William Liedesdorff, an early African American landowner in California
As Black History Month (February) winds to an end, I decided to post a bit of Californian history about African Americans and about my African American characters. I’ve posted before about African American history in the Oregon Territory. California was marginally more receptive to Blacks in that era, but not by much.
The Tanner family in my historical novels was African American. Both Clarence and Hatty Tanner were free Blacks before the Civil War. They and their children were on the wagon train to Oregon in Lead Me Home and Forever Mine. They moved to California in Now I’m Found, where they were able to become entrepreneurs more successfully than they could in Oregon.
Their story followed the reality of many African Americans. African Americans were miners from the earliest days of the Gold Rush. The sprawling mining enterprises that developed across California after the discovery of gold in 1848 were more open to black enterprise than many more settled areas of the United States. One early 1849 mining camp was called “Negro Hill” because Black miners operated it. And African Americans were as eager as anyone else to profit by providing goods and services to the hoards of miners flocking to the state.
An African American miner
Perhaps one reason for the openness to African Americans in California is that there were very few of them in the area before the Civil War. The 1850 census—the first census in California—recorded less than 1,000 African Americans in the state, and there were only slightly over 4,000 in 1860. Until World War II, African Americans made up less than one percent of California’s population.
By contrast, Chinese immigrants and Hispanics were much larger percentages of the state’s population. Most of the racial discrimination in California in the mid-19th Century—and there was plenty—was focused on Chinese immigrants who arrived in the 1850s and beyond.
Of course, there was also racial prejudice towards Blacks in early California, and I don’t mean to minimize that. Some Southern miners brought slaves to work in their mines. Although slavery was prohibited in the California State Constitution of 1849, attempts were made throughout the 1850s to exclude Blacks from the state altogether. African Americans, along with Chinese and Native Americans, could not testify in cases involving Caucasians. Laws also prohibited African Americans from voting. Education was segregated until the California Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional under the state’s constitution in 1874.
As I write about the settlement of the American West, I cannot ignore these issues. I must create characters that are true to their times, while still attracting modern readers. It’s a difficult proposition, and I struggled with it as I wrote about the Tanners and their interactions with other characters.
How does it make you feel to read about prejudices in a different era or culture? What do these stories make you recognize about our own time?
Prejudices have always been with us. In early Oklahoma the schools were segregated. In my G. Grandfather’s diary, he speaks of gathering to paint the nearby school which was for black students.