Remembering Bell Mountain: African American Landownership and Leisure in California's High Desert during the Jim Crow Era

• Main Author: Thornton, Jennifer L
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2018
• Subjects: African American Studies; American history; Black history
• ISBN: 0355937263; 9780355937268

This dissertation is a biography of place that tells the story of Bell Mountain, an early twentieth-century African American homesteading community located in the Mojave Desert outside of Los Angeles. In the 1930s through the 1950s, the community developed into a major leisure destination for African Americans, centering on western-themed activities at the black-owned Murray’s Dude Ranch. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that the history of Bell Mountain illuminates understudied aspects of the African American experience in California. The community provides insight into the breadth of the black town movement in California and the interconnections between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century migration and emigration movements. Collectively, these movements forged strong connections between California’s rural and urban populations and had a profound impact on the development of black nationalism in the Far West. After the opening of Murray’s Dude Ranch in the late 1930s, Bell Mountain offers a case study in California’s separate “black” leisure economy and the relationship of this economy to African American society life, class identity, and socio-economic stratification. As African Americans played at the dude ranch, they also “played” with the tropes of the American West, altering these motifs to suit their cultural needs and historical experiences. By the mid-twentieth century, access to sites of recreation was at the forefront of struggles for freedom, dignity, and civil rights in the United States. During the 1940s and 1950s, the segregated leisure economy in the Mojave Desert promoted strong bonds between the area’s African American and Mexican American communities, fostering grassroots organizing and a culture of everyday resistance to local discriminatory practices. In tracing the history of Bell Mountain, I tell a story that is at once African American and western, and as such refute the old lie that these two things are somehow mutually exclusive. The American West, as a region and as a cultural touchstone, was central to how both the homesteaders and the vacationers at Bell Mountain defined themselves and their communities.