Trains are majestic creatures, strong, slender, long-bodied beings that carry our cargo and us, fears, dreams, and all, forever toward some destination, some elsewhere of the imagination. When I boarded Amtrak’s 9 a.m. San Joaquins out of Oakland on June 8, 2024, I was thinking about W.E.B. Du Bois’s version of the California dream. You see, in 1910, in the predawn light of the Harlem Renaissance, the NAACP appointed Du Bois, recently resigned from his job at Atlanta University and deep into his ideological duel with Booker T. Washington, as its director of publicity and research. From that helm, the great scholar founded the Crisis, the organization’s monthly magazine, and immediately became synonymous with the publication, his brilliance and the force of his personality utterly defining its civil rights mission. By the summer of 1913, that mission took Du Bois west. The August edition—10 cents a copy—contains, along with its political and business pieces, his article “Colored California.”
“The charm and mystery of California lie in its very name,” he begins, mentioning briefly the mythic Amazons and Griffins of the Spanish novela from which the state’s name arose, though not the Moorish-Islamic etymological root of the mezcla itself: Calif-ornia.
After visiting with progressive people in San Diego and giving a series of lectures in Los Angeles, Du Bois observed the city’s sunlit beauty and hospitality, its burgeoning Black population, and what, in his estimation, was “the most beautifully housed group of colored people in the United States,” despite the fact that “the color line is there and sharply drawn.” From the city, Du Bois’s essay rides north, the writer extolling the redwoods, Yosemite Valley, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Mount Shasta, “where the earth, white robed and silent, walks up into Heaven and disappears.”
The article was, in sum, a siren song, urging Black folks to leave behind the cruelties of the American South for California.
A few years earlier, Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, wrote that to ride the train with him meant taking a seat in the “Jim Crow car,” which was actually, he notes, quite integrated, unlike the whites-only car. Today, however, the primary segregation in rail travel is the segregation of wealth, with coach class serving as the new Jim Crow car for the under-resourced majority.
The San Joaquins train took me on a route different from the one Du Bois traveled, and I came to view my journey as a reversal of his on multiple levels: Instead of coming to California for the first time to see what the great cities, coastline, valleys, and mountains of the Golden State might offer my people, I, a lifelong Californian, was traversing its parched inland rail line to think about the past, about time, and water.
I was headed to Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park for its annual Juneteenth celebration.
David Leonhardt, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning Ours Was the Shining Future, opines on the stagnation of American transportation standards that began in the 1980s with Reaganomics. Japan’s Shinkansen-style bullet trains, Leonhardt notes, could whisk Californians between San Francisco and Los Angeles in under two hours. Instead, my Amtrak ride lurched its way past the Stockton station, bordered by homeless encampments, burnt-out car hulls, and refineries; through Modesto’s verdant farmlands, bordered by dried, crisp grasses—Manichaean-like—on either side of the tracks; then past Corcoran, with its carceral backdrop; to Allensworth, just north of Bakersfield, in roughly six hours. Associated with an antiquated, essentially unjust America, our passenger rail systems are half a century behind schedule. I made it to Allensworth at about 3 p.m.
Even as I arrived late for the day’s activities, in some ways, I was early. The Juneteenth holiday falls on June 19, the date in 1865 when General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3, enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas, thus freeing the last enslaved Americans at the conclusion of our civil war. The Allensworth event—like many similar celebrations—was honoring our late-coming freedom 11 days early, not that it’s ever too soon for freedom or self-determination.
THE MIRAGE OF CALIFORNIA
In 1908, only a few years before Du Bois made his journey west, Colonel Allen Allensworth had made an even more historic mark on the future of Black America by helping found a namesake town in California. It’s a history Allensworth State Historic Park interpreter Jerelyn Oliveira will tell you about if you ask. Born into slavery in Kentucky, Allensworth was encouraged by his mother to play “school” and surreptitiously learn to read, contravening at every level the established laws against Black literacy. The “punishment,” Charles Alexander laments in his 1914 work Battles and Victories of Colonel Allen Allensworth, “for trying to learn to read and write the English language” was that the boy was separated from his mother, sold downriver to Louisiana from one enslaver to another. It was from this chattel state that he escaped in 1862 as the civil war roiled the land; capitalizing on the arrival of the 44th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment in Louisville, Kentucky, where he happened to be training to become a horse jockey, Allensworth apparently nabbed a Union uniform, smeared his face with mud, and marched with the 44th to freedom. Protests for his recapture made by his enslaver to the Union troops went predictably ignored.
