Black History

• BLACK HISTORY MONTH •

The Francisca Building on Dayton Street was the first commercial building commissioned by an African American for occupancy by African American businesses. The Lundy family at the Cawston Ostrich Farm in South Pasadena.

Collection reveals city’s turbulent past, hopeful future

By Luke Netzley Pasadena Weekly Deputy Editor

As Black History Month comes to an end, it is important to remember that recognizing and celebrating the history of the Black community in Pasadena is not a practice that should be reserved for one sole month of the year.

The lives and narratives of Pasadena residents should never be excluded from the history of the city based upon the color of their skin, and the Black History Collection at the Pasadena Museum of History is ensuring that these stories are not lost to the sands of time.

“History is a guide to the trend of how life progresses for the better,” said Adrian Panton, a research and education volunteer with the museum and lecturer on Black history in Pasadena. “It explains how we got to where we are, and it enlightens.”

Born from a Pasadena History Museum outreach effort to assemble material for a documentary called “The Changing Rose” in 1984, the museum’s Black History Collection is home to letters, photographs, family records, property deeds and other materials, many of which date back to early 20th century prior to the Second Great Migration, that help reveal the history of the city’s African American community.

“The museum had acquired the vast majority of this material from people interested in making contributions and organized by material donated by Blacks or that referred to Blacks,” Panton said. “The material was all there. It just hadn’t been explored.”

As an African American Pasadena resident, Panton was curious about the history of the city’s Black community and started his journey by learning about the Tournament of Roses.

“The city of Pasadena always had a float, and a city employee was always the queen of that float,” Panton explained. “In 1958, a very light-skinned Black woman was chosen to be the queen for that float, but it wasn’t discovered that she was African American until shortly before the tournament.”

Once news broke that the woman was African American, the mayor refused to meet the queen and the city canceled the float for that year.

As he delved deeper into the archives, Panton found that the stories he heard continued to shed light on the darker pieces of Pasadena’s past, particularly regarding the city’s school system.

In the mid to late 1960s, the Pasadena school district was performing poorly and the city of La Cañada decided to create its own district.

“A lot of white families left the Pasadena school district because they didn’t want kids going to what they thought were lower-performing schools,” Panton said.

In 1970, Federal Judge Manuel L. Real issued a desegregation order against the school district that lasted until the end of the decade. At the time of the order, Pasadena was the only school district west of the Mississippi that had a desegregation order to compel integrated schools.

While the Black History Collection highlights several cases of ingrained and institutional racism in the city’s history, it also projects the belief that learning from the past can change the present and shape the future.

One of Panton’s favorites stories from the collection, for instance, documents the construction of the Francesca Building on Dayton Street. Built in 1923, the Francesca Building was the first commercial building in Pasadena that had been commissioned by an African American.

“That was significant given that era,” Panton said. “Pasadena was not known as a progressive city, and the fact that a Black person was able to get a commercial building constructed and put into operation during the 1920s was so important.”

The Francesca Building’s development marked a notable early step toward a more progressive and equal Pasadena, a path that Panton sees paved by many of the city’s institutions today.

“At JPL we now have male and female Black astronauts, and coming from a time of slavery, in a really short period of time we have become such an integral part of society,” Panton said. “History shows that life is not static. We move on, and as far as the history of this country, the general theme is that we are moving forward toward a better environment and way of living with one another than what has existed in the past.”

Pasadena Museum of History’s Black History Collection WHERE: Pasadena Museum of History, 470 W Walnut Street, Pasadena WHEN: 1 to 4 p.m. Thursday to Sunday COST: Free INFO: pasadenahistory.org