History

California

• The arrival of Spanish colonists, participants in the Atlantic slave trade, brought along Africans and Indians to CA.
• Millions of African Americans were taken form their homeland and forced into slavery across the United States.
• In 1781, 26 of the first 46 settlers in Los Angeles were Black or Mulatto (black and white).
• In 1790, Blacks and Mulattos made up about 15% of the total San Francisco population and about 19% of the settlers in Monterey.  Baja, CA included 844 Spanish-speaking persons, 183 were Mulattos.
• Early African Americans lost their identity as Africans and became Californios and were later identified as Mulattos.
• In 1818 several African Americans arrived in California as members of the Bouchard expedition, an Argentinean effort to liberate Americans from Spain.
• Between 1821 and 1848 other African Americans arrived in California, many escaping U.S. vessels.
• Between 1852 and 1860 California’s African American population grew from 962-4,006.
• In 1850 CA was admitted into the U.S as a free state, but an extensive body of discriminatory legislation evolved in California, including the testimony restriction, which outlawed testimony by Blacks, Chinese and Native Americans against whites in court.
• In 1863 the Republican CA legislature removed discriminatory barriers in education and repealed the testimony restriction on 1851.
• In 1866, after campaigning for better schools throughout the Civil War, African Americans gained access to CA public schools with the exception that separate schools could be established along racial lines.
• In 1903 the Southern Pacific Railroad brought in almost 2,000 African American laborers to break a strike by Mexican American construction workers, doubling the African American population in LA and sparking interracial tension.
• It wasn’t until 1954 that Brown v. Board of Education of the U.S Supreme Court ruled that separate schools for black and white children were unconstitutional.
• In 1821 Mexico declared its independence from Spain and the Republic of Mexico was established on Nov 19, 1823.
• In 1826, Peter Ranne, a black man, was part of the first overland party to California, led by Jedediah Smith.
• Many free and enslaved people of African ancestry were part of the California Gold Rush, and many were able to buy their freedom and freedom for their families, primarily in the South, with the gold they found.
• In 1849 many African Americans traveled to California as slaves and freemen to perform hard labor. 

(According to the African Studies Department at San Francisco State University)

Bay Area

Men working hard on the railroads.

• In the late nineteenth century, many African Americans moved to Oakland and Richmond to work on the railroads.
• WWII and the emergence of shipyard industries was the major catalyst for African American migration to the Bay Area, specifically to Richmond and Oakland.
• During the California Gold Rush, Blacks found themselves in California but outside of the gold rush economy and confined to domestic work holding jobs as janitors, truck drivers, and bootblacks.

(According to the San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society & The Regents of the University of California)

San Francisco

• By the 1870s, Blacks secured an economic foothold in the hotel and restaurant industry in San Francisco, but in the 1870s white hotel workers in San Francisco threatened to strike unless all Blacks were fired from their jobs in that industry.
• The hotel owners fired all of their Black employees, and it would not be until 1963 that Blacks would organize a jobs campaign in the hotel and restaurant industry during the San Francisco Civil Rights Movement, to secure jobs for Blacks lost in the 1870s.
• The Black population in San Francisco remained small until World War II. In 1910, there were 1,642 Blacks living in San Francisco, with the number increasing to 4,000 by 1940.
• During the war the Black population in San Francisco increased to 40,000.
• When the Japanese American population in California and San Francisco was placed in concentration camps, Blacks began moving into the Fillmore district and into the Western Addition, and some Blacks held onto Japanese property during War and returned the property after war.
• The San Francisco Civil Rights Movement, which grew out of these terrible economic conditions, was inspired by the Southern Civil Rights Movement, the Cuban Revolution, and the African Independence Movement.
• The period from 1967 to 1968 was a period of rising influence of the Black Panther Party in Black communities throughout the United States.

(According to the San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society)

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