Florida history

April 21, 1996

By James C. Clark, of The Sentinel Staff

Amelia Island, located off the coast of Florida near the Georgia border, has seen it all. Its been a haven for pirates, smugglers and even a revolutionary or two.

But it achieved its early fame in the 1800s as a center for importing slaves.

In 1808, the United States outlawed the importation of slaves. But Amelia Island, along with the rest of Florida, belonged to Spain.

On Amelia Island, slave ships could safely unload their human cargo. From there, it was easy to smuggle the slaves into the United States. In all, about 60,000 slaves were illegally brought in through Amelia Island.

Thats why its ironic that the island became the site of one of the first black resorts in the United States.

After the Civil War ended, a number of blacks acquired small farms on the island. But even though blacks could own land, they were forbidden to swim with whites on the nearby beaches.

In 1901, A. L. Lewis, the president of Afro-American Life Insurance Co., purchased 200 acres of beachfront property on Amelia Island.

As his insurance company prospered, he built houses for company executives and for agents who won sales contests.

Lewis named his beach American Beach. The popularity of the beach grew, and during summer months as many as 10,000 people would visit on weekends. In 1935, hotels and shops were added.

The island steadily grew in popularity. The small farms that the newly freed slaves had gotten after the Civil War often for as little as 50 cents an acre were in demand because of people seeking to purchase vacation property.

In 1972, the farms were sold for the development of the Amelia Island Plantation resort.

Meanwhile, by the 1970s, more and more whites were coming to American Beach.

As land prices rose, the original black owners began to sell their property, creating concerns that Americas first black resort would lose its identity.

Fernandina Beach Journal; A Black Beach Town Fights to Preserve Its History

By MIREYA NAVARRO

Published: April 6, 1998

FERNANDINA BEACH, Fla.— To the north stands the Summer Beach resort, a 450-acre complex that includes homes and a Ritz-Carlton Hotel, with seven condominium buildings under construction. To the south is the Amelia Island Plantation, a 1,330-acre resort and residential community that is opening a hotel and building two condominium buildings with plans for more single-family homes. 

Sandwiched between the cranes that hover over the multimillion-dollar projects, where home prices range from $200,000 to more than $4 million, is American Beach, a vestige of the segregationist past, a place whose unique character many of its residents want to save. 

''We're the only remaining African-American coastal community in the state,'' said Annette M. Myers, president of the American Beach Property Owners Association. ''The property owners feel history should be preserved.'' 

Covering about 100 acres south of this city on Amelia Island, a barrier island on the Atlantic Ocean just below the Georgia border, American Beach was established in the 1930's by the founders of the black-owned Afro-American Life Insurance Company of Jacksonville. 

Originally, the beach was a vacation retreat for employees but it grew into a resort for blacks barred from whites-only beaches, drawing thousands from Florida and beyond, with its motels, restaurants and nightclubs. 

Most of the businesses closed in the 60's and 70's, after desegregation opened other beaches and resorts to blacks. Today only about 30 families, mostly retirees and mostly black, live year-round in American Beach, an unincorporated area of Nassau County. About 230 people own the one- and two-story cottages on 50- by 100-foot lots, some landscaped with flowers, palm trees and live oaks, in a sleepy beach community largely untouched by time. 

Residents say the small lots, half of which line unpaved roads in a town of only a dozen or so streets, have helped keep developers at bay by making it more difficult to assemble the large tracts needed for big construction projects. But the buildings that are springing up have helped push up property values and taxes to the point where some residents have been forced to sell, neighbors say. 

To those who remain, American Beach is a precious possession whose character they must closely guard. Some residents want to carefully control commercial growth but others want tourism to thrive in American Beach, as it did in the 1950's. 

''It was like a world within a world,'' recalled MaVynee Betsch, 63, a great-granddaughter of Abraham Lincoln Lewis, a founder of American Beach who vacationed there as a child and settled permanently in the 1970's in a cottage there. 

''Darling,'' Ms. Betsch said, ''I never saw white folk.'' 

A onetime opera singer in Europe, Ms. Betsch now lives in a trailer on a borrowed lot, often sleeps on the beach and is known as the Beach Lady, one of the area's best-known and staunchest advocates. 

Many other residents came back to retire at the only beach they knew as children. James Robinson, 66, a Jacksonville native, retired in 1986 from jobs with the New York State Legislature and the Education Department in Albany, and moved here with his wife, Joyce, who is a nurse. Mr. Robinson spoke of American Beach as an egalitarian home to current and former schoolteachers, university professors, doctors, lawyers and Federal judges. 

He bought his inland lot in 1973 for $2,300 and put a mobile home on it, and now the property is worth much more -- he estimates $30,000 -- but he has no plans to sell. 

