West of Jim Crow

The Fight against California's Color Line

Lynn M. Hudson

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780252085253, 9780252043345
• eBook ISBN: 9780252052224
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: Social Sciences

African Americans who moved to California in hopes of finding freedom and full citizenship instead faced all-too-familiar racial segregation. As one transplant put it, "The only difference between Pasadena and Mississippi is the way they are spelled." From the beaches to streetcars to schools, the Golden State—in contrast to its reputation for tolerance—perfected many methods of controlling people of color.

Lynn M. Hudson deepens our understanding of the practices that African Americans in the West deployed to dismantle Jim Crow in the quest for civil rights prior to the 1960s. Faced with institutionalized racism, black Californians used both established and improvised tactics to resist and survive the state's color line. Hudson rediscovers forgotten stories like the experimental all-black community of Allensworth, the California Ku Klux Klan's campaign of terror against African Americans, the bitter struggle to integrate public swimming pools in Pasadena and elsewhere, and segregationists' preoccupation with gender and sexuality.

CHAPTER 1

Freedom Claims

Reconstructing the Golden State

Getting a glass of whiskey on San Francisco’s Barbary Coast had never been difficult. The gold rush meant, among other things, that libations would be plentiful in the towns and camps that sprang up throughout the new state of California.1 But for African American men, stepping into a bar during the era of Reconstruction meant coming face to face with Jim Crow. By 1872 barrooms and restaurants in the West’s most populous city shunned African American patrons. In fact, many African Americans believed, according to one of San Francisco’s black newspapers, the Pacific Appeal, that “prejudice against color is now as bitter among proprietors of public places” as it was before the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of Act of 1866 and the Fifteenth Amendment. “Colored men are liable to insult, by asking to be served with a meal, in almost any inferior restaurant in the city,” quipped the editorial.2 California, of course, was not special in this regard. African Americans in every state in the nation faced Jim Crow restrictions in hotels, streetcars, bars, and cafés. But the state’s reputation as a place free from the harshness of segregation and racialized violence made this treatment in public places noteworthy, and for some, particularly insulting. In Washington, D.C., in the previous summer, a judge had ruled—in a lawsuit black Californians followed closely—that saloon keepers could “make no distinctions on account of color to whom they shall sell liquor.”3 If you could be served a drink in the nation’s capital, on the Mason-Dixon Line, reasoned black men in California, surely they should be entitled to the same pleasure.

The problem of men and alcohol surfaced repeatedly in the state’s black press during Reconstruction. In 1872, two African American men were scolded publicly for disrupting a Republican meeting in San Francisco while intoxicated. Clearly, the Jim Crowed public facilities had not stopped black men from drinking. But pressure to exhibit the right kind of manhood, as befits new citizens, prompted the anonymous writer of the column about the Drinking Duo to warn that “for the credit of the colored citizens at large, we hope that their friends will persuade them not to make themselves so ridiculous in a Republican meeting again.”4 The fact that these men were torchbearers of one of the city’s Republican clubs made the spectacle that much worse. Newly franchised and struggling to stake their claim in the state’s Republican Party, some African American men worried that this type of behavior played into the hands of those who argued that black men were not fit to be citizens.

Men’s behavior became a central focus of Reconstruction-era black politics, despite the fact that women participated in the campaigns for equal rights in significant and conspicuous ways. The focus on masculinity can be traced to gendered notions of citizenship and the patriarchal assumptions that cast men as voters and agents in the world of politics and women as passive observers or domestic helpmates. These notions assumed the men would be the ones to work out the intricacies of freedom. A number of factors conspired to place men front and center in the politics of freedom. Some of these factors were internal to black communities; churches, Republican meetings, parades, and conventions most often featured male leaders and male speakers. Other forces external to black settlements spotlighted men’s role in politics. The white mainstream press and political parties rarely, if ever, envisioned African American women as citizens or constituents. Black men themselves sought to keep the spotlight on manhood rights, not the rights of women. Indeed, some nineteenth-century African American men, including ministers, Republican Party leaders, and newspaper editors, became increasingly concerned with the rights of men precisely because women continued to challenge male prerogatives.5 The dictates of white supremacy encouraged black men to monitor their behavior and that of black women in order to establish the boundaries of proper political etiquette.

