San+Diego+Side+Trips

** San Diego Side-trips ** ** Places to Visit During Your Free Time at Midwinter 2011 ** toc

The rich website of the [|San Diego History Center] provided inspiration for this list of places to visit during your free time in San Diego if you are attending ALA's 2011 Midwinter Meeting. We have endeavored to highlight those who worked for progressive social change, as well as the movements and communities they inspired. 

Lomaland
**Point Loma Nazarene College; public access permitted - ask at the security booth for the "Self Guided Campus Tour" brochure**
 * 3900 Lomaland Drive; (619) 849-2200; [|http://www.pointloma.edu]** **Katherine Tingley** traveled worldwide, establishing schools in several countries, emphasizing practical humanitarianism, education, prison reform, and world peace. Born Catharine Augusta Westcott, she began her work after marriage to Philo B. Tingley in 1888. In the early 1890s on New York City's East Side she set up soup kitchens and emergency relief missions, and later she established philanthropic organizations for orphaned children, unwed mothers, and destitute families. In 1894 Tingley joined the Theosophical Society, and when president William Q. Judge died in 1896 she was recognized as his successor. In 1900, she moved the international headquarters to Point Loma where she established Lomaland, a Theosophical commune. A Raja-Yoga school was opened in 1900, followed by an open air theatre, temple, a college and a theosophical university. Other buildings included a hotel, a theater, a textile factory, a joinery, a bakehouse, and a publishing house. Around 60 percent of the community was female, with the same percentage represented in executive positions. The site is now occupied by Point Loma Nazarene College.

Lemon Grove School
**[|Lemon Grove Middle School], 7866 Lincoln Street, Lemon Grove, California 91945; (619) 825-5600 ** On January 5, 1931 Lemon Grove Grammar School principal Jerome Green, acting under instructions from school trustees, turned away Mexican children at the schoolhouse door. Principal Green announced that the Mexican children did not belong at the school, could not enter, and instructed them to attend a two room building constructed to house Mexican children. The resulting landmark lawsuit became the first successful school desegregation court decision in the history of the United States. In 2007, the Lemon Grove Middle School auditorium, which is on the site of the former grammar school, was dedicated in the honor of Roberto Alvarez, the lead plaintiff in the court case.

[[image:horton.jpg width="127" height="156" align="right"]]The Wednesday Club
**40 Ivy Lane at Sixth (Hillcrest)** Founded in 1895 by a group of prominent women, many long time San Diego residents, the stated purpose of the Wednesday Club was "artistic and literary culture." The thirty-three charter members chose **Lydia Knapp Horton** as their first President. Horton had seen the growth of women's clubs in the east and was anxious to see them get started in San Diego. She believed that the opportunities of women's clubs to help workers, the library, children's homes and to pursue other social needs of the community would be fostered by the Federation of Women's Clubs, writing, in 1898, "When the history of the last quarter of the 19th Century shall be written … there will come the history of women's clubs." San Diego’s first woman architect (and Wednesday Club member) Hazel Waterman designed the Ivy Lane headquarters building in 1910. 

Chicano Park
**National Avenue & South Evans Street, beneath the Coronado Bay Bridge (Barrio Logan)**  Established by Chicano activists on April 22, 1970, 7.9-acre **Chicano Park** has received international recognition as a major public art site for its commanding mural paintings of the past and present struggle of Mexican and Chicano history.

[[image:walker.jpg width="115" height="149" align="right"]]Mason Street School
Built in 1865, the Mason Street School was the first public school house in San Diego. **Mary Chase Walker** was its first teacher. Walker taught for only 11 months and became the center of controversy when she invited a black woman to lunch at the restaurant of the Franklin House hotel. Some diners stormed out and school enrollment plunged from 36 to 15 students. Although apparently supported by school board president Ephraim W. Morse, Walker resigned (and later married Morse). After her teaching career, Walker supported the suffragist movement and worked to help the needy. **U.S. Grant Hotel** **326 Broadway; (800) 237-5029; []** Jack Johnson Kimbrough, a dentist originally from Lexington, Mississippi, held the presidency of the San Diego NAACO branch in 1947-48. Angered at having been refused a snack at a downtown restaurant, Kimbrough devised a plan for redress that made him a pioneer in anti-discrimination protest tactics. He recruited a group of black and white students at San Diego State College, rehearsed them to act as customers and witnesses, and then targeted white-owned restaurants that discriminated. As the black students were denied service, the already seated white students would observe what transpired and be prepared to testify in court as to what they had witnessed. The NAACP filed and won 31 of 32 lawsuits against San Diego restaurants in little over a year. Kimbrough followed up this triumph with the desegregation of the restaurant at the prestigious U.S. Grant Hotel in downtown San Diego in 1948. In 1969 a group of prominent San Diego women staged a sit-in at the Grant Grill which resulted in the restaurant abandoning its “Men Only Until 3 p.m.” policy.
 * 3966 Mason Street; (619) 297-1183; open 10-4 daily; free admission **

John Wear Hate Crimes Memorial Plaque
**1029 University Avenue (Hillcrest), near the curb in front of Obelisk Bookstore** This monument pays tribute to 17-year old John Wear, who was brutally attacked and murdered on December 13, 1991 because he was perceived to be gay.

