The African American Cultural Center of Long Beach Hopes to Fill an Obvious Void

By Greggory Moore, Columnist

God bless the child that’s got his own.

In June 2021, the Long Beach Public Library inadvertently highlighted a problem when they hosted an online presentation by Claudine Burnett on her new book, African Americans in Long Beach and Southern California: A History, as part of their Local History Lecture Series.

The problem had less to do with Burnett’s being white than with the fact that she found reason to write the book at all. A former Long Beach librarian who spent 25 years of poring over microfilm of city periodicals dating back to 1881 to compile the Long Beach History Index, Burnett realized how much information on the region’s Black history had been lost and wanted to help preserve and made readily available what was left. Impressed as she was by 2006’s The Heritage of African Americans in Long Beach: Over 100 Years, she saw this as only beginning to fill the void. (Edited by Indira Hale Tucker and Aaron L. Day in association with the African American Heritage Society of Long Beach (AAHSLB), The Heritage of African Americans in Long Beach — for which Burnett wrote a Foreword — was originally intended as Volume 1 of an “ongoing project,” but subsequent volumes have yet to be produced.)

Planning to fill that void is the African American Cultural Center of Long Beach (AACCLB), incorporated as a 501(c)3 in July 2020 with a mission is “to preserve, honor and celebrate the heritage and advance the culture of the Black/African American community in Long Beach and beyond” by housing an extensive array of exhibits, resources, and programming in a physical space befitting an international city.

The roots of the AACCLB reach back to 1988, when Max Viltz and her then-husband took part in a group trip to Egypt led by Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan. Moved by his exhortation that the members “go back to your hometowns and start study groups and share this information,” Viltz returned to Long Beach and helped found the African Study Group of Long Beach, which set up shop in a small storefront at 19th Street and Atlantic Avenue. Over the next 20 years the group conducted classes and cultural events there and elsewhere, including the Homeland Cultural Center, the Queen Mary, various parks, and even people’s homes.

Viltz’s involvement led to the creation

— Billie Holiday

of Village Treasures, an “African Gallery, Gift Shop & Boutique” she founded in 1997 to provide “tangible items to support the studies.”

But the need for a more prominent and permanent cultural center has become increasingly obvious in recent years, as conservative backlash against initiatives like critical race theory and the 1619 Project has motivated many teachers and school systems to shy away from issues of how past inequities continue to affect the present on both personal and societal levels.

“We don’t have our own institutions to teach our people, and we can’t wait for the school system to do it,” Viltz says. “There’s more information out there to eliminate [the teaching of Black history] from schools than there is about getting it in there. […] Part of the importance of helping young people understand [Black history] is that they don’t understand the [generational] trauma that has continued. Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome is what it’s called, and we have behaviors that happen because of things we don’t even understand. But it’s passed on. For most of us, our families didn’t tell us that history because it was so painful for them to even talk about it, and because there was such stigma to being thought of as an ex-slave or to have come from a family of exslaves.”

AACCLB President Darick Simpson, who was actively involved in youth mentoring even before he became executive director of the Long Beach Community Action Partnership (LBCAP) in 2006, concurs: “I had a student in the Long Beach Unified School District who [recently] told me about a teacher who said, ‘I’m not going to teach Black history because it’s too controversial and it could cause conflict.’ […] I’m hopeful that we can do something in lieu of the institutions that are paid for with our tax dollars […] to tell our story — because Black history is American history.”

Acting on a proposal brought forth by 8th District Councilmember Al Austin, in February 2018 the Long Beach City Council requested that the city manager “work with community stakeholders to identify potential city-owned sites in Long Beach for an African American Cultural Center.”

With $50,000 of seed money from the City of Long Beach, throughout 2019 [See Void, p. 13]