God bless the child that’s got his own.
— Billie Holiday
In June 2021, the Long Beach Public Library inadvertently highlighted a problem when they hosted an online presentation by Claudine Burnett on her new book, African Americans in Long Beach and Southern California: A History, as part of their Local History Lecture Series.
The problem had less to do with Burnett’s being white than with the fact that she found reason to write the book at all. A former Long Beach librarian who spent 25 years of poring over microfilm of city periodicals dating back to 1881 to compile the Long Beach History Index, Burnett realized how much information on the region’s Black history had been lost and wanted to help preserve and made readily available what was left. Impressed as she was by 2006’s The Heritage of African Americans in Long Beach: Over 100 Years, she saw this as only beginning to fill the void. (Edited by Indira Hale Tucker and Aaron L. Day in association with the African American Heritage Society of Long Beach (AAHSLB), The Heritage of African Americans in Long Beach — for which Burnett wrote a Foreword — was originally intended as Volume 1 of an “ongoing project,” but subsequent volumes have yet to be produced.)
Planning to fill that void is the African American Cultural Center of Long Beach (AACCLB), incorporated as a 501(c)3 in July 2020 with a mission is “to preserve, honor and celebrate the heritage and advance the culture of the Black/African American community in Long Beach and beyond” by housing an extensive array of exhibits, resources, and programming in a physical space befitting an international city.
The roots of the AACCLB reach back to 1988, when Max Viltz and her then-husband took part in a group trip to Egypt led by Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan. Moved by his exhortation that the members “go back to your hometowns and start study groups and share this information,” Viltz returned to Long Beach and helped found the African Study Group of Long Beach, which set up shop in a small storefront at 19th Street and Atlantic Avenue. Over the next 20 years the group conducted classes and cultural events there and elsewhere, including the Homeland Cultural Center, the Queen Mary, various parks, and even people’s homes. Viltz’s involvement led to the creation of Village Treasures, an “African Gallery, Gift Shop & Boutique” she founded in 1997 to provide “tangible items to support the studies.”
But the need for a more prominent and permanent cultural center has become increasingly obvious in recent years, as conservative backlash against initiatives like critical race theory and the 1619 Project has motivated many teachers and school systems to shy away from issues of how past inequities continue to affect the present on both personal and societal levels.
“We don’t have our own institutions to teach our people, and we can’t wait for the school system to do it,” Viltz says. “There’s more information out there to eliminate [the teaching of Black history] from schools than there is about getting it in there. […] Part of the importance of helping young people understand [Black history] is that they don’t understand the [generational] trauma that has continued. Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome is what it’s called, and we have behaviors that happen because of things we don’t even understand. But it’s passed on. For most of us, our families didn’t tell us that history because it was so painful for them to even talk about it, and because there was such stigma to being thought of as an ex-slave or to have come from a family of ex-slaves.”
AACCLB President Darick Simpson, who was actively involved in youth mentoring even before he became executive director of the Long Beach Community Action Partnership (LBCAP) in 2006, concurs: “I had a student in the Long Beach Unified School District who [recently] told me about a teacher who said, ‘I’m not going to teach Black history because it’s too controversial and it could cause conflict.’ […] I’m hopeful that we can do something in lieu of the institutions that are paid for with our tax dollars […] to tell our story — because Black history is American history.”
Acting on a proposal brought forth by 8th District Councilmember Al Austin, in February 2018 the Long Beach City Council requested that the city manager “work with community stakeholders to identify potential city-owned sites in Long Beach for an African American Cultural Center.” With $50,000 of seed money from the City of Long Beach, throughout 2019 city staff worked with the AACCLB advisory committee and a pair of consulting firms to facilitate a variety of community outreach activities (meetings, surveys, interviews, roundtables, etc.) to create a vision of what the cultural center might look like and how it would best serve the community.
