Join the Institute for the Study of Los Angeles and their Scholar in Residence, Alison Rose Jefferson, M.H.C. | Ph.D. for a symposium via Zoom, titled “Promised Land, Hallowed Ground: Commemorative Justice and Making Change in Community Heritage Preservation in Southern California”, with invited guest speakers to discuss and respond to the context of American history and culture in relation to Belmar History + Art, a public history and art project in Santa Monica, California, on Saturday, March 20, 2021 from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m.

The Belmar History + Art project is a resonating multifaceted education, inspirational and remembrance civic commemorative justice project. It includes a context essay, outdoor exhibition, lesson plans, and community engagement programming. The project reconstructs, elucidates and reinserts a more complex American story about historical Black life in the South Santa Monica Beach neighborhoods before the Civic Center Campus expansion and Interstate 10 Freeway developments in the 1950s–60s back into the urban landscape of the city, the region and the nation. Alison Rose Jefferson is the project historian for this project. 

Register for this event here!

Alison Rose Jefferson’s Living the California Dream (Nebraska, 2020) examines how African Americans pioneered America’s “frontier of leisure” by creating communities and business projects in conjunction with their growing population in Southern California during the nation’s Jim Crow era. By presenting stories of Southern California African American oceanfront and inland leisure destinations that flourished from 1910 to the 1960s, Jefferson illustrates how these places helped create leisure production, purposes, and societal encounters.