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Race & Space Conversation II: The Right to Recreate

Jun 24, 2022

The starting points for an invigorating, informative and unsettling discussion during the second Race & Space Conversation were one of the nation’s early chief ports of entry from enslaved Africans, an historic and still operating Rocky Mountain retreat featured in the Green Book, and the first golf course in the Upper Midwest to allow Black golfer to play. The 90-minute online event, available on The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s (TCLF) YouTube page, wove through numerous topics including founding Black families, the right to recreation, and unspoken local histories. April de Simone once again deftly facilitated the proceedings and provided trenchant, prodding observations.

The panelists included Candace Henry, Director of the Water’s Edge Museum in Oxford, MD, Judge Gary Jackson from Lincoln Hills, CO, and Bronze Foundation President Darwin Dean from Minneapolis, MN, along with respondents Angela Kyle from Pensacola, FL, and Jacquelyn Sawyer, Vice President at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) Board Co-Chair Emma Skalka, with Victor Stanley, and TCLF president & CEO, Charles A. Birnbaum, provided opening and closing remarks.<drupal-media data-entity-type="media" data-entity-uuid="b93e9631-7465-4131-b315-4044b594c26c" data-align="none" data-view-mode="wysiwyg"></drupal-media>Judge Jackson offered a riveting and deeply personal account of Lincoln Hills, which includes <a href="/sites/default/files/microsites/landslide2021/locations/winks.html" target="_blank">Wink’s Panorama</a> (featured in TCLF’s Landslide 2021: Race and Space report and digital exhibition). Located near Denver, CO, the mountainside retreat is celebrating its 100th anniversary, which Judge Jackson characterized as “100 years of precious memories.” These included visits by Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Lena Horne, and Zora Neale Hurston and spanned the period that saw Jim Crow, the KKK, the Depression and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His Grandpa Pitts, the son of an enslaved woman, built the family’s lodge. His father along with some other World War II veterans founded the Black Ski Club in the 1950s. He likened the site to Oak Bluffs, the town on the island of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts long popular with African Americans. He concluded saying Lincoln Hills is “still flourishing” and preparing for its “next 100 years of joy.”<drupal-media data-entity-type="media" data-entity-uuid="d401a4cf-9a94-4815-b341-b7e4e92441f3" data-align="none" data-view-mode="wysiwyg"></drupal-media>Darwin Dean spoke movingly about the <a href="/landscapes/hiawatha-golf-course?destination=search-results" target="_blank">Hiawatha Golf Club</a> and the pioneering local African Americans Jimmy Slemmons and Solomon Hughes who were instrumental in integrating the course (1938) and its clubhouse (1954). The site became home to the Minnesota Negro Open Golf Tournament (renamed the Upper Midwest Bronze Amateur Open, known colloquially as “The Bronze”) and Hughes taught famed boxer Joe Louis how to play golf. But until 1954, Hughes and other Black golfers were denied access to the clubhouse, so they created their own clubhouse in a section of the course’s parking lot that Dean said was known as the “Amen Corner.” In 1999 Tiger Woods brought his First Tee program to the course, a milestone in its history. Nevertheless, Hiawatha, Dean says, is “under attack”; a years-long efforts to redesign the historic eighteen-hole course as a nine-hole course with additional amenities including a BMX trail and a dog patio have been debated by the Minnesota Park and Recreation Board and the local community. Dean is committed to saving the course for “the youth of tomorrow.” Efforts have begun to pursue listing the site in the National Register of Historic Places.In introducing Candace Henry from the <a href="/sites/default/files/microsites/landslide2021/locations/waters.html" target="_blank">Water’s Edge Museum</a>, moderator De Simone noted that Oxford, MD, the museum’s location, was where many enslaved Africans first touched land in the United States. They were the founding Black families.<drupal-media data-entity-type="media" data-entity-uuid="805e6d67-abe7-4554-85d6-4e795aa1ffc7" data-align="none" data-view-mode="wysiwyg"></drupal-media>Oxford, Henry detailed, was one of the state’s oldest towns and second only to the capital, Annapolis, as a port of entry. The last ship with Africans arrived on April 11, 1772, but this local history was not part of her education despite Henry being a native of the area. The museum, she says, describes ancestors brought over in chains, people who had no rights and inequitable living conditions. Nevertheless, the museum, Henry says, ultimately describes not a story of sorrow, but of joy and the richness of the lives lived in spite of the challenges. What’s particularly powerful for residents who visit the museum are reading and learning about people who share the visitors’ last names. During an ensuing Q&A with De Simone and Birnbaum, Henry talked about the importance of oral histories and noted that without them we miss a huge portion of “what it means to be human.”Kyle observed that it was important to focus on the right to recreation, a right, she noted, that African Americans have historically been unable to exercise. The three sites being examined provided social infrastructure as well as physical infrastructure and they are significant as places where social and cultural forces collide. In discussing the Hiawatha Golf Club, Kyle said the story of golf is often about individual achievement, while Hiawatha is about community. Indeed, she suggests a causal relationship between Hiawatha’s role as a community space and why it’s under threat.Sawyer, from the National Building Museum, observed that the stories associated with each of the sites, in part, concern family legacy and what that means in the context of the “American Dream.” She offered a variety of other significant observations and later concluded that cultural institutions have a role in convening a safe space for these conversations about race and space.This second Race & Space Conversation is available for viewing at TCLF’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWBewBO3VBc" target="_blank">YouTube page</a>. Additional conversations will be scheduled in the future.

Race & Space Conversation II: The Right to Recreate

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