Something was off about the story of the death of a Black man who was traveling on the ferry between Coronado and San Diego in 1946. Initial news accounts at the time said that the man, Alton Collier, argued with a couple of White sailors, slashed one of them with a knife, and when they responded with boat hooks, Collier jumped overboard and subsequently drowned.
“It looked fishy,” said Kevin Ashley, a local historian who came across the archived accounts of Collier’s death while researching Coronado high school basketball championships. “I was like, ‘Hold on a second. Why would a guy attack anybody on a ferry with a knife then jump in the water if he didn’t know how to swim, and drown?’”
As Ashley kept digging, he found that Collier’s wife, Georgia, also found those accounts suspicious and demanded police investigate her husband’s death. When that didn’t work, she contacted lawyers who helped her press for an investigation, and Black newspapers in San Diego and Los Angeles began publishing stories about Alton’s death and the lack of police action. Eventually, witnesses would tell the Black press that the two White sailors, originally from Texas, had antagonized Alton, calling him the n-word and starting a fight. Although Alton tried to get away from conflict, the fight grew to include other sailors on the ferry who ultimately pushed Alton overboard, where he drowned because he couldn’t swim. His body washed ashore about a week later.
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Ashley wrote about these witness accounts, the lack of a police investigation, the absence of arrests or charges, and the coroner ruling Alton’s death a suicide/accidental drowning in a piece in his Substack newsletter documenting Coronado’s Black history. He thought Alton’s story might qualify as a racial terror lynching and reached out to the Equal Justice Initiative. The nonprofit organization, which works on issues of poverty, racial injustice, and the criminal justice system, also documents racial terror lynchings (which they define as “lethal violence directed at people because of their race, in an effort to terrorize the entire community”). Earlier this year, they responded in agreement with his recommendation and will include Alton as the third racial terror lynching victim killed in California between 1865 and 1950.
Ashley, who is also curator of the Coronado Historical Association’s exhibit, “An Island Looks Back: Uncovering Coronado’s Hidden African-American History,” (on display through June 9 and including Alton’s story), took some time to talk about working to share the Colliers’ story and the hope that people will be compelled to take another look at history and consider the experiences of others. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: First, let’s talk about who Alton Collier was and how you first came across his story.
A: When I was initially doing my research, I found several search engines that allowed me to search historical newspapers using keywords. One of the keywords, obviously, you’d use is to use the word that people used for African-Americans across the various periods, so the word “negro” was quite commonly used for many years. I used that as a search word in these historic newspapers and up pops the story of Alton Collier. As we got closer to the anniversary of his death last year, I felt like I needed to write his story, so I compiled all the stuff that I had available at the time and I published my story on Substack. I sent my research to the Equal Justice Initiative and said, ‘Hey, just let me know. I published this story and, in my view, I believe this was a lynching based on my research.’
What we know is that he was born in poverty to a sharecropper in Luling, Texas. His father died when he was young, basically from borderline starvation and malnutrition from a disease called pellagra. At the time, that killed thousands of people in the South who were poor farmers, who couldn’t get all the nutrients they needed to be healthy, so Alton became a breadwinner for his family and got a job in Corpus Christi, Texas. Through the contact of his wife, who he met down there, they got the opportunity to come out to Coronado in around 1944. She worked for a family as a sort of caretaker and they lived in the servant’s quarters, in Coronado, in that house. He worked at the Naval Air Station, North Island, as a cement finisher. He had a union job, an American Federation of Labor job. Eventually, he moved over to work for the Hotel Del Coronado as a cement finisher and a union worker. He lived in Coronado with his wife for two-and-a-half years. He was known by the local police chief, who knew both Georgia and Alton as upstanding citizens, and what happened to him was quite shocking because he was a Coronado resident. He was a very quiet man, according to his wife and her deposition in the civil suit she filed. He’d never been in a fight, did not argue, did not own a knife, did not own a razor (except for an electric razor), and didn’t drink. He was simply going across on the ferry to go pick up some clothes from a department store — a topcoat for his wife and a pair of slacks for himself — and was coming back so they could get dressed and go across on the ferry again in the evening to see, who I believe was, Earl “Fatha” Hines playing in a club in San Diego that night. Of course, he never made it back. In the deposition where his wife later filed a civil suit against the Spreckels company, she discussed what kind of guy he was and how he helped her wash dishes in the house she worked in, helped her cook dinner, planted flowers out in the garden, and so forth. He was just a nice, gentle soul.
