A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit by Noliwe Rooks

Author:Noliwe Rooks [Rooks, Noliwe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

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Black: Capital, Capitalism, and Relaxation

This is a story of capital, capitalism, and the knife’s edge walked by the sons and daughters of the enslaved who believed the tools capitalism teaches could lead Black people to freedom. It is about Bethune, her ancestors, and a beach named Bethune. It is about a man named Abraham Lincoln Lewis and the beach he founded and named American. It is about his ancestors, and their understanding that Black survival was bound up with a kind of relaxation that provided salvation beyond rest. It is about the tenderness wrought by believing children could and should scream lustily because of their joy, and not their pain. It is about Amelia Island, a piece of land surrounded by water, some of it of the fresh river variety but most of it a salted sea. This is about the shared understanding that for a people struggling not to drown in the rising tides of fascism, exclusion, and exploitation, there is a way for Black capital to defeat the terrors of capitalism in the cause of Black freedom. These beaches tell a story about a group of people who understood the why of creating, seeking out, and embracing the relief of a jaw unclenching at the sound of waves rolling fast toward them. They knew the truth, reality, and beauty of a tickle of sweat trickling down foreheads, breasts, and chests as hips find a shared rhythm and bodies swaying in community refine a collective beat.

The businesspeople, political activists, and “just folks” who built American Beach said they did so because they needed a place where all Black people—those who had money, those making it from one paycheck to the next, and those struggling to consistently earn a steady livelihood—could experience community together. The goal was to use Black capital to repudiate the violence of capitalism so often directed at Black people. They wanted to build Black wealth, promote Black joy, and forge Black community. I know this island and this beach. My grandparents owned a home there in community with Black people who began building it in 1935. It existed because racism and white supremacy existed, because by the 1920s, laws in Florida banned Black people from most of the beaches in the state. Those who built American Beach said they did so because they needed a place where they and theirs could experience, as the community motto stated, “Relaxation and Recreation without Humiliation.”

American Beach’s primary founder, Abraham Lincoln Lewis, was born two months after his namesake signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865 and was one of the founding partners of the Afro-American Industrial and Benefit Association, Florida’s first Black insurance company. The company was destroyed in the Great Jacksonville Fire of 1901, and Lewis rebuilt it, becoming the first manager of the association, which was renamed the Afro-American Insurance Company. Mary McLeod Bethune sold life insurance policies for the company for five years as she struggled to make ends meet in Palatka, Florida, where she ministered to prisoners while trying to start a school.

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