Once upon a time in America

Locals struggle to preserve Idlewild, once a thriving Michigan resort haven for the Black intellectual and cultural elite

It was a hot summer day in July 1954 when a police detective approached his friend, a young Detroit businessman, John O. Meeks, and asked him to ride with him up to the Idlewild resort in northwest Michigan.

At the time Meeks was a 31-year-old owner of a prosperous dry cleaning business and wild as a buck.

He had heard about the vacation resort as a playground for the Black rich and famous. "That was the word I got and wanted to come see this place," he says with a laugh.

After the three and a half hour ride from Detroit, when they approached the blinking light at the intersection of Broadway and US 10, they knew they had arrived.

"Traveling west on US 10, when you get to the blinking light you take a left and you're only three or four minutes from the beach," Meeks says.

It was the beach that captured the young Detroiter's fancy when he arrived on that sweltering Saturday afternoon. The beach was crowded with a thousand or more people; so crowded in fact, police were directing traffic.

Meeks fondly remembers the beach being filled with people of all ages sun bathing and swimming. There was a pool hall, a photography studio, a skating rink, Giles Hotel and the Flamingo Nightclub. Meeks understood it was the place to go for a weekend of fun, and it proved to be everything he had heard - and more.

"Man, on weekends people didn't even sleep," he recalls. "That was around its peek and it was definitely jumping."

Meeks, 80, fell in love with the community and never really left after that first weekend nearly 50 years ago. Now a longtime resident, he owns Morion's Motel in Idlewild.

It was called the "Black Eden." More than a playground for the Black intellectual and political elite, Idlewild offered a veritable paradise where the best and brightest of Black America came to escape from the daily humiliations of racial oppression. It was an exclusive resort whose hedonism was matched only by its breathtaking beauty.

During its prime, from about 1920 to the mid-1960s, Idlewild was a lifetime away from the drudgery of Jim Crow segregation. Nestled deep in the white pine woods of western Michigan, it is about 200 miles northwest of Detroit.

In its heyday, Idlewild hosted some of the most prominent African American political, intellectual and entertainment figures in this country's history. Patrons included W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Charles Chesnutt and Madame C.J. Walker. The followers of Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey came to strategize their plans for Black liberation. A range of entertainers - from Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, to the Temptations, B.B. King and Aretha Franklin - came too, performing before warm and friendly "home audiences."

Guests mainly came from Chicago, Cleveland and the Detroit area, but some also came from as far west as Kansas and Nebraska, as far south as Alabama and Texas, as far cast as New England and New York and as far north as Toronto.

What drew them to Idlewild was its uniqueness. Located in Lake County, which boasts 150 lakes, Idlewild had several of its own, complete with beaches. There were restaurants and motels, tennis courts, a softball field and horseback riding. It was a fisherman's and hunter's paradise. Three nightclubs sustained the resort's notorious night life. Most important, however, it was a place where Black men and women, as Francis X. Donnelly of the Detroit Free Press has written, "momentarily forgot the color of their skin and had the inalienable right to have a good time."

Ironically, Idlewild was established by two White entrepreneurs, Adelbert and Erastus Branch, in 1912. Scholars say the brothers saw a unique opportunity to start a resort for the "Best of the Colored Class," who, during the days of segregation, had few options when it came to getting away. According to Black Eden: The Idlewild Community by Lewis S. Walker and Ben C. Wilson, "They would be blacks who were hungry for land, and their ownership of a piece of resort property would be evidence that they had made the American Dream work for them."

"[The brothers] were very sincere and wanted to have a place where the prime movers in the Black community could come and relax and enjoy themselves and at the same time, allow other African Americans to rub elbows [with them] and get a sense of group consciousness," says Walker, a retired professor of sociology at Western Michigan University who owns property in Idlewild.

The Branches entered into a financial partnership with Wilbur Lemon of Chicago, along with several other associates, which allowed them to execute their plan successfully. The "group purchased nearly 2,700 acres of overcut timberland from lumber concerns and from a Michigan railroad company." According to literature from the time, most of the land was divided into small 25x100-foot plots, which sold for $35 each. Small bungalows were built on these modest properties.

In 1921, Lela and Herman Wilson, an African American couple from Chicago, purchased 80 acres of the land surrounding a lake. They later acquired an additional 320 acres and opened a hotel, a grocery store and the Paradise Night Club on Paradise Lake. By this time, the resort began to flourish.

"Idlewild was a place at one time where you could see up to 24,000 people on a summer weekend," says Walker, 66.

But a walk along Idlewild's dirt roads today tells a far different story. Instead of beaches crowded with pretty girls and cottages occupied by the well-heeled and cultural icons of the day, one is more likely to find cement-block houses and mobile homes filled with senior citizens. Where there were once 14 motels, nine night spots and six restaurants in the business district, there are now just five businesses - two small motels; a convenience store; the Red Rooster Lounge, a bar and grill; and a beauty parlor "specializing in damaged hair."

Like many African American businesses that thrived during segregation, Idlewild's success depended largely upon the laws and societal pressures that limited the options Blacks had to vacation elsewhere. But with the success of the Civil Rights Movement and integration opening up other vacation destinations, Idlewild began to wither on the vine.