''It's so nice and peaceful around here,'' Mr. Robinson said. ''When I saw this opportunity, I grabbed it.'' 

American Beach may have outlived its original purpose, but its residents are still fighting old battles. In a recent highly publicized case, a judge ordered the local Domino's Pizza franchise to start delivering to American Beach residents after the Robinsons sued, saying they were forced to wait for their pizza at a highway convenience store because the deliverers would not drive down their street, the main entrance to American Beach. 

And residents are angry that the Amelia Island Plantation put its maintenance, mailroom, shipping and laundry in warehouses across the street from homes at the same main entrance. 

''It's like being spit on,'' said Charles Pantino, 51, a retired Army sergeant and one of a handful of residents who are white. 

Jack Healan, president of the Amelia Island Company, which owns the Amelia Island Plantation, notes that the warehouses had been built before his company bought the resort in 1978. ''We don't have anywhere to relocate,'' Mr. Healan said. Despite residents' fears of encroaching development, he said, most developers would find it impractical to buy into American Beach because there are so many owners and such small parcels of land. 

But the National Association for African-American Heritage Preservation, a nonprofit group based in Indianapolis that is devoted to protecting historic black sites, has put American Beach on its endangered list because it has been shrinking. About 80 acres of its wooded area along Highway A1A were sold to Amelia Island Company and have now been transformed into Sprey Village at Amelia Island Plantation, an affluent retirement community of single-family homes, golf courses and a 48-bed assisted-living complex. 

On the northern end of American Beach, Ms. Myers, the owners' association president who lives in a two-story house hidden in the live oaks and palm trees, has neighbors nearby for the first time, the Summer Beach complex. 

''Nothing remains the same,'' she said with resignation. ''We have to adjust to change.'' 

But the owners' association has taken a conservative path, proposing that Nassau County designate American Beach a special zoning district to restrict the size of hotels and stores and keep condominiums and shopping malls out. Not all residents agree on how American Beach should grow, but there is agreement on one thing: they must strive to retain its black identity. 

Ms. Betsch said that because many heirs of former residents have no interest in the area, buildings remain vacant or boarded up. She said she had talked some people into designating in their wills that the property be kept within the family. 

More encouraging to the preservationists is evidence that young black professionals are taking an interest in American Beach, buying homes for their own retirement. 

The history of American Beach may last in other ways. At least one book about it has been published -- ''An American Beach for African Americans,'' by Marsha Dean Phelts (University Press of Florida, 1998). Another book, ''American Beach: A Saga of Wealth, Race and Memory,'' by Russ Rymer (HarperCollins) is due out in October, and the Public Broadcasting Service plans a one-hour documentary on the community. Kathleen Donaghy, the producer, said she had visited similar black beach communities along the Eastern seaboard and found that American Beach was the best preserved. 

In the summer and on most weekends, American Beach attracts mostly black crowds from Florida and Georgia. Most of the year, however, it is the kind of place where a neighbor can still ''walk out to the street and not worry about your house being broken into,'' Mr. Robinson said. 

''Let's face it,'' Mr. Robinson said. ''You can't find a more beautiful place to live.'' 

Photos: The price of cottages has gone up on American Beach, a thriving black beach community in the 1950's. It now finds itself trying to preserve the past while facing development all around it, on Amelia Island, Fla. MaVynne Betsch recalled her childhood in American Beach, Fla. ''It was like a world within a world,'' she said. ''Darling, I never saw white folk.'' (Photographs by Phillippe Diederich for The New York Times) Map showing the location of Fernandina Beach, Florida: Growth south of Fernandina Beach threatens American Beach.

Published Monday, February 5, 2001

The American Dream

 

WJCT documentary tells story of African-American beach community on Amelia Island

By Charlie Patton
Times-Union staff writer, 

About seven years ago, documentary filmmaker Kathleen Donaghy visited American Beach, a quiet enclave of middle-class homes tucked into a section of Amelia Island surrounded by upscale developments.

She fell in love with the place, just as generations of people have been doing since African-American entrepreneur A.L. Lewis bought up large tracts of oceanfront property in the 1930s so blacks could have access to the beach.

Since 1995, Donaghy has been at work on the documentary film An American Beach, a story about this unique community and its struggles to survive. That documentary makes its television debut Wednesday on WJCT TV-7, after a reception and special screening tomorrow at WJCT's studios.

The central figure in An American Beach is MaVynee Betsch, the colorful "Beach Lady," a granddaughter of A.L. Lewis and a leader in the fight to protect American Beach from the encroachment of large, affluent neighbors such as Amelia Island Plantation. (Betsch's first name is pronounced as if it included an "r" between the "a" and the "V." It once did, but she removed the "r" during the Reagan administration.)

