Betsch, MaVynee 1935–

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MaVynee Betsch 1935–

Environmental activist

MaVynee Betsch is affectionately known as “the Beach Lady” for her emotional attachment and civic dedication to American Beach, a small parcel of Atlantic Ocean waterfront that is the last surviving coastal community of African Americans in the state of Florida. Located at the northeast tip of the state near Jacksonville, American Beach was established on Amelia Island in the 1930s by Betsch’s great-grandfather as a resort community for African Americans. Though she herself grew up amidst great wealth and privilege, Betsch gave much of her inheritance away to environmental causes, and since the mid-1980s has slept on the beach on a chaise lounge. She is considered American Beach’s unofficial mayor, and has fought tenaciously to keep the growing popularity of luxury oceanfront resorts from eradicating its boundaries entirely. “Black folks used to own all the islands from Savannah to Jacksonville after the Civil War,” she told Gerry Volgenau in an article for the Kentucky Messenger-Inquirer. “And we’d still have them if white folks hadn’t discovered golf.”

Betsch’s life is indelibly intertwined with her past. Her great-grandfather, Abraham Lincoln Lewis, whose mother had been born into slavery, was one of the first black millionaires in the United States. As a young man in Jacksonville, Lewis founded the first insurance agency in the entire state. In time, he emerged as one of the leading citizens of Jacksonville and its thriving African-American community. Despite their unprecedented wealth, Jacksonville’s minority community was still subject to the same discriminatory Jim Crow laws that kept blacks and whites officially segregated throughout the South. In response, they simply founded their own institutions, such as the Lincoln Golf and Country Club. By the 1930s, Lewis had bought up acreage on Amelia Island and Fernandina Beach. These parcels of land would become American Beach.

A Pampered Heiress

Betsch was born in 1935, the same year that American Beach became Florida’s first beach open to African Americans. Her mother—Lewis’s granddaughter Mary—had married John Betsch, and both worked for the Afro-American Life Insurance Company, which grew to become the state’s largest private employer of blacks. Betsch’s family included a brother, John Jr., and a sister, Johnetta. All were tutored in music at home, and Betsch had started piano lessons even before she was enrolled in elementary school. As a teen, she emerged as a musical prodigy, and decided to study piano at Oberlin College in Ohio. When she went to see the Verdi opera Aida in Cleveland during her sophomore year, she changed her course of study to voice. After graduating in 1955, she sailed for Europe on an ocean liner with plans to launch her singing career there first.

Betsch studied voice in Paris, and usually ran through the funds her mother sent her by the middle of the month. After establishing herself in West Germany, she became an accomplished singer of lieder, the nineteenth-century songs written in the German vernacular by composers such as Robert Schumann and

At a Glance…

Born 1935, in Jacksonville, FL; daughter of John (an attorney and insurance executive) and Mary (a bookkeeper and insurance executive) Betsch, Education: Received degree in music from Oberlin College, 1955.

Career: Professional singer in West Germany, late-1950s~1965; environmental activist in Florida.

Addresses: Office —c/o Fernandina Beach Post Office, Fernandina Beach, FL 32034.

Franz Schubert, and was feted in concert halls in all the major German cities. She made her opera debut in Braunschweig in 1959, and went on to earn effusive reviews for her interpretations of Salome and Carmen, among others standards. Germans viewed Betsch as exotic, calling her the Halbnegrin, or “demi-negress,” in the newspaper reviews, though she recalled being treated kindly, if somewhat unusually. “I would walk down the street and everything would stop,” she told Russ Rymer in his 1998 book, American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory.

Returned Home

Betsch has said that there were pressures for longer and longer engagements at this stage in her career, and she did not want to be tied down by contracts. So in 1965, with her mother ill, she returned home to Jacksonville. A few years later, Betsch was devastated by the destruction of the family home—built by Abraham Lewis—by the city in order to make room for a hospital expansion. Much of the opulent Sugar Hill was razed as well. In a new neighborhood outside the city, she cultivated a spectacular garden at her grandfather’s home. Both her mother and grandfather died within a month of each another in 1975, and Betsch then inherited a great deal of money. But her health had been troubled since she returned from Europe. Diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she underwent a hysterectomy, but still suffered pain, and doctors believed the cancer might have spread to her colon. Irate, she removed herself from their care and decided to embark upon her own course of treatment, which included an organic diet. “I was real sick then. I didn’t let anybody know about it,” she told Rymer. She spent the next five years at the beach, for along with her double inheritance, she had also been bequeathed a share in one of the first resort homes built there. She knocked out all of its interior walls and painted everything blue and orange. “That house was like I was returning to my own inner psyche, my own inner being,” she told Rymer. “I just loved being inside it. I loved the view. I loved how every room had a breeze, after I knocked out the walls… That house healed me.”

Betsch claimed it was her illness that forced her to re-evaluate her life and its purpose. Then one day at her house, she saw her oleander bush covered in butterflies, who were using it as a gathering spot before their migration; she took it as a good omen and immediately began to feel whole again. Grateful, she began giving her money away to what she believed had rescued her—nature. “It’s a state of mind. I think everyone should have a life-threatening something-or-other,” she told Rymer. “Because then you don’t take it all for granted anymore.”