The parameters of citizenship in the new state of California would not be determined solely by men, however. Seven years before the two men disrupted the Republican meeting, in 1865, a group of African American women were also scolded for behavior that was deemed inappropriate for the occasion. In this case, the citizens in question were not drunk; their transgression was voting. At a planning meeting for the fourth black convention hosted in California, three of the seven women in attendance attempted to make their voices heard by voting on a question brought before the committee. For this behavior, they too were ridiculed. This attempt to silence or shame African American women, implying that politics was only for men, did not have the desired effect.

In 1866, black women beat a path to California courtrooms to challenge poor treatment on the increasingly segregated streetcars. As part of their strategy, they placed their bodies on public transportation where they were not wanted, a strategy used later by Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Rosa Parks. Black women in the nineteenth century, as Brittany Cooper shows, developed an embodied discourse, including a set of social and political strategies that made legible their role as citizens.6 In California, as in other states, this process had its roots in slavery and in white fallacies about the accessibility and lascivious nature of women’s bodies. African American women in the Golden State challenged Jim Crow and rigid gender proscriptions in ways that centered the body. Their activism and challenges to the racial-gendered order began a soon as California joined the union.7

Women claimed freedom by protecting slaves on the Underground Railroad, seeking redress in the courts, boarding streetcars, and opening schools for “colored” students. If the state’s goal was to keep black people in their place, women understood that resistance to white supremacy meant physically occupying spaces where they would confront hostile forces. Black women’s determination to shape freedom put them in conflict with white men, white women, black men, and others. While little remains in the historical record that documents the political philosophy of black women in nineteenth-century California, their actions reveal a political engagement that challenged the very root of Jim Crow’s tenets. What their actions tell us is that black women did not shy away from political confrontations over segregation even when the danger was represented as one about bodies. In the battles over schools and streetcars, for example, proponents of segregation argued that unseemly mingling of black and white bodies constituted the core of the danger. These were precisely the places where African American women were most visibly engaged in the battle against Jim Crow.

The black codes that we associate with the Jim Crow South found a comfortable home in California. The state legislature passed statutes that ensured white privilege in most areas of public life. Separate schools for white and nonwhite children originated with statehood. Streetcar drivers routinely ignored or refused to stop for black riders. Antimiscegenation laws criminalized marriage between African Americans and white Californians. And for the first thirteen years of statehood, African Americans could not testify against a white person in court.8 The presence of Jim Crow in California elicited a forceful response. Black men and women challenged segregation in the courts, the streets, the ballot box, the pulpit, theaters, and in the pages of the black press. These efforts amounted to what has been called “the first civil rights campaign in the West.”9 As in the civil rights movement that would follow in the next century, women and men made meaning out of race and gender, sometimes pushing against rigid definitions, sometimes adopting what we would see as conventional gender roles. Black women often found themselves in precarious positions that shaped their modes of resistance; throughout the nineteenth century their bodies would be the subject of racialized and sexist diatribes and their quest for freedom occurred in response to and challenged such beliefs. Black men, however, also engaged with racist proscriptions that were about gender and sex and that deployed pseudoscientific rhetoric about their impure and dangerous bodies.

This chapter examines African American efforts to wrest freedom from California during the first decades of statehood, revealing the significance of black women and men in the larger project of determining who would be a citizen. Black men and women became integral to the state’s efforts to define what citizenship entailed in post-emancipation America. The claims that black Californians made as they articulated their demands for equal rights reveal myriad beliefs about what democracy should look like and who should be entitled to the privileges of citizenship. Sometimes nineteenth-century black Californians understood that their fight required coalitions with other aggrieved groups, especially Chinese; on other occasions, African Americans made their freedom claims separate from and in conflict with Chinese. Black women and men organized a civil rights movement using networks and strategies formed in the abolitionist movement, creating new ways of thinking and being. Whatever the strategy, gender and bodies were always part of the equation.

