Lost Black History
By Don Valentine
Black slaves were brought to California as chattell/property, like a horse or plow. The gold rush of the 1840s lured adventurous slave owners to California. A necessary tool is someone to dig up the gold. This migration began about 15 years before the Civil war. During this time Blacks could be found working in the gold fields and domestic spaces of California.
Kevin Waite, the author of the book West of Slavery, describes the arc of the Black exodus. “Perhaps as many as 1,500 enslaved African Americans were forcibly transported to California between 1849 and 1861.” After the war the reputation of California was not as harsh as the Jim Crow south spread. This was because California entered the Union as a Free state. That did not always always stand with all the jurists on the California bench. In dozens of cases, California courts ruled in favor of slaveholders. Freed Blacks were returned as legal property.
This lenient antislavery policy allowed a slave colony in San Bernardino to flourish in plain sight in the early 1850s. Mormon migrants, with at least two dozen slaves in tow, built a settlement there. Finally in 1856 the settlement’s largest slaveholder came to trial. Retention of slave labor went especially unnoticed in the remote mining districts. The slaveholders often clustered together in the same area. They forced their slaves to dig for gold. The life of a miner was horrendous, often working 14 hour days on two meals.
By 1860 more than 5,000 Blacks had come to California. Blacks migrated to Los Angeles from Texas, Shreveport, New Orleans and Atlanta to escape the racial violence. The job opportunities were plentiful. All things considered, life for Blacks was more benign than in the deep South. Still, being Black anywhere in the United States was fraught with unbridled racism. Even in California, the history of lynching runs from the 1800s to the end of the 1930s. Surprisingly the majority of lynchings were on Mexican people. Finally after a series of grisly Black lynchings in the 1920s, California passed an anti-lynching law.
Note: These events are not taught in schools.
That is why we need our Black Press.
If we don’t know our history, we are doomed to learn “His-story!
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