PARADISE FOUND
Once a glamorous summer resort, the abandoned ‘Black Eden’ is poised for a comeback
IDLEWILD, Mich. — The traffic along US 10 blows right by a dirtroad entrance. But a newly built brick marker proclaims, optimistically, “Welcome to Idlewild, a historic community.”
This dirt road — dotted with abandoned cottages and businesses — offers a journey into a little-known piece of American history. It tells the story of the rise and fall of black America’s segregated high-society life and how they experienced, for a very brief time, something extraordinary and special.
Welcome to what was called “Black Eden,” the largest and most successful resort in the Midwest. For blacks in America, until the 1960s, this was the premier getaway spot in the country, a place they could call home for a week or two — or all summer long. At Idlewild, their dreams came true.
“At its high point, between the ’40s and early ’60s, nearly 30,000 folks would descend on here in the summer. Hundreds of black-owned businesses thrived. This place was hopping,” said John Meeks, who first came here in the ’50s with his family and now heads the town’s African-American Chamber of Commerce.
“We had a roller-skating rink for the kids, our own fire department and a post office,” he said.
Cab Calloway played here. So did Duke Ellington, Aretha Franklin, the Four Tops, Jackie Wilson — the list goes on. There were beauty pageants, literary circles, hunting clubs and nightclubs like the Flamingo and the Paradise Club.
It was a family place, and it was an entertainment place — Las Vegas for the parents, Disneyland for the kids, surrounded by the cool woods and waters of Michigan’s Lake Country.
“For African-Americans it was paradise. It was where you had to be,” said Colleen Carrington-Atkins, the township supervisor in charge of the area. “It was everything, until it wasn’t.”
When the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, legal segregation ended and there was an exodus.
“People started to go on family vacations where they weren’t allowed to before,” Meeks said. And black entertainers found they could charge more to play in clubs and resorts that now accepted all colors.
Now, more than 50 years later, Meeks is working relentlessly to revive the town. Charming, determined and far more energetic than most millennials, the 95-year-old showcases a big summer music event at Idlewild every August.
“I put it together three years ago to create an annual event to draw people back to Idlewild,” Meeks said. “By last year 2,000 people attended; we had six buses coming up from Detroit, Flint
and Pontiac.” This year he expects over 3,000. For the last decade, Meeks has also worked hard to lure vacationers back for R&R at the resort. “We have three motels here now. There used to be 35. We have one restaurant. There used to be 25. I don’t expect it to be what it once was, but I do believe it deserves a future.”
Founded in 1912, Idlewild was conceived by a couple of white developers and their wives during the Jim Crow era who figured an allblack resort would attract a lot of Midwestern middle-class vacationers. The founders bought nearly 3,000 acres around the Lower Peninsula’s northwestern woods and promoted hunting, fishing and swimming to tourists — but glamour was the real draw.
Today Idlewild is not a complete ghost town. Its pristine lakes remain home to a couple of hundred people — mostly those left over from its heyday — and a few newcomers such as township supervisor Carrington-Atkins, who recently bought the perfectly preserved home of famed black author Charles Waddell Chesnutt. And yet, many of its houses are empty, its storefronts fallen victim to nature.
While the end of Eden wasn’t good for business, it was very good for the country. Idlewild can’t expect to return to a heyday that was entirely based on segregation. But that doesn’t mean it can’t once again become a center for celebrating black culture. “The story of Idlewild cannot end. It is a legacy to our past — but it is also part of our future, and that is the important thing to remember,” said Meeks. “It wasn’t just a place, it was part of all of us.”
And, as he emphatically adds: “I just refuse to give up.”
Between the ’40s and early ’60s . . . this place was hopping John Meeks, head of the African-American Chamber of Commerce