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The article reports on African American and Hispanic visits to federal recreation areas. According to the data on file with Donald English of the Visitor Use Monitoring Project based in Washington, D.C., African American visits account for very low percentages of visits to national forests across the U.S. On the other hand, Hispanic visits to national forests in the Southwest are high. It is posed that factors such as private landownership and social definitions of place may be integral in considering African American use of wildland public recreation regions in the Southern states in the U.S.

Collective memory can be used conceptually to examine African-American perceptions of wildlands and black interaction with such places. The middleAmerican view of wildlands frames these terrains as refuges—pure and simple, sanctified places distinct from the profanity of human modification. However, wild, primitive areas do not exist in the minds of all Americans as uncomplicated or uncontaminated places. Three labor-related institutions—forest labor, plantation agriculture, and sharecropping—and terrorism and lynching have impacted negatively on black perceptions of wildlands, producing an ambivalence toward such places among African Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]