For the duration of the conflict, Allensworth served in Union hospitals and as a navy steward, and in subsequent years, he would teach and minister, among his many vocations, in Kentucky and Ohio. In 1886, Allensworth was appointed chaplain to the 24th Infantry, better known as the Buffalo Soldiers, a Black American regiment within the nation’s Jim Crowed military. Perhaps most notably during this second military career, he founded a literacy program for Black enlisted men. Serving in a number of overseas conflicts without ever raising a rifle, Allensworth rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, a remarkable ascension for a noncombatant.
While stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco, Allensworth fell in love with the beauty of California. Yet, he was also keenly aware of the challenges faced by Black Americans in an overtly hostile, systematically discriminatory country. As the executive summary of the final report prepared by the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans (2023) states, “America’s racial hierarchy was the foundation of a system of segregation in the United States after the Civil War. The aim of segregation was not only to separate, but also to force African Americans to live in worse conditions in nearly every aspect of life.”
Like Du Bois, Allensworth believed that Black people would be well served by relocating to the relatively less cruel California. And like another leading figure, Booker T. Washington, Allensworth promoted vocational education, land ownership, and self-sufficiency. After his retirement from the military, he embarked on a speaking tour to promote those values. After one such lecture in Pasadena, Allensworth met the educator William A. Payne. The two men were kindred spirits whose dreams combined Du Boisian and Washingtonian themes to envision a new Black world in the Golden State, a territory where Black strivers “would settle upon the bare desert and cause it to blossom as a rose.” Despite pervasive institutional racism, new opportunities were afoot at California’s rural margins. Allensworth; his wife, Josephine; Payne; and fellow community builders Nimrod Rainbow, James Hackett, and others established a township in the colonel’s name along a remote stretch of the Santa Fe Railroad at a midpoint between San Francisco and Los Angeles (nine hours by train in either direction). Envisioning it as a train-stop town, these early residents erected a general store to serve rail passengers, as well as grain warehouses to transact with the commercial entities that trundled through. They also built a schoolhouse, a library, a church, a barbershop, a cement-manufacturing plant, orchards, cattle pens, and rows upon rows of homes. The township also included progressive elements: By 1912, only a year after women in California had gained the right to vote, every woman in Allensworth had registered to vote, fully eight years before women’s suffrage became law nationally. And according to Friends of Allensworth president Sasha Biscoe, “there was no jail, and that was by design, because the colonel didn’t want to lock his people up. But they would remove you from the town if you didn’t want to behave.”
“COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY”
As I deboard the Amtrak San Joaquins and step down from Allensworth’s small train platform, I find it hard to square the area’s history of Black self-determination and the Juneteenth celebration underway with the arid landscape surrounding me and the fact that the town had been converted into a state park in 1974. The streets are populated only by passers-through like me and state park officials (none I saw were Black), who are running what is no longer a town but an artifact.
Yet within its parched confines, the Juneteenth celebration jammed on. A lively scene drawing hundreds of celebrants despite the afternoon heat, the gathering featured a canopied concert stage where R&B acts did their thing and a sun-exposed grass-and-dirt dance floor where men and women mingled before escaping into the shade. “It’s a festival-like atmosphere,” says Biscoe, whose nonprofit organization has staged the Juneteenth celebration here since 1984. “There’s presenters and dancers and singers and food and music. But I am in the process of flipping it—yes, we can have all of that, but we need to understand who we are as a people.”
Which brings me to the more than dozen vendors, granted their own section off to the side of the stage. They are merchants not just of goods but of information; their booths dedicated to African American health and wellness and K–12 learning and college education sit alongside the elaborate displays of craftswomen and clothiers, as well as the offerings of other artisans and everyday business folk, Black entrepreneurs of every stripe.
In that scene so full of Black life, which would not have been out of place in Oakland or Inglewood, I consider the demography of the towns surrounding Allensworth. None of them have a sizable free Black population, though if you count the unfree African Americans incarcerated at Corcoran State Prison, North Kern State Prison, Kern Valley State Prison, and so on throughout this region, then those numbers rise exponentially; then the story changes, becomes about addiction and dysfunction and violence, and lost children, and broken people, and a troubling resemblance to America before Juneteenth.
