By Don Valentine
Lieutenant Colonel Allen Allensworth stands courageously in the vanguard of strong Black leaders. The history books all but ignore his creation of Allensworth. Thankfully the historic African American Registry notes, “The community of Allensworth, just 70 miles south of Fresno, in Tulare county, was the first and only Black owned city in California.”
In 1842, he was born a slave in Louisville, Kentucky, twenty years before the start of the Civil War. Kentucky banned slaves from reading, but he secretly mastered the English language, and became a voracious student of the Bible. The start of the Civil war gave him a chance to flee to the Union Army. He escaped slavery in 1862, and worked as a civilian nurse for the Illinois Volunteer Infantry, until 1863 when become a seaman in the Union Navy. He left the Navy and enrolled at Roger Williams University to study theology.
The Black media website News One reported, “After becoming an ordained minister, Allensworth jumped right into the pulpit… The community began to look up to him and it propelled him into politics” The fervor to preach led him to spend 2o years in the Army as a chaplain. In 1906 he retired from the Army as a Lieutenant Colonel, and the highest-ranked Black man in the U.S. Armed Forces. News One noted, “…Colonel traveled the U.S. lecturing Blacks on the importance of self-help programs. Like Booker T. Washington Allensworth believed Blacks in America needed to become more self-sufficient.” He partnered with William Payne, a professor at West Virginia Colored Institute, and headed to California. They created the California Colony and Home Promoting Association to secure the land. Pacific Farming Company, a White development firm, offered the association prime land in a fertile area near Tulare. It was a good site for the town, because it had a depot station on the main Santa Fe Railroad line.
The African American Registry recorded that the city was founded in 1908, but the 1912-1915 period marked the apex for Allensworth as a thriving city. “During Allensworth’s golden age, the social and educational organizations were The Owl Club, the Campfire Girls, the Girls’ Glee Club, and the Children’s Saving Association. They met the needs of the young, while adults participated in the Sewing Circle, the Whist Club, the Debating Society, and the Theater Club.”
Racial discord over the prosperous town came when the railroad moved its stop to a neighboring Alpaugh. The San Francisco Chronicle detailed the other liabilities that closed the town: “…a few factors started to lead to the town’s eventual decline. Water supplies dwindled, and soil conditions deteriorated… in September of 1914, Colonel Allensworth was struck and killed by a motorcycle…” Friends of Allensworth president Sasha Biscoe said, “You lose your leader, you lose your water, and you lose that train spot. It just brought the town to its knees.”
