American Beach: How "Progress" Robbed a Black Town--and Nation--of History, Wealth, and Power [Paperback]

Russ Rymer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 8, 1999

"First we had segregation. Then integration. Then disintegration."-- resident, American Beach

Avoiding the easy clichés of victimhood and oppression, award-winning journalist Russ Rymer brings to life the stark conflict between whites and blacks in the United States today. Through three connected lives in and around northeast Florida's black resort town of American Beach--an unarmed black motorist killed by a white policeman; the great-grandfather of Florida's first black millionaire, who lives on the beach with next to nothing; and prominent Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston--Rymer presents a vision of a nation where the futures of both races are as linked as their histories, where the lost record of heroic black enterprise and prominence offers a key to the struggles of every modern American.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Compelling and refreshing, but don't underestimate its shock value." -- -- Emerge

"Filled with moving and often terrifying stories, fascinating history and vivid portraits. [American Beach] is a model of what a serious, sustained conversation on race might be, a conversation in which the participants were willing to finger the jagged grain of race and American history, perhaps discovering in the process the future of us all." -- Chicago Tribune

"These stories strike at the core of who we are as a nation, caught as we are in the vise grip of race, and between development and progress and our traditions and past." -- New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Russ Rymer is a journalist who has written for The New Yorker, Harper's, and the New York Times. His first book, Genie, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Los Angles.

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (December 8, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060930896
• ISBN-13: 978-0060930899
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,115,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Shared Values, January 17, 2001

By 

E. Eggen "eeggen" (Pensacola, FL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: American Beach: How "Progress" Robbed a Black Town--and Nation--of History, Wealth, and Power (Paperback)

Russ Rymer has composed a series of three essays bound together by a theme of black cultural identity and its often sad conflict with a dominant (or at least more assertive) white culture.

The major essay, composing over half of the book, is the story of MaVynee Betsch. She is a rather eccentric older women who has taken as her life's cause the preservation of a former beach resort of the black middle and upper class. The resort was developed by her father, A.L. Lewis, the millionaire owner of a black insurance business from the 1920s to the 1950s. Rymer, who is white, does a good job of developing the relevance of the resort to the black culture of the time, while providing the historical context for its existence. Both Mr. Lewis's insurance company and the beach resort were the results of white exclusion of blacks, and both met their demise with the legal end of that exclusion. Miss Betsch can't save the insurance company, but she makes amazing strides at preserving American Beach. The essay is long, with many apparent digressions, but the author's sympathy for the Miss Betsch and her amazing character carry it along.

The main essay is preceded by an account of the tragic end to the life of a 33-year-old black man, Dennis Wilson, by a policeman's bullet at a traffic stop. Mr. Rymer develops the man's background and the events leading up to the sad ending as well as its effect on the survivors, both in Mr. Wilson's family and among the policemen involved. Its place in the book as the lead essay is to set the tone of conflict between two cultures, black and white, that basically have the same dreams and values. The story has been and is being replayed in communities all over the country and is now becoming a public policy issue known as racial profiling. To me, Rymer's point is that whites must make an effort to view the issue from the perspective of black people.

The third essay is the best in the book, and is worth reading by itself. It addresses the preservation of the town of Eatonville in central Florida, which has become a symbol of celebration of black American culture. Mr. Rymer compares it with the commercial effort of the Disney conglomerate to develop the planned community of Centennial nearby. Centennial attempts to recreate the past, while Eatonville's citizens succeed in preserving their past. The story again points out the shared values of the two cultures, and the importance of preserving the black culture.

This is a book well worth reading.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Disney vs. democracy, February 8, 2003

By 

Rennie Petersen (Copenhagen, Denmark) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: American Beach: How "Progress" Robbed a Black Town--and Nation--of History, Wealth, and Power (Paperback)

I have very mixed feelings about this book.

On one hand the book is very well written by an author who is obviously very intelligent. (He had me feeling intellectually challenged from time to time, and I consider myself to be a pretty bright person.) He presents, again and again, extremely thought-provoking ideas and profound comments about modern society. And in presenting his biting analysis of today's society he provides glimmers of hope that things can be changed for the better.

On the other hand, I found this book to be very depressing. The descriptions of the sins of the past, in the form of slavery and racial segregation and violence against blacks, are chilling. Today's problems, with lingering discrimination and the commercialization of American society, are also saddening. Sometimes I took a break from reading because the book made me so unhappy.

"American Beach" is a collection of four stories, three short ones and one quite long one. All but the last story are based on Amelia Island on the east coast of Florida next to the Georgia border, where the towns of Fernandina Beach and American Beach are. (The last story is based in Eatonville on the outskirts of Orlando, Florida.) And all but the first of the four stories has racial conflicts as a primary theme.

But Mr. Rymer makes it clear that today's racial problems, serious as they are, are not the biggest problems faced by blacks or by American society in general. He sees big business and it's influence on everything to be a greater source of apathy and alienation and disenfranchisement and environmental destruction.

In the view of Mr. Rymer, unbridled capitalism and the "culture of the corporation" are breaking down the values that the founding fathers stood for and that many generations of Americans up until WW II fought for, such as democracy. As an example he tells about the Disney-owned town of Celebration which proclaims itself to be the reincarnation of the old-fashioned American town, but which requires residents to sign a contract in which they let Disney operate the town without them, the residents, having any significant influence!

One of the author's claims is that cultural poverty can be worse than economic poverty. Blacks are especially hard hit by cultural poverty, having lost their roots when they were abducted from Africa. Black attempts to create their own culture often resulted in their best creations being usurped by the dominant white society and their less fortunate attempts being ridiculed by the whites.

But American society in general lacks roots, being a melting pot society. Added to this is the rise in the power of the corporations, who can transform functioning towns into ghettos on the edge of holiday resorts for the rich, and can commercialize and thus de-fang every kind of cultural protest. Bob Dylan becomes Muzak and street gangs and gun-toting rappers become movie fodder and hit entertainers.

Consumer capitalism has turned culture and even history into proprietary products, merchandise for the masses. And very few, other than Mr. Rymer and a few of the people he writes about in "American Beach", have even noticed the danger.

Highly recommended.

PS. I read the hardcover book, which has the subtitle "A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory". The paperback edition has the subtitle "How Progress Robbed a Black Town--And Nation--Of History, Wealth, and Power". I'm guessing both subtitles were dreamed up by the publishers' marketing departments in attempts to sell the book to people who want to read about American race conflicts. Shame on them.

Rennie Petersen