The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 167

ion by night. You could eat shrimp, drink whiskey, dance your heart out. Blacks owned everything and ran everything. Patrons came from Jacksonville, Atlanta, even Alabama, driving Model Ts or packed in old school buses "yellow hounds," they were called as many as 10,000 people on a single summer weekend. "The nightclub had a troupe that were sissies you know, homosexuals and they put on a show," says Ernestine Latson Smith, whose grandfather was also a founder of the Afro-American Life Insurance Com shore, shifting dunes and swarms of migrating butterflies that come in autumn.

Most important, it is a legacy one that MaVynee is devoting her life to keeping alive. Abraham Lincoln Lewis, her great-grandfather, bought the first piece of property here in 1935, the same year she was born. One of seven founders of Jacksonville's Afro-American Life Insurance Company, Lewis envisioned a retreat for employees, and a great democracy. American Beach has evolved to be many things, but it is not exclusive. A former maid Instead, forced into the spotlight again, she will smile and perform.

She carries a file folder in the same hand that cradles her 10-pound bundle of dreadlocks, the same hand whose nails spiral an astounding 14 inches. Now she opens the file and begins to distribute photocopies of an article on her hometown a precious stretch of ocean-front property, one of the last predominantly black beaches in the country. "Do you know about American Beach?" she says, nearly shouting to be heard above the buzz. baby, let me tell you Five minutes later, she is gone, off to watch some schoolchildren dance at the bandstand. The peace is fleeting.

"Oh, my God," a teenager cries. "Can I touch your hair?" iVi pany. But just as segregation had made American Beach thrive, the integration of the 1960s nearly killed it. The crowds thinned as blacks tasted what had been denied them all these years, businesses died, summer cottages fell into disrepair and were abandoned. The whole place began to look a little seedy.

By the '70s, white developers bulldozed what was to become the sprawling Amelia Island Plantation to the south, and they eyed American Beach with lust in their hearts. A promotional brochure from the time predicted that American Beach would soon be "unrecognizable as it changes from 'black beach' to 'beach' and blends into and is absorbed by the growing island around it." Among their plans: get the motel, refurbish it and create a dormitory for resort workers. It never happened. The company went bankrupt, then changed hands. To MaVynee, it was divine intervention.

"Thank you, Mama!" she shouts, throwing her head back and laughing to the sky. Since she returned to this place in 1975, inheriting an ocean-front home from her grandfather, she has made it her full-time mission to protect American Beach physically, culturally, historically. Each year, she has grown more radical in her quest. "It used to be Marvyne before I got disgusted with Reagan and took the out What that man did to the environment God!" SHE RISES WITH THE sun and greets the day with a stroll on the clean, coarse sand. It is late February, dreary and drizzly and cold, the crowds of vacationers long gone, and she wraps herself in a poncho and the bliss of solitude.

She is one of the few year-round residents at American Beach. MaVynee (mar-VEEN) Betsch is the unofficial mayor here, certainly its goodwill ambassador, a pacifist warrior in the battle to preserve it. On the southern tip of Amelia Island, 30 miles north of Jacksonville, American Beach is flanked by the Ritz-Carlton and Amelia Island Plantation exclusive, expensive resorts that have gobbled up the dunes and woods for tennis courts and championship golf courses. Amelia Island, once a pirates' haven, later home to two plantations, has evolved into a playground Vft aVynee Betsch is admittedly left of left: a vegetarian, pacifist, eco-feminist, animal-loving loner who gave up her fortune and a successful operatic career abroad. Now, at 59, she is admittedly left of left: a vegetarian, pacifist, eco-feminist, animal-loving loner who owns little more than the clothes on her back.

Years ago she gave away her fortune more than three-quarters of a million dollars to some 60 causes, most of them involving animals and insects, and lost her grandfather's house to inheritance taxes. A handbook for butterfly watchers is dedicated to her: "For MaVynee, a true friend of butterflies and all nature." These days she lives in a used motor home with no running water and a small generator. She bathes in the ocean and dresses in flip-flops, sweat pants and a for the well-to-do. When MaVynee stands at the water's edge, she can see the swank condos and million-dollar mansions looming in the distance. "I love to defy all laws of economics," MaVynee says, beaming.

"I look at the same ocean, feel the same breeze, and they're paying $400 a night to hear their neighbor's toilet flush." American Beach is an unincorporated dot of a town, a mere 200 acres and 125 homes, from ramshackle to elegant. It is a respite for the wealthy and working-class alike. It is stunning twisted oaks, expansive lives in the same neighborhood with a retired teacher and a state Supreme Court justice. In the '40s and '50s, black beach-goers came in droves. Segregation prohibited them from sharing "whites-only" beaches; if they tried, they were harassed and even beaten, sometimes by police.

For a time, American Beach was the only ocean-front playground for blacks in all of Nassau and Duval counties. And it was far more than just a stretch of sand there were restaurants, nightclubs, a candy store, vacation cottages, a motel. You could rent a swimsuit by day and listen to Ray Charles perform in the pavil.