The decline in vacationers, coupled with the local government's inability to market the resort properly, expedited its decline. By the mid-1960s Idlewild was a virtual ghost town.

Last year, the average age in Idlewild, which remains predominately Black, was 62, and the average income is less than $10,000 a year. The year-round population is only about 784 people, which can grow to as many as 6,000 during tourist season from Memorial Day to the first week in November.

Those tourist numbers pale in comparison to the tens of thousands that the resort regularly welcomed at its height.

But its residents and faithful vacationers are determined that it not be forgotten; there is simply too much history there, they say. "You keep your jewels and you keep them polished," says Mildred A. Kyles, 63. "We already lost Martha's Vineyard and Hilton Head."

Kyles, president of Detroit Idlewilders, Inc., says Blacks were prohibited from going anywhere else in Michigan to lay on the beach, party and have teas, so Idlewild, like the Vineyard and American Beach in Florida, filled an important niche.

Her group is one of a half-dozen regional organizations started by veterans of Idlewild summers who are fighting to keep the resort open. The 65-member group takes joint vacations, holds fundraisers to provide scholarships to Black students and performs other charitable works in an effort to raise the profile of Idlewild.

Every June, the Mid-Michigan Idlewilders put on the Idlewild Jazz, Blues and Food Festival, which is in its fifth year. In August there is the 2003 Idlewild Jazz Festival. Now in its second year, it's sponsored by the Idlewild Foundation. According to the events' organizers, more than 2,000 people attended each of the festivals last year, making them the most popular events in the area each summer.

"People are eager to visit here and have a quality place to stay and all the accommodations that go with spending a nice day out of the city," says Meeks, whose motel only has 17 rooms. "Three years ago we had Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis here for a book signing and the Contours performed here [in 1998 and 1999]."

Still, many say it's going to take a lot more than fundraisers and festivals to make the community a more viable and competitive vacation destination for African Americans again.

Last year, a Detroit News report noted that Yates Township (where Idlewild is located) sits in Lake County, where one of every five residents lives in poverty, the highest rate in the state. The article pointed out that at different times since 1980, the community tried to build a museum, entertainment complex, mini mall, sports hall, convention center, specialty shops, amphitheater, horse stables, 100-room hotel and a 9-hole golf course. However, companies stayed away, saying the area remains too far from metro areas and interstates to entice visitors.

There was also the issue of residents failing to agree on how to market Idlewild. Some wanted to try to recapture its glorious past as a world-class resort; others were less ambitious and merely wanted to attract industry to strengthen the tax base. Efforts by the Yates Township Board of Trustees to raise the property millage have been rejected by locals seven times in a row. The original Chamber of Commerce went out of business in the late 1990s, so Meeks founded the African American Chamber of Commerce in 2001.

Mabel Williams, a 71-year-old widower, moved to Idlewild from Ann Arbor in 1972 and is now the deputy clerk of Yates Township. Williams and her husband moved to Idlewild after hearing about it from friends. She says although people in the community would like to recapture the splendor of old Idlewild, they are not working to bring it back to what it was.

"We just want to make it a wonderful retirement community for those who want that or a community where young people won't have to leave in order to get employment," she says. "We want to make it a place where Black people can come and be proud of their roots."

Although he recites a litany of developments that indicates an effort by Idlewilders to rehabilitate the resort from new ownership of a local bar and grill to 26 new homes starting at $100,000 being built in the area - Meeks acknowledges the community is struggling because of a lack of business savvy and foresight on the part of community leaders.

"Had Idlewild had business finesse it could have survived longer," he says. "But the government was not visionary."

Ronald Jemel Stephens, a professor of anthropology and geography at the University of Nebraska, is the author of the book Idlewild: The Black Eden of Michigan. He says while town officials were not adequately prepared for the dramatic change in fortune, it would be unfair to place all the blame on them.

"A tragic reality is that the township suffered from a lack of vision also from the seasonal residents who owned businesses there," he says. "They failed to reinvest in their own businesses. If something broke down they didn't repair or replace it."

Stephens notes that as time went on businesses and housing codes standards evolved, and many of the business owners failed to keep up with the changes and new demands. "This resulted in buildings being non-functional, inoperative or even condemned. So [vacationers] elected to go other places."

And if people wanted to point to the real abandonment, it actually came from the top flight entertainers who the local night club owners could no longer afford, he says. "If you wanted to see a good show that you had grown accustomed to over the years, you simply had to go elsewhere," Stephens says.

Wilson, the co-author and director of Africana Studies at Western Michigan University, says it will take a collaborative effort among the state and local government, and Idlewild supporters, to restore the resort and make it competitive again.

"Even though the resort was built during the era of Jim Crow restrictions, all Michiganders should contribute to the continued existence of Idlewild," Wilson says. "Of course the resort will never be what it used to be, but it can be a combination historical preservation site and resort."

Folks should also consider the idea of a rhythm and blues [venue], for a year-round basis," he says. "We're talking about something that would contribute to the tax base of that community.

"Something has to occur where you get the movers and shakers to bring about the revitalization of the place."

Trevor W. Coleman is a Detroit area writer.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated May/Jun 2003
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