Where do I fit, I wonder, in this desert of prisons and unfree Black people?
Allensworth was one of several Black towns founded across Central California. “In addition to Allensworth,” the California Reparations Report reads, “African American towns such as Teviston, Fairmead, Cookseyville, Bowles Colored Colony, South Dos Palos, and Sunny Acres all existed in California’s Central Valley.” Implicit in the founding of Allensworth as an all-Black township was the colonel’s acceptance of the prevailing racial segregation of those times. We can view his vision as outdated, inapplicable to our more integrated America, which is true enough, but beyond its immediate use value, the colonel’s vision reveals the cloaked militancy of Washington’s purportedly conservative ideology when driven to its logical conclusion: Allensworth’s original inhabitants were new maroons, migrants who had escaped the Jim Crow South for a better life in what was, in its brief heyday, a Black-founded, Black-funded, and self-governing township.
In the dirt lot at the edge of the event, I come upon a small tribe of brothers in elaborately adorned motorcycle jackets. They remind me of the Black bikers I see regularly in Oakland, except that these men are different somehow, quieter, more serious, more studied, and more righteously appareled. I chat up Rodger Bailey, road name Flywheel, the secretary and chaplain of the National Association of Buffalo Soldiers & Troopers Motorcycle Club, based in Modesto. Bailey also serves as an educator at Allensworth’s Juneteenth events, dispensing information about the Buffalo Soldiers and Allensworth specifically. Allensworth’s biography speaks to Bailey, in part, because though Allensworth served in the military, “he was also nonviolent. The weapons he chose were his knees in prayer and his brain.”
Bailey is a solidly built man, his vibe that of an old head, a wise unc, made more so by the way he stands at attention as he speaks to me, his manner almost martial. “My father flew with Benjamin Oliver Davis Jr., the commander of the Tuskegee Airmen. When my mother passed away, I brought my father to California and I took him down and let him tour Allensworth and see the history…an all-Black community built by Black hands, ran by Black hands. And he was so impressed with it, he sat at the gate and he cried,” Bailey recounts. “It’s a safe place for people to be of color.”
Bailey cherishes the visionary shadow that Allensworth still casts, drawing young and old alike from hundreds of miles away for this Juneteenth in the desert. The annual event, and the town itself, provide his organization the opportunity to teach visitors of all races “comprehensive history,” by which he means Black American history in its fullness as a necessary record within American history. “So that they can get a better sense of what their cloud of witnesses is and that their story is part of the making of this country,” he says.
That the teaching of Black history, the actual lived experience of our ancestors, is under threat from grifting right-wing political figures is hardly lost on the event’s leaders. Biscoe makes this point most clearly: “Where I see [Black people] lacking is knowledge of what our ancestors have gone through and who we are as a people, and yet there’s such a backlash about teaching us our own history.”
To counter these efforts, Bakersfield City School District youth services coordinator Lewis Neal and youth services specialist David McCrary work in partnership with Amtrak to bring cohorts of P.R.O.U.D. (Powerful Resilient Outstanding Unique Determined) Academy students to the Juneteenth gathering out of the same sense of mission. “Allensworth is something that we learn about in P.R.O.U.D. Academy as part of our curriculum. It is a story of resilience,” says McCrary. “We want [students] to learn about the people that came before them, the people that they don’t hear about in their history books.”
I dig this mission, this attention to this small postage stamp of our history, for it is also an attention to our future. Allensworth matters not just for what it was, but for what it teaches young Californians, and how it inspires young Black Californians.
MISSED OPPORTUNITY
Allensworth wrote repeatedly to Washington, the architect of Tuskegee University, describing the rose that he was bringing to bloom in the barren desert. B. Gordon Wheeler, author of Black California: The History of African Americans in the Golden State, writes on the History channel website that Allensworth “envisioned a Tuskegee of the West that would provide practical training in such technical fields as agriculture, carpentry and masonry to black youths in California and the Southwest.”
According to McCrary, Allensworth’s proposed institute was “a phenomenal vision—if it would have manifested, I think that things would be a lot different.”
