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.
The town that bore his name, Allensworth declared, would provide sanctuary for "the masses who are without opportunity and without hope," a refuge from the Jim Crow laws and lynchings of the South. It also would be a place, the colonel told the hundred settlers gathered for the town's dedication, where they could prove their mettle:
"A large number of our fellow countrymen have been taught for generations that the Negro is incapable of the highest development of citizenship," he said that day. "This they believe and will continue to think until we show them they are mistaken. . . . We must do as they did -- settle upon the bare desert and cause it to bloom like a rose."
The colony prospered for half a dozen years or so and then all but withered away. Still, Morrison said the other day, embarking on an informal tour of the town, "it's a beautiful history. To see it was a self-governing community, founded by blacks -- it just goes to show you, as they say today, yes we can."
A 73-year-old widow and mother of five, Morrison moved here more than 30 years ago, shortly after the remains of the original colony were preserved as a 240-acre state park. At the time, she recalled, Allensworth was inhabited by many black families. A few had ties to the original pioneers, but most were remnants of a second wave of 30,000 to 40,000 migrants who poured into California in the 1940s to pick cotton and build a better life in the West -- the "Black Okies," they were called.
One by one, the blacks died off or moved away, and now most of Morrison's neighbors in the town of 500 are immigrant farmworkers from Mexico.
"I'm one of the last," she said, "one of the last."
On her dinner table was an absentee ballot filled out and ready to mail. Three weeks before the election she already had cast her vote for Barack Obama: "This is history in the making, and everybody who can should take part."