Betsch, who grows her hair and her nails long and wild because "Mother Nature just took me over," calls American Beach "this beautiful place where my great-grandfather bought us freedom, bought us a sense of dignity."

Lewis was one of the seven founders of the Afro-American Life Insurance Co., started in Jacksonville around the turn of the 20th century. The company specialized in burial insurance, policies designed to cover the expenses of a funeral. During the Depression, Lewis established the community at American Beach as a place where black Americans could enjoy access to the Atlantic beaches and could own relatively inexpensive beachfront property.

The struggle in recent years, as sketched in An American Beach, has been to protect the community's unique character.

That struggle was compounded in 1998 when the Nassau County Sheriff's Department began heavily patrolling the area and setting up traffic stops on the roads leading into American Beach. While the police said they needed to beef up patrols because weekend visitors to American Beach were bringing in guns and liquor, several residents say in An American Beach that they believe the increased police presence was part of an effort to harass them into selling out to big corporations.

As Samuel Harrison, an amateur historian who is a descendant of a family that once owned a plantation in the area, says, "The folks at American Beach are under pressure from both sides because it is such prime property."

But a number of residents state their defiant determination to hold out.

"Here we are in the middle, defying all rules of economics," says resident James Robinson.

"As caretakers of American Beach, we must pass the torch," says writer Marsha Dean Phelts.

Although the documentary is never very clear about the details of the battle between developers and preservationists, by the end of An American Beach it appears the preservationists have lost some battles but survived the war. Amelia Island Plantation has built a new golf course close to the sand dunes at American Beach, but the state has agreed to protect some of the land, and Amelia Island Plantation has agreed to maintain a buffer zone between its development and American Beach.

"Fifty years from now," Betsch says, providing the film's coda, "some young person will come along and say, 'This was all worth it. The Beach Lady wasn't all that crazy.' "

But Donaghy feels no such spirit of triumph. Having run up a personal debt of about $40,000 finishing the film -- which cost in excess of its initial budget of $106,000 -- Donaghy says An American Beach, as now edited, isn't the film she had set out to make.

She's vague about how her film would have been different but said she never felt she had the time to complete the movie the way she wanted. "The process of putting together a documentary film is extremely time-consuming and expensive," she said. "Trying to raise the money has been the major activity."

Eventually, after Donaghy missed several deadlines, WJCT, having provided some of the funding in exchange for the rights to air An American Beach, took over the film in editing, as its contract with her permitted.

Lisa Buggs, who served as WJCT's producer on An American Beach, said that as far as she is concerned, the finished product does an effective job of telling the community's story.

And on that point, Donaghy admitted, at least one of the subjects -- Betsch -- seems satisfied. "She is excited that the project is completed," Donaghy said. "She's excited that people are going to get to see a story of American Beach."

An American Beach will air at

8 p.m. Wednesday; it will repeat at 1 p.m. Friday and at 10:30 p.m. Feb. 12.

 

New museum will honor history of blacks at American Beach

By Andrew Pantazi  Fri, Sep 5, 2014 @ 6:59 pm

MaVynee Betsch died with her dream unfulfilled, but on Saturday, after a decade of trying, a museum will open.

She wanted an American Beach museum, something to honor the history of Abraham Lincoln Lewis – her great-grandfather and Florida’s first black millionaire – and American Beach, the black-designated beach in the days of Jacksonville segregation.

Most everyone knew Betsch as the Beach Lady, and the Beach Lady had her museum for a while. She ran it out of a broken-down RV covered with stickers advocating political and environmental causes. County code enforcement had the museum towed away in 2002. 

The museum will open at 11 a.m. Saturday at the American Beach Community Center and Museum at 1600 Julia Street, Fernandina Beach.

The building first opened as the community center in 2010. The county owns the $287,000 building.

“We’re pretty much working just to bring about cultural awareness,” said Jermyn Shannon El, who started the Facebook event for Saturday’s grand opening.

The area, he said, is also important for the Gullah/Geechee nation, the descendants of Africans from west and central Africa who lived along the coast from Jacksonville, N.C., to Jacksonville, Fla.

Lewis founded American Beach in 1935. It was a place where blacks didn’t have to worry about racism.

“American Beach quickly became both a desirable destination and a richly-evolving community on Florida’s beautiful Amelia Island,” a Facebook event for the museum’s opening said. “The success of American Beach – and Betsch’s passion for the community and its heritage – is a captivating story that makes for a fascinating exhibit at the new museum.”

The first exhibit, “The Sands of Time: An American Beach Story,” will feature Betsch giving a tour of the beach on film. 

Carol J. Alexander, the former executive director at the Ritz Theatre and Museum, will curate American Beach’s museum.

 

Andrew Pantazi: (904) 359-4310