Luisa Moreno
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 90%;">**Medio Street, Encanto** <span style="display: block; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: left;">**Luisa Moreno** was a leader in the United States labor movement and a social activist. She unionized workers and convened the 1939 Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española, the "first national Latino civil rights assembly" before "voluntarily" returning to Guatemala in 1950. In 1937, she settled in the Encanto neighborhood of San Diego, which she used as a base for her nationwide activism, organizing cannery workers and establishing a chapter of the Mexican Civil Rights Committee. In speeches to chapters of the Young Progressives of America, she warned that racial tensions and communist hysteria provoked racial profiling, stereotyping and police brutality against Mexican Americans and other ethnic minorities.

**Balboa Park**
<span style="display: block; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: left;">**Kate O. Sessions**, often referred to as the "Mother of Balboa Park," was the dean of horticulturalists of San Diego. Born in Oakland, California, Sessions received a B. S. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1881. Her horticultural career began when in 1885 she became a partner in a San Diego nursery. As owner of a succession of nurseries in Coronado, City Park, Mission Hills and Pacific Beach, she became a central figure in California and national horticultural circles. She published articles in newspapers and helped to found California Garden, the publication of the San Diego Floral Association. As supervisor of agriculture and landscaper for the San Diego schools, she taught horticulture and botany and supervised school gardens. In 1892 Sessions leased from the City of San Diego land that would become Balboa Park, in return planting 100 trees each year. Sessions was the first woman to receive the International Meyer Medal in Genetics. The Kate O. Sessions Balboa Park Nursery is on the eastern side of Balboa Park near the Frisbee golf course and the city golf course on Pershing Drive. Located near the Balboa Park west entrance on Laurel Avenue, Sefton Plaza features a bronze statue of Sessions. The six and one-half foot statue by San Diegan Ruth Hayward depicts Sessions in a hat and long flowing skirt, a trowel in one hand and a seedling in the other.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 90%; line-height: 1.5;">1549 El Prado; [] **

Soapbox Corner
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 90%;">**Intersection of Fifth Avenue and E Street** <span style="display: block; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; text-align: left;">In 1912 the central business district of San Diego concentrated at the intersection of Fifth and "E" Streets, and from all four corners speakers used this "soapbox corner" to proclaim their messages. For a year and a half the International Workers of the World successfully used this corner to help enlist workers in San Diego. Activity related to the San Diego Free Speech Fight culminated with a March 10 protest of a new city ordinance restricting street speech. The protest in front of the San Diego city jail drew a crowd of nearly 5000 people; the crown dispersed only when police called in the fire department to spray the protesters with fire hoses. Protests continued and in May 14, Emma Goldman and Ben Reitman arrived to support the IWW efforts. A mob of 500 surrounded their hotel and police escorted Goldman to the train station. The mob seized Reitman, who was, among other abuses, tarred and covered in brush and foliage.

LaJolla Historical Society
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 15.6000003814697px;"> <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 90%;">**7846 Eads Avenue; (858) 459-5335; 10-4 Monday through Friday; []** One of the first women to attend college in the United States, ** Ellen Browning Scripps ** completed her studies in 1858 at Illinois’ Knox College. After graduation, she took a position as a school teacher, but when her brother James started the Detroit Evening News, Ellen joined him, proof reading and writing a column which included thoughts on topics as far ranging as woman suffrage and prohibition. She continued her career in journalism and when she died in 1932 her column was one of the world’s largest newspaper features, distributed daily to approximately 1,000 newspapers. As her brothers continued building what would eventually grow to a 24-paper newspaper chain, Scripps worked beside them and became a rich woman. A lifelong advocate of free speech, she gave Scripps Park to the city to be used for political and social discussions of any kind. Through contributions and inspiration, Scripps was responsible for the establishment of institutions such as the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, The Anthenaeum Music and Arts Library, the La Jolla Public Library, and Scripps College. Scripps was also a lover of automobile travel, and seemingly had no qualms about the dangers of driving. Her motto on the open road? “The faster the better.” A 1915 arson fire destroyed Scripps’ home Moulton Villa and most surrounding structures but a small Carriage House used to accommodate her Pierce Arrow touring car escaped the fire. Find it on Eads Avenue, near the La Jolla Historical Society headquarters.