected people's conscience.”

That act ushered in a political firestorm and death threats.

The International Olympic Committee subsequently suspended Smith and Carlos from the U.S. team and banned them from the Olympic Village.

After his track career — and a couple years playing professional football — Carlos became an in-school suspension supervisor at Palm Springs High School and track and field coach at Palm Desert High School, he said.

In 2003, Carlos was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame.

“I think young and old school know about it. I think what they need to know about more than anything is activism,” Carlos said. “Somebody has to be an activist to have progression.”

The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II fought two wars. One against the Axis powers overseas, and the other against racism at home.

From 1941-46, more than 940 pilots were trained at the Tuskegee Army Air Field in Tuskegee, Ala., and commissioned, having received their pilot wings, according to tuskegeeairmen.org.

Dr. Robert Higginbotham was among them. He followed in his older brother's footsteps and enlisted in 1944.

“I felt I had an obligation, a duty to serve my country,” said Higginbotham, 84, a Rancho Mirage resident. “I felt I would do my part and no one would have to say I was drafted.

“Regardless of what anybody says, it's my country.”

Enlisting before President Harry S. Truman integrated the military in 1948 meant facing discrimination and racism.

His first taste of it came on the train ride to Mississippi when he and other black soldiers in uniform were threatened with arrest if they did not give up their seats for white soldiers. They stood the remaining eight hours of the trip.

“I didn't have too much exposure to hateful discrimination and segregation,” he said. “We never left the farm except to go to church.

“It's irritating to have to deal with a situation where time and time again, you have to prove yourself because of the color of you skin.”

After the war, Higginbotham became an orthopedic surgeon with a private practice in Los Angeles.

John Nobles' ranch

Roberta Smith isn't shy about sharing her age. — she'll turn 104 in March.

The centenarian wasn't the first to move to the valley — blacks first started coming en masse in the 1940s — but she's among the oldest living.

Smith, the granddaughter of a slave and the daughter of a sharecropper, moved to Indio in 1951, wooed by better wages where she earned $3 a day.

“I came up on the farm. I knew nothing but cotton-picking when I came out here,” she said. “I picked beans. They grow a lot of beans here.”

Four generations of Smiths followed.

She, like many of the blacks who moved to the valley before Civil Rights, first lived on John Nobles' ranch. Nobles was an Oklahoma sharecropper who moved to Indio in 1922.

“John Nobles' ranch was the only place where colored could stay,” she said. “Everybody got along real nice. There was a sense of community.”

Although the valley schools were integrated, Smith said blacks still faced racism and discrimination, a history that should not be lost on the young.

“Lord thank you somebody woke up,” she said. “God is good. God says, if he's with you, who can be against you?

“We climbing.”

‘Preserve the dream'

When Joseph Beaver moved to the Coachella Valley, no one would rent a room to a black man.

“Segregation invited so much degradation,” said Beaver, 87, a local historian and president of the Black Historical and Cultural Society.

“It's based on skin color. It's sinister.”

During Black History month, Beaver is an in-demand speaker as a longtime civil rights supporter.

He attended the march on Washington, D.C. when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, and considers himself a follower of nonviolent civil protest, which culminated in the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

Despite the country's advances in equality, though, Beaver called the fight today an ongoing struggle.

“The history of black people has been too often simply ignored,” he said.

He rattles off some of the contributions like a young boy counts change.

Dr. Charles Drew, who developed the technique for long-term preservation of blood plasma.

Garrett Morgan, the son of former slaves, who invented the gas mask and a traffic signal.

Lawrence Crossley, who designed the Coachella Valley's first golf course.

A longtime civil rights supporter, Beaver was instrumental in helping rename Coachella Valley roads for black figures such as Crossley and Rosa Parks, whom he helped bring to the valley in 1993.

In 1980, he also helped organize a protest against David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan.

“We must preserve the dream and keep marching forward so the dream comes to fruition,” he said during a Black History Month event at the Tolerance Education Center in Rancho Mirage this month.

“We must not allow the dream to derail or be forgotten.”

Sprucing up Palmdale's historic grave sites

Time is running out for descendants of the city's settlers to improve plots at a cemetery that the city will soon take over as Pioneer Memorial Park.

Marge Kimbrough, 81, right, visits family members’ graves with granddaughter Holly Kimbrough, left, daughters Kristi Kimbrough and Renee Kimbrough Kroeger and Renee’s husband, John Kroeger. Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

By Ann M. Simmons
Los Angeles Times

Glen Settle, 97, knew he had to act fast.

The concrete marker on the grave of his sister Aileen, who died in 1918 at just 3 days old, was worn and faded. It needed to be replaced.

