S E A S O N ’S G R E E T I N G S !!!
Above I (Alison Rose Jefferson) am posing with an Outward Bound Adventures, Inc. group on a July 2023 field trip at the Historic Adamson House and Malibu Lagoon Museum. This outing was one of a summer series that I led the coordination of with the Santa Monica Conservancy. The trips were funded by a Coastal Conservancy grant to expose inland youth to different layers of California coastal life, social histories, nature environments, as well as conservation issues and efforts.
Join me in exploring the past and gaining inspiration to shape the present and future from a few activities, movies, books, and articles I highlight below. Check my website for more of these musings. Also, you are invited to share this news post with your colleagues, friends, and family.
History Talk About Less Familiar SoCal Stories: A Long Beach Airport’s 100th Anniversary Celebration Event
Thursday, January 25, 2024 (5:30 – 7:30 PM), join me and my co-author Philip S. Hart for a talk we will do at the Billie Jean King Library in Downtown Long Beach, CA about the information we uncovered that we present in the new essay we researched and wrote titled “Long Beach Airport and Southern California: A Brief New Aviation and Aeronautics History (1900s – 1980s).”
We will illuminate histories of overlooked women and people of color who contributed to making Southern California a global center of aviation and aerospace over the last century. This essay (with many historical photographs) was commissioned by the Historical Society of Long Beach and Long Beach Airport (LGB, airport code) as part of its 100th anniversary celebration and is available online now.
A reception will start off the January 25 event at 5:30 PM before the program begins at 6:00 PM. A video recording of the presentation will made available online soon after the live program.
Update: “Black California Dreamin’…” Exhibition, CAAM LA, and More
The “Black California Dreamin’: Claiming Space at America’s Leisure Frontier” (“BCD”) exhibition curated by me, Alison Rose Jefferson, for the California African American Museum (CAAM) in Los Angeles on view through March 31, 2023, illuminates African Americans in Southern California histories during the Jim Crow era and a more inclusive American identity. This exhibition visually illuminates my book, Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era subject matter and some of the public/applied history activities which have used these histories. CAAM is closed as repair efforts continue due to the storm in late August 2023. Currently, you can view BCD exhibition photographs (by Elon Schoenholz) below and a Public Historian journal exhibition review here. Also, view more of the global media coverage the BCD exhibition has garnered and see photographs from the August 4 opening party here (scroll down the page to the BCD story of this post).
In a related event, I (Alison Rose Jefferson) was quoted in the recent Easy Reader News article about Bruce’s Beach and the descendants of Major George Prioleau and his wife, Ethel Stafford Prioleau receipt of a resolution of apology from the City of Manhattan Beach, CA for their ancestors whose land was taken via eminent domain and racism in the 1920s.
Lastly…
- Check out this Smithsonian Magazine article, “The Myths of the Thanksgiving Story and the Lasting Damage They Imbue” by Claire Bugos. She cites a contrary history asserted by David Silverman in his book, This Land Is Their Land: the Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Trouble History of Thanksgiving, to broaden this America celebratory fest mythos, to assert that “In truth, massacres, disease and American Indian politics are what shaped the Pilgrim-Indian alliance at the root of the holiday.”
- If you missed the movie, “Rustin” in theaters, you can now view it on Netflix, produced by Higher Ground, founded by Baraka and Michelle Obama, and directed by Pomona College alum George Wolfe. The movie stars Coleman Domingo as the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, the organizer who spearheaded the landmark 1963 March on Washington D.C. that took place on the National Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial. This biopic about the courageous Rustin, a figure unknown to many Americans, opens up a view of the contentious process of this peaceful protest organization to demand the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which are inseparable.
- Go see the emotionally moving and beautiful photograph exhibition, “This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement” at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles on view through February 25, 2024. Nine photographers — of different ethnic, racial, religious, and geographic backgrounds — lived within the 1960s phase of the Movement and documented its activities by focusing on local people and socially-engaged students to portray community life as well as protest in the demand for voting rights which continues today. There is also a catalog you can purchase which includes essays by the late civil rights leader Julian Bond and Dr. Clayborne Carson, Movement historian.
- Laila Edwards became the first Black woman to play hockey for a U.S. women’s senior national team, on Saturday, November 18, 2023, in Los Angeles. New York Times writer Hailey Salvian recently did a profile, “A First for a Black Woman in U.S. Hockey, and Maybe Not her Last First,” on this trailblazing top-ranked University of Wisconsin sophomore from Cleveland Heights, Ohio. The professional football players, the Kelce brothers, Jason and Travis (the latter possibly Taylor Swift’s boyfriend), also from the Cleveland area, are big fans.
You are invited to share this news post with your colleagues, friends and family.