Gave Fortune Away

Betsch began sending checks to various environmental causes. She funded butterfly studies, seal-saving expeditions, and rainforest reclamation projects. Scientists even dedicated a butterfly textbook to her. By this time, Betsch’s sister Johnetta Cole had emerged as a prominent anthropologist, and would become president of Spelman College. When Cole and her brother decided to sell the American Beach home they co-owned, Betsch moved into rooms at the headquarters of the Afro-American Life Insurance Company in 1980. She spent the next five years there, and continued to give away her money. She showed Rymer the room where she had lived, which was wallpapered with the canceled checks of her donated money. But Betsch’s cousin, James L. Lewis, had inherited the reins of the business, and it floundered. He gambled and was even arrested for drug trafficking, and Betsch was forced to move out by its new non-family-member president in 1985. She was fifty years old, and had just #70 to her name.

Betsch remembered how the beach had saved her once before, and headed there. At first, she walked all night because she was afraid of being mugged, and slept on porches of empty homes in the morning. But summer residents—many of whom had inherited their cottages from grandparents who had known Abraham Lincoln Lewis, or remembered Betsch as one of Jacksonville’s most accomplished daughters—began helping her out by giving her money or food. The people who had purchased Lewis’s original waterfront home allowed her to sleep on its beach, and others even asked her to housesit. Newcomers wondered who she was, for by this time Betsch, who stands six feet in height, had six feet of dreadlocked hair that she carried in a hair net near her waist the size of a beach ball. She decorated it with seashells and political buttons, and the fingernails on one hand were over a foot long.

Johnetta Cole began sending #150 a month, #25 of which Betsch donated to her pet causes. At one point, Cole decided to buy her sister a small motor home, which Betsch then turned into a makeshift museum stocked with reading materials, organized into file folders, on subjects ranging from the sea turtle to Jacksonville history. Betsch leaves it unlocked, so anyone can come in to study. She is the tour guide for American Beach’s stop on Florida’s African-American Heritage Trail, which includes the home of Dr. Mary McLeod-Bethune, who once worked as a sales agent for Lewis’s insurance agency.

Crusader to Save Historic Parcel

More importantly, Betsch has become a crusader to save American Beach—its important heritage as well as its priceless shoreline—from luxury condominium development. She is a regular presence at the meetings of the Fernandina City Commission, the Port Commission, and Nassau County Commission. Considered the unofficial head of the movement to save American Beach, she has battled to have it included on the National Register of Historic Places. In the 1970s, a luxury home development called Amelia Island Plantation was built by the same company that had created Georgia’s Hilton Head, and its popularity aroused the interest of other developers. Betsch is not as confounded by what she feels is the greed and rapacious-ness of developers as she is by the willingness of people to pay top dollar for such condominiums. As she fumed to Rymer: “So, here comes Mrs. von Snooty Snooty with all her money, and where does she want to live? In a place named ‘Summer’ or ‘Palms’ or ‘Ocean,’ in a house that looks just like the one next door and the one next door to that… You’d think they’d want to keep some trees for privacy, or novelty, or at least for some shade. But no, they cut ’em down and hole up in the heat with the air conditioner….”

Between 1994 to 1997, Betsch fought to save what was called the Harrison Tract, a parcel of land given to a man named Harrison by the king of Spain in late 1700s. Her great-grandfather bought it, but left it undeveloped, and her drug-trafficking cousin then sold it to speculators. The tract is rich in Spanish moss and twisted live oak, both of which would have been eradicated for luxury homes and a golf course. It would also wedge American Beach between two expensive resort developments. She contacted biologists, government lobbyists, the Army Corps of Engineers, and anyone else she thought could help her save the Harrison Tract. When she spoke at a 1995 meeting, according to Rymer, she told county officials and the developers, “All along the coast you will not see a black face from Charleston south. White developers have by devious means gotten all that land along the coast…Oh, they said very friendly things…but all that land was owned by blacks, and they have slowly like a cancer just bought it up bit by bit, until now they own us, at American Beach. It’s not fair.” When her five-minute allotment ran out, others rose to give her theirs.

Betsch failed in her bid to save the Harrison Tract, and the resort was built. A large ber m of landscaping and barbed wire separates it from American Beach, and the developers placed their warehouses and service buildings adjacent to Betsch’s beach. The new development has increased property taxes for the American Beach families, some of which are still owned by prominent black Floridians, including a member of the state’s Supreme Court. Sundays at American Beach continue to attract a large crowd of African-American college students from Jacksonville, prompting nearby white residents to complain; police officers stand guard to keep that alleged rowdiness in line.

American Beach is considered such a unique place that it was the subject of two books in the late 1990s—Rymer’s and the 1997 title An American Beach for African-Americans, a historical memoir penned by Marsha Dean Phelts. Both books center much of their story on Betsch. “My great-grandfather loved this beach,” the Beach Lady told in the Messenger-Inquirer. “It was everything to him. He’d look out to sea and say: ‘If you keep walking, you’ll eventually get to Egypt. Black kings conquered Egypt.’”