To undo Jim Crow as it was being created in this western place meant grappling with ever-changing meanings of manhood and womanhood and with diverse ideologies of freedom and equality. Black men and women created multiple routes of resistance in this era, strategies and tactics that laid the foundation for future activism. Their insistence on entering previously white-only spaces drew attention to the hypocrisy of California’s status as a free state. Women’s insistence on inhabiting white-only and male-only spaces meant that they experienced Jim Crow differently and fashioned their own, sometimes independent strategies. California, or “freedom’s nursery,” as Eliza Farnham called it, was indeed a nursery of ideas about freedom, though probably not in the ways that Farnham had imagined.10 That slavery was intact but ambiguous and Jim Crow emerging as California claimed statehood meant that black Californians were in a position to study discrimination and shape freedom. The ways that this unfolded show us that African Americans were central actors in the debates that animated antebellum and Reconstruction politics in California and that the subject of black bodies was deeply imbedded in those politics. This initial era of the state’s history reveals Jim Crow under construction in a place where African Americans rarely found the freedom they deserved. This positioned black Californians to shape the contours of democracy in the state and nation.

Slavery’s Shadow

Upon entering the Union in 1850 as a free state, California emerged as an innovator of racial restrictions and quasi-freedom.11 Anglo Californians embraced the rhetoric of freedom and equality as they carefully crafted their limits. Efforts to create, protect, and defend freedom for white men were complicated by the state’s multiracial and multiethnic population, and its ever-changing demographics. Creating out of Native American and Mexican territory a republic that privileged free white men required an arsenal of new laws, “sciences” about race and racial categories, and attention to gatekeeping in every area of public and private life. As the meanings of free and unfree labor were refined and adjusted, slavery lingered. Staking a claim to freedom in this environment would be more difficult than most black migrants anticipated.

The process of state making in the territory that became California hinged, in many ways, on the question of slavery and freedom. Believing that the presence of slaves would undermine the freedom of white men, a majority of delegates at the 1849 Constitutional Convention voted to endorse the antislavery constitution. The presence of free blacks worried state makers for much the same reason. Convention delegate O. M. Wozencraft from San Joaquin opined, “I desire to protect the people of California against all monopolies—to encourage labor and protect the laboring class. Can this be done by admitting the negro race? Surely not.”12 Delegates considered a state constitution that would prohibit free black migration as well as slavery, but there was concern that Congress would not approve the constitution. The first state assembly passed an anti-immigration law forbidding free blacks from entering the state only one month after the convention. Although the bill did not gain senate approval, anti-immigration bills were introduced in the California Legislature on three other occasions—in 1851, 1857, and 1858.13 The message that black people were unwelcome and out of place could hardly be telegraphed more effectively. Try as they might, however, white supremacists could not expunge African Americans from the state.

Freedom was precarious for many in the first years of California’s history. Although Mexico had outlawed slavery in the territory in 1829, African American and Native American slaves continued to toil for masters when California entered the Union. Indeed, the trafficking of Native American women and girls became a central feature of Northern California society in the years after the gold rush. As Stacey L. Smith shows, California’s contests over slavery were “far more complicated, contentious, and protracted” than historians have realized. Well into the 1850s, slaveholders made every attempt to transplant the culture of southern slavery to free soil. The rights of slaves and slave owners were ambiguous at best, and defining these rights became a central preoccupation of California’s antebellum politicians and lawmakers. As Smith notes, “Californians, far from being detached, distant, or unconcerned about slavery, battled over three of the most divisive political and legal issues of the era: the status of slavery in the federal territories, masters’ rights to sojourn with their slaves in free states, and free states’ obligation to capture fugitive slaves.”14 The specter of slavery dominated state making and pulled slaves, free blacks, and slave owners into the national contest over freedom. Black bodies were a pivot point in state politics.

Most of California’s earliest black migrants arrived as part of the mass exodus inspired by the gold rush. Southern slave owners anxious to strike it rich forced African Americ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Freedom Claims: Reconstructing the Golden State
• 2. “This Is Our Fair and Our State”: Race Women, Race Men, and the Panama Pacific International Exposition
• 3. “The Best Proposition Ever Offered to Negroes in the State”: Building an All-Black Town
• 4. A Lesson in Lynching
• 5. Burning Down the House: California’s Ku Klux Klan
• 6. The Only Difference between Pasadena and Mississippi Is the Way They’re Spelled: Swimming in Southern California
• Epilogue: Remembering (and Forgetting) Jim Crow
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover