But the single most critical factor in the community’s decline was the death of Allen Allensworth in 1914. On September 13, Allensworth was in the foothill city of Monrovia to speak at a church. Shortly after he left the train station, crossing the street, he was struck by a speeding motorcycle and died the next morning. Riding the motorcycle were two white youths, E. S. White and W. F. Ray, who claimed that an excited Allensworth was responsible for the accident. But after the colonel’s family filed a legal complaint, the two were arrested in late September. After funeral services at the Second Baptist church of Los Angeles, with a military honor guard of both races, Colonel Allensworth was interred at the Rosedale Cemetery on September 18, 1914.

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The Allensworth community was devastated. Although Payne and Overr assumed the leadership of the colony, no one could replace the colonel. Without Allensworth’s spiritual guidance and leadership, the community began to disintegrate. By 1920, the two leading figures, William Payne and Josephine Allensworth, had left the area. Payne accepted a teaching job at El Centro, while Mrs. Allensworth returned to Los Angeles to live with her daughter, Nella. The exodus continued during the years of the Great Depression and World War II.

Henry Singleton painted a bleak and disappointing picture of the community’s decline during this period: any Negro that wanted to work in plowing, in potatoes or the grapes grown in Delano could just move into Allensworth, move into one of the empty homes. They could stay, no rent, no nothing, nobody owned it. Some of the houses were good, others were falling down. It was a sort of a camping ground.

The lure of jobs in Oakland and in other war industry sites further decimated the town’s population, and in 1966, arsenic was found its water supply. This seemed to sound the death knell for Allensworth. Yet the colonel’s dream would not die. Beginning in 1969, various community organizations, led by Ed Pope and Eugene and Ruth Lasartemay, expressed interest and support in creating a state historic site at Allensworth. By 1973, the state had acquired the land, and the advisory committee, under the direction of Dr. Kenneth Goode, began its work. In May 1976, the state Department of Parks and Recreation approved the plans to develop the park, and on October 6, 1976, the park was indeed dedicated. So the colonel’s dream, if not his colony, endures.

When the Department of Parks and Recreation was collecting oral histories during the 1970s as a prelude to establishing the park, however, several of the former residents who were interviewed wondered why anyone was interested in Allensworth. After all, hadn’t the colony failed? Why commemorate an unsuccessful venture?

While the colony existed as symbol of hope for less than 20 years, it assumes greater significance in the context of the political and racial pre-World War I America. From that era of segregation, characterized by vitriolic racism and the extralegal atrocities of Judge Lynch, arose the ambiguous leadership of Booker T. Washington. His policies of accommodation to white racism, mixed with his exhortations for black self-help and virtuous living, were clarion calls for much of the African-American community. Certainly many early Allensworth residents agreed with Washington when he said: One farm bought, one house built, one home sweetly and intelligently kept, one man who is the largest taxpayer or who has the largest banking account, one school or church maintained, one factory running successfully, one garden profitably cultivated, one patient cured by a Negro doctor, one sermon well preached, one life clearly lived, will tell more in our favor than all the abstract eloquence that can be summoned to plead our cause.

The community of Allensworth was an indirect result of Washington’s philosophy of racial self-help. There, black men and women who controlled their land and destiny could prove to white America than, left to their own devices, they could create businesses, churches and communities that would contribute to black America’s rise to greatness.

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