MaVynee Oshun Betsch: Beach Lady

written by Michael Gergeni

A history of environmentalism, environmental struggles for justice, strife and unrest for a more environmentally conscious world is never complete without the contributions of Black environmentalists. Too often, conversations about environmentalism and conservationism overlook their contributions. This is why we know the John Muirs, Jane Goodalls, Teddy Roosevelts, and Aldo Leopolds, but not as many people know the story of the Beach Lady, MaVynee Betsch.

MaVynee Betsch was born January 13th, 1935 in Jacksonville, Florida, into a Black family that was wealthy and well-known in the South for founding the oldest African-American beach resort on a piece of coastline a few miles north of Jacksonville named American Beach. She was trained as an opera singer when she was a young adult at Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music, and she subsequently gave opera performances all over the world, but mostly in Europe. But it is when she came back when she truly became the name she was affectionately given – the Beach Lady.

A little while after Hurricane Dora struck Northeastern Florida in 1964, she returned from her successful opera career of ten years to her hometown in

Florida and settled back down. At the time, it was not allowed for African Americans and white Americans to share a beach due to various Jim Crow restrictions, and American Beach was a rare place where Black people could come over to the Florida coastline without any of those restrictions.

And come over they did. Not only was it an incredibly popular vacation spot for thousands of Black Americans since its inception in 1935, but it featured some really premier talent – the likes of jazz legend Duke Ellington, home run king Hank Aaron, writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, Joe Louis, Ray Charles, A. Phillip Randolph, and many more. Visitors had access to one of Florida’s largest dune systems, including a 60ft dune that Betsch called “NaNa”. But over time, in part from the hurricane and in part from the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the beach fell into disuse and many of the businesses there boarded up. As a large part of African American culture at the time was built up on the exclusion that segregation caused, desegregation made other locations finally available, but it meant that the appeal of American Beach would begin to fade.

Businesses left and populations diminished, but MaVynee Betsch remained committed to the preservation of this beach. She invested all of her career earnings, about $750,000, back into environmental organizations and preservation funds, sold her family home and began living on the beach. Her inheritance went to its upkeep and preservation. Her life as preservationist would start with this grand swing.

She vehemently opposed Reagan’s environmental policies, even dropping the “R” from her birth name, Marvyne, and adding an “E” at the end to honor the environment. As land developers offered mind-boggling sums of money for American Beach’s “hot property”, Betsch stayed strong and did not budge. She planted trees everywhere and gave historical tours to keep her family’s legacy alive. Her preservation efforts were widely successful, not just at American Beach, but for all the fifty-odd environmental associations she was benefactor or member of.

In 2002, however, she was diagnosed with cancer, and had to begin living indoors. But that still didn’t stop her from pursuing another ambitious project: opening a museum for the history of American Beach. Though she never saw its completion in her lifetime, it opened joyfully, and permanently, in 2014. The Beach has now become a National Park Service Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, and the “NaNa” dune is now owned and protected by the NPS as well.

MaVynee Betsch once claimed that when she died, she would come back as butterfly. On the day the American Beach Museum opened on September 6th, 2014, the sun split the clouds and orange butterflies fluttered nearby, greeting all the visitors almost as a welcome from the Beach Lady herself.