The plan for a land-grant college was popular locally; however, statewide, the white-majority voting public was against it, as were some Black Californians in urban areas who worried that an exclusively Black educational institution would inadvertently import Jim Crow to the Golden State. Allensworth’s plan failed. Today, it exists only as a missed opportunity. The historically Black college or university is no longer an exclusively Black institution. It is integrated, and it plays a unique role in the higher education of millions of Black professionals. I know many of them, these talented Black scholars who’ve left California for an HBCU education never to return. They’re part of the larger out-migration of Black folks from California in recent years.
It’s clear to me that Allensworth dreamed boldly of expanded opportunities, but they never came to fruition. The township never supported more than a few hundred families. Moreover, from its very beginnings, it was threatened by water scarcity; nearby Tulare Lake was siphoned away just prior to the town’s founding. The Allensworth townspeople extracted water from beneath the earth using a system of artesian wells instead. However, they never received a sufficient number of these wells from Pacific Farming Company, the land-development firm with which they negotiated the original purchase, thus placing the town in a continuous state of resource precarity.
In 1914, the same year that Washington died of natural causes, Allensworth was killed by a motorcycle in Monrovia, California. Just as damaging, the Santa Fe Railroad Company built a spur to the nearby town of Alpaugh, diverting trains around Allensworth, likely in retaliation for Allensworth community members’ calling out the numerous instances of racial discrimination and resource deprivation they faced. The new route starved the nascent township economically. Later, with the town’s deep wells tapping out, the naturally high arsenic levels in the area’s water table became an unavoidable concern. By midcentury, the question of Allensworth’s basic livability slowly but inevitably arose, leading eventually to its transformation into a state park.
A GREAT SURVIVOR
California has since its American founding occupied a place of promise within our imaginations, associated with creativity, tolerance, and freedom. Yet Du Bois had noted in “Colored California” that the color line was drawn sharply in Los Angeles and that the trade unions barred Black workers in Oakland and San Francisco. This systemic racism continued for decades, with the federal, state, and local governments “creat[ing] segregation through redlining, zoning ordinances, school and highway siting decisions, and discriminatory federal mortgage policy,” according to the reparations report. The generational financial impact of these and other practices is real: The task force cites a 2014 study of the Los Angeles metro area that found that “the median value of liquid assets for native born African American households was $200, compared to $110,000 for white households.” In sum, the report concludes that “due to residential segregation, African Americans— compared to white Americans—are more likely to live in worse quality housing and in polluted neighborhoods with inadequate infrastructure. African American Californians face similar harms.”
Among the task force’s policy recommendations is the establishment and funding of a California American Freedmen Affairs Agency, with “a Development Office, to provide oversight and monitoring of state-sponsored and state-funded infrastructure development, to ensure that descendants receive a proportionate share of the development of housing (e.g., subdivisions, multi-family, mixed use), business/commercial districts, and towns/cities.” Included is a declaration that the historic African American towns of the Central Valley “all existed…and should receive the same investment from the state.”
Upon the desolate land where Allensworth and Payne had dreamed and cultivated the rose of a new Black world, little else but the curated corpse of those efforts seemingly remains. Yet it would be wrong to see their town as a failed venture. Well into midcentury, Allensworth still served as a safe harbor for Southern migrants escaping Jim Crow cruelties and, as the task force notes, a destination for “disillusioned African American migrants who had fled the South, but found a different type of discrimination in California.” Though with time this desert rose went unwatered, it did not wilt easily. Surviving its namesake’s death, resistant to the corporate and racist forces arrayed against it, even now its example and its Juneteenth celebrations inspire many, especially since passage of legislation proposed by the reparations task force continues to face stiff resistance in the state legislature.
Du Bois never traveled to Allensworth and, like most Americans, might not have known it existed, but he did return to California. In a July 1945 Chicago Defender column, he wrote of California’s redwoods, “They are survivors of a dead world; of black slavery, the gold rush.… They survive perhaps because they believe in life, in strength, in will.” Instead of the names of American generals, he declares, “They should be called Toussaint, Buddha, and Confucius; life’s greatest survivors.”
Allensworth, as well, survives, somehow still here, on the bare land in its silent and powerful way.•
The Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park 2025 Juneteenth celebration will be held on June 14. Click here for more information.
Keenan Norris’s latest book, Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings, was published in 2023. He is the author of the novel The Confession of Copeland Cane, which received the 2022 Northern California Book Award, as well as the novels Lustre and Brother and the Dancer. Native to the Inland Empire, he now lives in San Leandro, California.