Q: You were researching Black history at the time; why?
A: It initially started as a hobby. I’m retired and my son was a basketball player at Coronado High and his team was playing for the high school championship in 2020. I just said, ‘Oh, I wonder who was the last high school Coronado team to win a CIF championship?’ I came across this picture from 1956 of the team, and of the nine players on the Coronado High team, three were African-American. I was just like, ‘Wait a second. Coronado has a Black history,’ and I’d never heard about that. We live in Coronado. My wife is Kenyan, my kids are Black, and I’d lived in Africa for 25 years, so I had this sort of built-in sense of color. Growing up in Perris [Calif.], I was a basketball player growing up in this town where 25 percent of the population was African-American in the ‘70s. So, I started doing my research after I found that photo and I kept going. I realized, ‘Oh my God, the history goes back to the founding of Coronado as a city in 1886.’ I kept digging, story after story, and this one just kind of bugged me, thinking there was something wrong about it. I thought there was an injustice that had happened to this man and his wife, and I felt like I needed to know more.
Q: When you initially found this reference to him and his death, what compelled you to look further into his story and to write about what happened to him on your Substack?
A: The more I went into it, the more sick to my stomach I got about everything about it. It wasn’t really until I came across the writings in the Black newspapers that suddenly made me go, ‘Oh, so there was an uproar in the Black community about this death,’ which probably triggered the coroner’s office to have to do a jury, or an inquest, further into the death.
Q: What was it about his story that had a hold on you, to the point of not only writing about him, but reaching out to the Equal Justice Initiative to petition for his inclusion in their list of racial terror lynching victims?
A: You can’t relitigate the past in the court of law; everybody involved in the case. Alton had no kids, and his siblings are scattered across Texas and parts of California. So, I’m looking at it like, ‘Well, the Equal Justice Initiative is actually doing the hard work of honoring these people who are victims of injustice.’ If you go on YouTube, there’s a video on what a racial terror lynching is, with Bryan Stevenson talking about it. That’s what happened to him. He probably, at one point, fought back and if you fight back, you run the risk of dying, as a Black man. So, I just thought, ‘I’m going to submit this to them and it’s for them to decide if, based on my research, they think it qualifies.’ A year passed and I didn’t hear from them until just this year, in March. Out of the blue, I get an email from their senior researcher saying, “We’ve gone through the research and we concur, this was a racial terror lynching and his name is going to be added to the names of victims at the Legacy Museum.” I just broke down.
Q: What is the significance of Alton’s killing being documented in this way by EJI?
A: I think it’s significant for a whole bunch of reasons, but mostly just justice for Alton and his wife, number one. Number two, I think the natural instinct of almost everybody in this country, White and Black, when presented with the history of racial terror lynching, is they can’t help but turn away. It’s a horrible history, so to me, when people do take the moment to actually face that history, they still bring with them this idea that this stuff only happened in the south a long time ago. So suddenly, here we are, we’re dealing with Southern California, a freaking Navy resort town in 1946. Granted, there was a lot on the books in California in 1946—the miscegenation law against interracial marriage; San Diego was considered the most segregated city on the West Coast at the time, due to de facto segregation; Black Americans could not go into the majority of hotels and restaurants across the city; beaches were off limits, so many things. So, I just think the story forces people to rethink and reckon with the racial history of the United States in a Southern California/Western United States context. For me, this helps keep the discussion alive and forces people to reckon with our racial history. That’s the biggest part of this.
Q: In your research and writing of his story, you mention that the coroner at the time announced that an inquest would take place. What is a coroner’s inquest and what difference does one make in a case like Alton’s?
