By KIMBERLY ACEVEDO
Whether it was in the north or south, segregation was prevalent in America. The civil rights movement was documented well in the south. But, in the north, it was less noticed.
Patrick Graham, the former director of the Martin Luther King Center in Long Beach, spent three years researching Long Beach's community development and the Martin Luther King Center during the civil rights movement for his dissertation. He interviewed nearly 50 people, researched local board meeting minutes and meticulously read over 1,000 newspaper articles from 1960 to 1980 on the City of Long Beach's development.
Graham's dissertation, We've come this far by faith: The Long Beach Martin Luther King Center, Local Black Power and The Great Migration, 1964 to 1981, documents the growth of the local MLK Center and the community during the turbulent sixties.
Born and raised in Long Beach, Graham graduated from Long Beach High School in 1988. In 1992, he graduated from John C. Smith University in North Carolina, where he competed on a track scholarship and earned a bachelor's degree in marketing. Graham graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received a master's degree in Afro-American studies with an emphasis in media and policy in 1996. And, last August, Graham received his doctorate in American history with an emphasis in civil rights and community development from SUNY Stony Brook.
Graham's idea for the dissertation stemmed from questioning residents about why they moved to Long Beach, and why they had gotten involved with civil rights and the center. The center, which was originally located on Park Place in 1967, was founded by community activists, like James Gradon. He and other activists wanted a place for young African-Americans to learn about their cultural values, Graham said. While living in the south, Gradon had experienced the brutality of the Klu Klux Klan and white segregationists in Florida, he said. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Christian Light Baptist Church were also instrumental during the start of the center.
So many activists were for local community development, Graham said. It's one of the first things we should look at during those turbulent 60s.
Like Graham's mother, a majority of local African-Americans were from the south. Many were recruited for domestic work, Graham said. In the south, they experienced segregation, he said. When they came to Long Beach, they found it to be a similar situation.
Long Beach was still segregated and African-Americans could only get domestic jobs, he said. The remembrance of the southern experiences fostered a need for change, Graham said. While many residents tried to separate their experiences from the north and south, Graham believed there was a continuation of those experiences and the new residents depended on each other. The difference in Long Beach during the movement, he said, was the Jewish population. Many were very supportive of civil rights, Graham said.
While you had some that wanted to enforce segregation, you had others that still believed in Martin Luther King's dream of a color blind society, Graham said. A sense of history, he said, within the center, the community and its development fostered the dissertation. He compared it to the larger civil rights movements and made a connection of the local development and the national development.
Still, it was the history and voices of the center that spoke to Graham. In 1981, The Martin Luther King Center was relocated to Riverside Boulevard and Pine Street. What began as a good educational idea, slowly turned into a place of controversy. After a bad audit and controversy over an alleged lack of supervision, Graham was brought in as the director in September, 1997. He was only the second local resident to be named a director, and promised to remain for four years. The first local director was Leroy Conyers in 1968.
While serving as director, Graham pursued his doctorate until his term was complete in 2001. Under Graham's guidance, Nassau County returned some much-needed funding to the center. In the beginning, we used volunteers to provide staffing for the center and youth activities, he said.
During Graham's term, the community went through a major change. Community organizations, like the North Park Association, volunteered their time to the improvement of the center. Also, the center collaborated with community programs, like Project Challenge and the Long Beach Public Library. But the biggest change, he said, came from the center's outreach to the entire community rather than just the African-American community.
After three years of research, Graham said, his dissertation reinstalled a pride that his mother gave him in his southern roots. He is currently the director of the emergency financial assistance program at the Crisis Assistance Ministry in Charlotte, N.C.
Graham plans to present the Long Beach Public Library with a bound copy of the dissertation. In late February, Graham said he would like to present a lecture based on his studies. It's a story that anyone in Long Beach should know regardless of race or ethnicity.