So earlier this month, a friend helped Settle erect a new gray granite stone engraved with a baby angel at the plot in the Historic Palmdale Cemetery.

Settle is among a group of descendants of the city's early settlers buried in the cemetery who are rushing to repair or replace grave markers, monuments and headstones before a July 16 deadline, when the city will take over general maintenance of the property that will be rededicated as Pioneer Memorial Park.

The cemetery will be closed to future renovations and burials, unless people can prove they owned plots before the city's 2006 resolution to close the grounds to interment. The cemetery includes at least 200 graves, and they will be maintained as they are now.

"It's nice to know that it will be taken care of now," said Settle, whose family arrived in Palmdale in 1908. "I think it means a lot to the old-timers."

The cemetery is one of the few reminders of the early Palmdale settlement known as "Palmenthal," said city spokesman John Mlynar. About 60 families of Swiss and German descent traveled mainly from Nebraska and Illinois and settled in the area in 1886.

They founded a Lutheran church. One family donated 20 acres to the church, which includes about 2 1/2 acres at the northeast corner of 20th Street East and Avenue S that are known to have graves. By 1899, most of the pioneers had moved away from Palmenthal because of drought, land deed issues and competition from a neighboring community called Harold, in an area now known as central Palmdale. The newcomers settled closer to the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks, Mlynar said.

The cemetery continued to be used by other settlers, but it eventually fell into disrepair, a victim of overgrown vegetation, graffiti, trash and vandalism. The last burial on record was in 2001, but that remains in dispute because the former property owner officially closed the cemetery to burials in 1999.

In 2006, the city committed about $220,000 to clean up the cemetery, with $30,000 more allocated for annual maintenance of the site. Ground-penetrating radar equipment was used to check for additional unmarked graves, Mlynar said. In 2008, a wrought iron fence was erected around the cemetery to guard against further destruction.

"The city and the community respect this place as the final resting place of the pioneers of the city," said Noel Doran, Palmdale's deputy city attorney, who has helped steer the municipality through the legal process of creating a pioneer park. "It's an opportunity for our generation and future generations to connect to the past."

Genealogists and historians praised Palmdale's efforts to create a pioneer memorial park at a time when some cities and counties are allowing historic cemeteries to languish.

Sue Silver, state coordinator for California Saving Graves, a group dedicated to preserving and restoring endangered and forgotten cemeteries, said human "apathy and moral decay" had contributed to the demise of some of these historic sites.

"To me it's not a matter of economics, it's a matter of being ready and willing to commit the time and the effort," Silver said, noting that Palmdale "deserves a lot of credit."

Some jurisdictions have been slammed for allowing historic cemeteries to be turned into play parks and soccer fields. In the early 1970s, outrage erupted over a decision to convert a portion of San Diego's Calvary Cemetery into a public park. And today, some Ventura residents are fighting to get the city's Cemetery Memorial Park restored to its original state. In the mid-1960s, the grave markers of more than 3,000 of the city's most influential pioneers were unceremoniously removed, and the cemetery was transformed into a city park.

At the Palmdale cemetery, grave markers bear names of pioneer families, including Jonas, Nagel, Ritter and Munz. Descendants recalled that they created a town with stores, a blacksmith shop, a bakery and a shoe shop.

Barry Munz, 48, whose great-grandparents are among those buried in the historic graveyard, said his descendants were grain and livestock farmers. Historical records show that one of the Munzes' started a pioneer turkey ranch in Antelope Valley and developed the Holland strain of white turkey.

Ralph Ritter, 80, recalled that pioneer members of his family owned an abundance of land, flourishing orchards and a winery. His grandfather had immigrated to the U.S. from Germany and later moved to California.

Other early families included the Settles, Kimbroughs and Coursons.

Plots lie in clusters across the rugged desert floor, spotted with California junipers, Italian cypress and at least one Joshua tree. A horseshoe-shaped path made of decomposed granite allows passage around the graves.

Relatives of the deceased have been encouraged to place grave markers, monuments, headstones and other embellishments in accordance with the cemetery's simple, non-gaudy style. Walkways, statues and gargoyles are not allowed for individual graves.

Marge Kimbrough, 81, whose deceased husband is among 11 Kimbrough family members buried in a cordoned-off lot at the cemetery, said she was thrilled that the graveyard was being preserved.

"We are such a transient state, it's important to keep some of the old legends from the past," Kimbrough said. "I think we all like to feel our roots."

Munz said that given the cemetery's age and prior deteriorating state, "something needed to be done. The city stepping in was by far the best for the overall community."