A: They differ by jurisdiction, but it’s something called a coroner’s jury (or in some cases an inquest). San Diego police and Coronado police have both refused to pick up the case during that time, and the chief of police of Coronado, June Jordan, who was trained by the Federal Bureau of Investigations and knows Alton, admits that something doesn’t add up here. [Otis Reed] Gilbert and [Freddie Leroy] Johnson are in the brig in the Navy, pending the results of this coroner’s jury. In the coroner’s jury, they listen to as many eyewitness reports as possible. I don’t know who was on the jury or how many people there were, but they essentially interview witnesses (and probably the coroner, himself) to try to decide if they agree with the coroner’s decision. The coroner’s decision was originally that it was a suicide, that was on the death certificate and that death certificate never changed. What the jury did say is that there was no need to call it murder, that it was an accidental drowning of Alton’s fault, and he was responsible for his death because he drew a knife and he got scared when the guys were going to get him, and he jumped in the water. That’s what they agreed based on a group of witnesses who have a vested interest in making sure fellow Navy members did not go to jail for murder. So, in the coroner’s inquest, members listened to these statements and then made their decision, which they said was an accidental drowning.
The only shred of doubt in the entire story from the White press was in the Coronado Journal, I believe, where June Jordan says something about how the case didn’t add up and he’s asked people to remain in place while he finishes his investigation. You have to imagine, it’s 1946 and Coronado is growing exponentially. By 1940, Coronado has about 7,000 people and by 1950 it was, like, 13,000 people. It’s the greatest boom time in our history, everybody wants nothing but good news and the Navy is helping drive all of this. All of the people who are buying those houses in the 1940s, that are being built across Coronado, they’re buying them in restricted zones and many of them are former military. It’s a military town then more than it is even now (because most military can’t afford to buy in Coronado now). So, there were so many vested interests, not to mention that the ferry was owned by the Spreckels company, as well. And, the Spreckels company ran, not just Coronado, but for a long time, ran San Diego. That also played a part. Once you’ve tagged the Black guy as an assailant with a knife in his hand, and he slashed one of our White, patriotic sailors, well, it’s done. There’s nothing else they need to say.
Q: You present the differences between the news coverage of Alton’s death by the White media at the time, the San Diego Union and the San Diego Evening Tribune (today, the San Diego Union-Tribune) and that of the Black press in San Diego and Los Angeles. Can you talk about the differences in the coverage and the general necessity of these alternative news sources?
A: The Los Angeles Tribune, which wrote about the case of Georgia Coller and also wrote about the inquest, was founded by an African-American woman whose son, today, is the president of the United Negro College Fund [that woman was Almena Lomax and her son is Michael L. Lomax]. This was a super influential person. Even then, the Tribune was less of a major paper than The California Eagle, which was run by Charlotta Bass, who ran for vice president of the country in the Progressive Party six or eight years after this story came out. The law offices of the lawyers that came down to investigate Alton’s case on Georgia’s behalf, were across the street from The California Eagle’s office. At that time, Loren Miller, who was the most important lawyer outside of, probably Thurgood Marshall and others in dealing with segregation, particularly in property, Miller later bought The California Eagle; he was influential.
The center of the voice of what’s right for African-Americans, came out of those newspapers. It was legit reporting by well-trained journalists. Then, the San Diego paper (The Lighthouse), refers to a local organization of African-Americans organizing to push for an investigation. I think that group was probably the most instrumental in getting that coroner’s decision. That story came out three days later in the Black press saying, ‘Hold on a second,’ and I think that helped push for the inquest to take place.
Q: You’re the curator of the Coronado Historical Association’s current exhibition, “An Island Looks Back: Uncovering Coronado’s Hidden African-American History,” on display through June 9. A lot of people think of California and San Diego as largely progressive places where racism is uncommon compared to this country’s southern states. In his research about Nathan Harrison, San Diego’s first Black homesteader, San Diego State University anthropology professor Seth Mallios found that San Diego used to be referred to as “the Mississippi of the West,” that southern California had been settled by people migrating from the southern states, and that Los Angeles was a hotbed of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Can you talk about the Coronado that Alton and Georgia were living in during the 1940s? Where does Alton’s story fit within the island’s history and the larger picture of Black life and history in Coronado?