According to the Preliminary Institutional Business Plan created during the 2019 visioning process, the AACCLB was advised to plan on an operating budget of $2.2 million per year (including paying the needed 17 or so full-time employees), only one-third of which is projected to come through earned revenue sources even when the cultural center is up and running. That means a lot of fundraising both now and later.
To that end, last fall the AACCLB invited Simpson to come on board and captain the ship. A local heavy-hitter when it comes to nonprofit fundraising — under his guidance, LBCAP tripled its staff and septupled its budget before he moved on to head the $30 million Miller Foundation in late 2019 — Simpson recognizes the scope of logistical challenges inherent to creating a multimedia space filled with everything from “exhibits which emphasize and encourage dialogue on race, reconciliation and healing” to collections featuring artifacts and highlighting the “life experiences of African-American heroes and sheroes, both famous and forgotten,” including residents who have made contributions to the arts, sciences, sports, and education — not to mention hosting an array of arts and educational programming and other events “to preserve, honor, and share [African-Americans’] rich heritage and culture,” along with information on matters as practical as home-buying and holistic health and dietary practices.
Funding challenges aside, the biggest obstacle so far has been finding a sufficient space. Simpson estimates that 15,000 sq. ft. is the minimum workable footprint (though this would probably be too small to do everything the AACCLB envisions), while the city manager’s final memorandum on the visioning process (dated Feb. 18, 2020) recommends a maximum footprint of 40,000 sq. ft. Viltz, the AACCLB’s facilities chair, says that unfortunately none of the seven or eight city-owned assets put forward so far has fit the bill, and so the AACCLB has expanded the search to the private sector.
Although the AACCLB is amenable to building from the ground up — even if this means a lengthier timeline, not to mention that locating an adequate lot may not be any easier than finding an existing spot — Viltz is hopeful that ground she’s already covered may eventually bear fruit. “There are a couple of spaces we’ve looked at that I haven’t given up on,” she says. “There’s always the possibility that something that isn’t available now but is maybe just sitting there that the owners decide to sell or lease.”
Simpson hopes getting the word out about the AACCLB’s plans may bring new options to the table. He notes that because fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic (such as a permanent increase in the percentage of employees working from home) has depreciated value of some commercial real estate, “It could be a good time for us [to find a home], because there’s a value proposition in partnering with the African American Cultural Center […] because now you’d have this amazing organization running programs and educating the city [from your commercial space].”
In the interim, one organization partnering with the AACCLB is the Bixby Knolls Business Improvement Association, enabling the AACCLB to offer a small variety of programming out of the EXPO Arts Center, including a Pan Afrikan Study Group, West African drum and dance classes, and various exhibits, such Forgotten Images’ The Roots of Slavery (through Feb. 27), featuring an extensive collection of artifacts from America’s darkest days presented as a meditation on how “the slave trade impacted American economics, the divide in social class, agriculture, human rights, and more.”
But this is only a glimpse of what the AACCLB envisions. And they’re in it for the long haul, because, as Simpson articulates, the project is simply too important not to manifest.
“This cultural center is not a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have if our next generation is to understand from whence they came and the struggles that were undergone and the fights that were taken on for us to have what we have and not take it for granted,” he says. “[…] “It’ll be a place to go that’s ours. It’s not a church, so you don’t have to worry about, ‘Well, I’m not religious’; it’s not a political or government institution, so you don’t have to worry about whether your politics fit; it’s a neutral space. It’s a cultural center that happens to have a Black origin or theme — but we’re teaching American history from a Black perspective.”
The African American Cultural Center of Long Beach welcomes inquiries of all sorts, from real estate opportunities and donations of any amount to class/event participants and potential volunteers. “If you believe in our vision,” says Simpson, “then tell us how you think you can contribute. Maybe you’re a retired teacher. Maybe you can be a docent for an exhibit. Maybe you’re a carpenter who can build us mobile walls. … I’d like to think there’s a place for everyone to come to the table and feel like their contribution is valued, so long as it fits our vision.”