California's Black Pioneers: A Brief Historical Survey

Description

"From its earliest beginnings the great European incursion into the New World included black men of African origin. They came as explorers, laborers, artisans, and servants, free as well as slave. Like their white fellows, many remained, and with the introduction of slavery the territories of the Spanish Empire in America began to acquire substantial black populations. When two and a half centuries later Spain moved to establish its dominion in California, blacks from the existing settlements became part of the colonizing process. Indeed, it was a black majority of settlers--twenty-six of the original forty-six--that founded California's second Spanish town, the civic pueblo of Los Angeles. Placing black settlement in the perspective of the state's early development, this book proceeds to review the history of California's Afro-Americans within full historical context. Essential to an understanding of early Spanish and Mexican power struggles which involved black leaders, for example, are explanations of territorial subdivisions and imperial lines of command. Similarly, descriptions of the living arrangements, food, and clothing of the colonists are provided as background for events that culminated first in Mexican independence from Spain and then in United States conquest and annexation of California. Black participation in these and succeeding events is recounted in the activities of such diverse individuals as black Army scout and Pony Express rider James Beckwourth, the beautiful and wealthy San Franciscan Mammy Pleasant who is reputed to have helped finance John Brown's slave uprising, and Allen Allensworth who entered the Union Army a fugitive slave and left it a much-honored chaplain and lieutenant colonel. Collaterally, the mass of California's black populace is examined as it moves within the sweep of state and national affairs--admission of California to the Union, the gold rush, the Civil War, the equal rights movements at the turn of the century, the depression, the world wars, and the momentous events of the last half of the twentieth century. Growing in numbers, responding to the shifting political, economic, social, and cultural climate, black Californians progress in a quickening pace toward the goal of complete elimination of racial discrimination. The day of the black pioneer is far from over; in 1973 the city of Los Angeles, largely conservative and with a black minority of only 16 percent, chose as its mayor Tom Bradley, the son of a black sharecropper. In neighboring Compton Doris A. Davis became the first black woman mayor of a metropolitan city. In the congressional elections of the previous year, Los Angeles voters elected Yvonne Brathwaite Burke to the U.S. House of Representatives, the first woman sent to Congress from California in twenty years and the first black woman ever elected to the House from California. As black Californians increasingly seek out opportunities for leadership, they and their nonblack fellow citizens need to be aware of the continuity of black involvement in California history. This survey of California's black pioneers examines a legacy shared by all Americans."--Dust jacket.

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  California's Black Pioneers: A Brief Historical Survey

  • 1974-06-01
  • 228 pages
  • Paperback
  • McNally & Loftin Pub