A: One of the most shocking realizations I came across was around 1906, the Coronado school graduation had 16 graduates and two of the 16 were African-American. African-Americans were part and parcel of being included in Coronado from its inception, but it was in the late 1920s when realtors started sticking this idea in people’s heads that people of color, particularly African-Americans, were detrimental to property values. From the mid-1920s up until 1989, only one African-American succeeded in buying property in Coronado in those 65 years, and that was in the early ‘40s. It was a guy named Emmett Rogers, who was different because he grew up in the White House and his mother, Maggie Rogers, was the personal maid to six U.S. presidents, including the Roosevelts (who came to visit their son in Coronado, and Emmett’s wife cooked for the Roosevelts). I think when local Coronado saw the stature of Emmett and his wife, they were allowed to buy a property and that was the only person who bought a property in Coronado in the mid-1920s up until 1989. So, things can get worse; they can start out well and go backward. That’s the sad thing, is that the arc of civil rights is not constantly getting better, it can go backward and that’s what happened in Coronado in the ‘40s. The only African-Americans who were living in Coronado Village are the servants of people, so that’s how Alton got to be able to live in Coronado. His wife was a personal maid/caretaker for a Navy family that retired in Coronado Village. Outside of that, they could not have easily rented or bought anything in Coronado because things had turned so drastically against African-Americans in property and real estate. That’s why the Hewes Report [“Intergroup Relations in San Diego: A Report to the City Council and the Board of Education of the City of San Diego” from the American Council on Race Relations in 1946] is so relevant because it talks about the segregation that was already in place in Logan Heights.
Keep in mind that in 1944, guess what came to Coronado? A federal housing project. It housed 3,000 people. Suddenly, in Coronado, 20 percent of the population are war workers, basically living in projects built right where the current Tidelands Park is, as you come over the bridge. That was a housing development, and in that housing development, 15 percent of those residents were African-American. So, suddenly Coronado had gone to all this work to become completely White and, lo and behold, here comes this federal housing project. That project stayed in Coronado until 1969 and was literally the only place that African-Americans lived in Coronado during that period. That’s where the guys who are in that basketball picture were living, in those projects. So, in 1946, you have African-Americans suddenly in high numbers in Coronado, living in those units.
To understand the “Mississippi of the West,” a big chunk of my research is what was happening in the ‘60s with the White Citizens Council in San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento. Literally, the White Citizens Councils of Mississippi were working with a San Diego political operative to set up citizens councils across California. Just months after the Selma [Ala.] march where you had Sheriff Jim Clark cracking people over the head with his baton, he spoke at a middle school in San Diego in ’65, brought in by the White Citizens Council. San Diego has a history that goes into the ‘60s that would shock you about these groups and what they were up to, how they were trying to keep things segregated.
In my research on census polling, by 1960, about 313 people in Coronado were African-American. Now, that doesn’t sound like a lot out of a population of about 16,000, but if you take the cities of Chula Vista, La Mesa, Lemon Grove, Imperial Beach, Escondido, Vista, Fallbrook in 1960, you have seven cities with a combined population of 180,000 people and there were only 130 African-Americans living in all of those cities. That’s a crazy statistic, so that gives you an idea of what it was like in the 1960s; imagine what it was like in the 1940s. It was not good. That being said, the African-Americans that went to Coronado High School in the ‘60s had great things to say about Coronado because it wasn’t Arkansas, right? ‘We’re in California, we’ve got the beach here and people are generally nice to us.’ Most of them had positive things to say and you’ll see that in the exhibit. It wasn’t racism everywhere in Coronado, and it wasn’t two guys from Coronado that tossed Alton off that ferry, it was two guys from Texas who were in the Navy. The way Coronado let him down was because the police didn’t arrest anyone, nobody from the community came to the defense of his character.
Q: What is your hope in sharing Alton’s story, in documenting what happened to him in San Diego?
A: My hope is that it’ll make people think twice when they try to think they know all there is to know about our history. Coronado is in the Green-Book [an annual guidebook for Black people, published from 1936 to 1967, listing businesses that were relatively friendly to Black where they could receive services while traveling by car]. There are only three houses in all of San Diego County that were listed in the Green Book in 1940 and one of those was in Coronado, which was the garbage man’s house. By me turning over and looking at all of this history in Coronado (and this is a city of 15,000 to 20,000 people), if all of these stories are being unearthed, what else is out there that we don’t know, in every little town across this country, but particularly in California? For me, if it can make people think, ‘Wait a second, there’s a lot that we don’t know,’ it’s my hope that it’ll get them to actually soften their heart a little bit and to recognize that not every community has had the same experience with the American experiment.
