Vision of an African American utopia — Allensworth




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Photograph by Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times

A LOOK BACK: The sun sets on Colonel Allensworth State Historic
Park, where original buildings and replicas provide a glimpse of the
utopian community founded by a former slave and retired Army chaplain
for his fellow African Americans in 1908.

By Peter H. King
October 27, 2008
Reporting from Allensworth, Calif. — From outside her house in this beaten-down little town in the southern San Joaquin Valley, Nettie Morrison, Allensworth’s unofficial mayor, can look up the road a few hundred yards and see where it all so grandly began — the birthplace of one of the more audacious California dreams.

A century ago, it was on this flat, barren piece of California that Col. Allen Allensworth, a former slave and retired Army chaplain, came to launch a utopia: a colony of, by and for black Americans.

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About lmharnisch

I am retired from the Los Angeles Times
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