Exhibit showcases first black settlers' influence on Indio

Indio resident Leah Jordan points to a picture of her sons riding horses while discussing her family's history in Indio. Jordan's family moved to Indio in 1928. Her uncle, John Nobles, was the founder of Nobles Ranch in Indio. (Crystal Chatham The Desert Sun)

Aldrich M. Tan
The Desert Sun

As a young black girl in Indio in the early 1940s, R. Gene Wilson spent summers waking up at 5 a.m. to pick onions, grapes and chop cotton under the blazing sun.

It was her family's way of surviving life in the desert at a time when the only jobs available to blacks were farmers and housekeepers.

Wilson, now 75, reflects on those times decades later as she puts together her family's history poster for the upcoming “Black Pioneer Showcase” at the Coachella Valley Museum and Cultural Center.

The monthlong exhibit opens Saturday and highlights the historical contributions of the local black community. It features about 75 items of significance to Indio's black history, including family photos and heirlooms dating back to the early settlement of Indio.

“We wanted to show that the black people of the Coachella Valley didn't just sit down,” said exhibit committee president George Thomas of Indio. “We helped develop this town.”

An opening-day celebration with speakers and performers is scheduled from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday at the center, 82-616 Miles Ave., Indio.

With wrinkled dark hands from years of agricultural labor and service to the school district, Wilson glued the last picture to the poster at her Indio home recently.

“It means the world to me,” Wilson said of the showcase.

“We can get out and show our kids and grandchildren what our forefathers have done here in the valley, and how we have poured out their lives here.”

A committee began work on the exhibit seven months ago to debut for Black History Month, which has been held in February since it was established in 1976. The historic inauguration of a black president has given the committee more drive to show their history.

Jesse Siess, executive director of the Coachella Valley Museum and Cultural Center, said it's difficult to tell exactly how many black people were in Indio when the city was incorporated in 1930 because, at the time, racial minorities were often not accounted for by the census.

The first stop for many black residents starting their lives in Indio was Nobles Ranch, Siess said. John Nobles came to Indio from Oklahoma as the first black farmer to own land here in 1922.

Facing housing discrimination, many black settlers turned to Nobles, who divided his land and sold it to the earliest pioneers so that they could support themselves, Siess said.

Leah Woods Jordan, Nobles' niece, remembered her uncle as a kind and helpful man. Her family came to Indio in the 1930s.

Many newcomers to Nobles Ranch, Jordan said, lived in tents until they could raise money to build their own homes.

With time and hard work, black people settled down in Indio. They bought property from Nobles and built churches, such as the African Methodist Episcopal church in April 1930, and homes where they could raise their families.

By the 1990s, there were 87 homes, a public housing project and three churches in the Nobles Ranch area, said Victoria Bailey, author of “Indio Reflections and Visions.”

City takes control

While their grandparents and parents toiled on the fields, the young black children in the 1940s went to integrated schools.

Cora Mayfield, now 58, became Indio High School's first black cheerleader at a time when segregation was seen elsewhere. She said her cousins in Texas were surprised she could attend an integrated school.

“My cousins were shocked that I had gone to school with white people,” she said.

Black residents faced ongoing occupational and housing discrimination, Siess said. Blacks who sought work in the 1960s were referred to blue-collar jobs like janitors and gas station attendants.

Indio's black community faced a setback in 1986 when the city took over the communities established on Nobles Ranch under eminent domain for a proposed expansion of the Indio Fashion Mall next to their neighborhood.

Black people from all over the Coachella Valley protested the city's action for at least three weeks in front of the mall.

“We were infuriated because they were traumatically moving residents who were largely black,” Beaver said. “It was an atrocity.”

Despite the setbacks, the black residents of Indio who remained in the area continued to strive for success.

Mayfield said she feels like her experience in Indio gave her “a good start in life.”

“I was exposed to a lot of opportunities that I probably would not have had living in a segregated state,” she said.

Black residents of Indio started making presentations for Black History Month in the mid-1990s, Siess said.

“A museum should focus on where a community comes from, and we want to show the history of the valley through the people who have helped form the valley,” she said.

The presentations usually consist of speakers and performances, Siess said. What makes this year's showcase unique is the establishment of an exhibit at the museum led by city residents.

Thomas said he feels the right group of people came together at the right time to make this type of project work.

On display through February, the exhibit traces the journey of the settlement of the first black residents of Indio as farmers of the desert and the lives of their descendents.

Johnson brought rusting silvery cups called “water cups” to use in the exhibit. Farmworkers used the cups to drink water when they were working in the fields, she said.

“These are artifacts that show where we come from,” she said, “so we can appreciate what we have now.”

If the project is successful, the group plans to expand the exhibit to include black pioneers and families who live in other parts of the Coachella Valley, Thomas said.