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Civil Rights, Protest and Anti-Slavery Activism in San Francisco

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Civil Rights, Protest and Anti-Slavery Activism in San Francisco CIVIL RIGHTS, RACIAL PROTEST, AND ANTI-SLAVERY ACTIVISM IN SAN FRANCISCO, 1850-1865 by Albert S. Broussard The State of California was a hotbed of civil rights and antislavery activity between 1850 and 1865, and the political activism and commitment to eradicate the “peculiar institution” was shared by African Americans and whites alike. African Americans throughout the entire state, however, took the lead in rallying the nation against slavery as well as calling attention to numerous examples of overt discrimination and racial inequality that they experienced. The center of this emerging political activity was San Francisco, a relatively small but politically active African American community of approximately one thousand individuals, the majority of whom had migrated to California during the gold rush era. African Americans, however, also organized protests in Oakland, Sacramento, Stockton, Marysville, and Los Angeles. This essay will examine racial activism, civil rights, and antislavery activity throughout the state in the decade and half prior to the Civil War. It will attempt to illustrate how black and white Californians, through a variety of strategies and protest campaigns, contributed to the development of an emerging national consciousness that ultimately came to view the enslavement of another human being as inconsistent with the principles of a democratic, egalitarian nation. Similarly, the essay will demonstrate how black and white activists in California used the state as an important symbol of the resistance to slavery that swept the nation. Finally, these antislavery activists, through their words as well their deeds, should be viewed as part of the national Underground Railroad, that vast network of roads, stations, routes, and safehouses that assisted enslaved people in their escape to freedom. As the historian C. Peter 1 Ripley writes, “As a formal term it [the Underground Railroad] refers to the movement of African-American slaves escaping out of the South and to the allies who assisted them in their search for freedom.1 By the early 1850s, the State of California had attracted an impressive African-American leadership class. Although less than 1,000 African-Americans were recorded in the 1850 census for the entire state, one undetermined resident reported that the influence of African-Africans could be gleaned in part by the “original naming of at least thirty-odd geographical features either Negro or Nigger.” The African-American population grew rapidly during the state’s first decade, a sign that economic opportunity was available and not totally restricted because of race. Approximately 4,000 blacks resided in California in 1860 and the majority settled in San Francisco, Sacramento, and in the mining districts in the northern part of he state.2 1C. Peter Ripley, “The Underground Railroad,” in The Underground Railroad (Washington, D.C.:Division of Publications, National Park Service, 1998), p.45. 2Hardy Frye, “Negroes in California from 1841-1875,” San Francisco Negro Historical and Cultural Society Monograph, vol. 3 (April 19680, 1-2; Preliminary Report on the Eighth Census, 1860 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1862), 2, 130; An excellent account of the California Gold Rush is J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981); Delilah Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles: 1919; reprinted, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969). 2 California’s famous Gold Rush attracted fortune seekers of all races and nationalities from around the entire world, and a small number of African-Americans, both slave and free, migrated to the Golden State. By 1852 an estimated three hundred slaves worked in California’s goldfields, a pretty good indication that southern slaveholders did not fear bringing their human chattel into California despite the anitslavery provision that legislators had adopted in the 1849 state constitution. California, in fact, had the largest number of slaves of any state or territory west of Texas.3 Alvin Aaron Coffey, born a slave in Macon, Kentucky, accompanied his master to California in search of gold in 1849. Coffey and his master left Kentucky in April 1849 by wagon train and encountered many obstacles during the long and arduous journey including wolves, icy roads, the steep terrain of the Rocky Mountains, and a cholera epidemic. Yet after five difficult months of travel, Coffey’s party finally reached California.4 3Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990 (New York, W. W. Norton, 1998), 78. 4Philip Montesano, “A Black Pioneer’s Trip to California,” Pacific Historian 13 (Winter 1969): 58-62. 3 Coffey’s fate was not unique, for a number of other African American bondsmen traveled to California in search of gold. A slave owner named George McKinley Murrell, born into a comfortable slaveholding family in Bowling Green, Kentucky, brought a trusted slave named Rheubin out to the California gold fields in 1849 and established his base of operations on the north fork of the American River. “California is not the country that it had been represented to be, but there is plenty of gold here from what I have seen,” he wrote back home to his family in Kentucky. Murrell spent two unsuccessful years in the mining fields, and, like the overwhelming majority of fortune-seekers, never managed to strike it rich. Yet his slave Rheubin proved to be invaluable to him in a number of respects. In addition to serving as a cook, laborer and body servant for his master, Rheubin was hired out as a cook and laborer to provide an additional source of income for his master. Hiring out slaves had been a common practices in the southern states, for it afforded African-American slaves a degree of freedom and autonomy that was absent on the plantation. It was also a lucrative practice for slave owners, for slaves worked in a wide array of service, skilled and semiskilled jobs, and their labor was always in demand. Although George Murrell returned to Kentucky in 1854, never having struck it rich, Rheubin died while hired out in the California gold fields in 1851. His employment as a cook in California mining towns increased his susceptibility to cholera and a number of infectious diseases.5 Whether slave or free, early African American settlers who migrated to California were seeking, above all, economic opportunity, and a number of these individuals, despite 5Albert S. Broussard, “Slavery in California Revisited: The Fate of a Kentucky Slave in Gold Rush California,” Pacific Historian 29 (Spring, 1985):17-21. 4 considerable prejudice against African Americans, did remarkably well. One African-American migrant referred to San Francisco as the “New York of the Pacific,” when he sized up San Francisco’s economic opportunities for members of his race.6 Many others apparently agreed with his conclusion. The African American carpenter Mifflin Gibbs migrated to San Francisco with the desire to pursue his trade as well as pan for gold, and discovered that white carpenters threatened to strike rather than accept an African American co-worker. The resilient Gibbs then established the Pioneer Boot and Shoe Emporium, which specialized in the sale of fine boots and shoes, and was quite profitable for many years. Gibbs was one of only three African-American merchants listed in the 1852 census for San Francisco.7 6Frederick Douglass’ Paper, October 30, 1851 and December 11, 1851. 7Mifflin W. Gibbs, Shadow and Light: An Autobiography (Washington, D.C., 1902, reprint ed., New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 44-45. 5 Similarly, Mary Ellen Pleasant, a black boardinghouse keeper and influential member of San Francisco’s African American community from the time of her arrival in 1849, owned property in San Francisco and Oakland prior to her death in 1904 and accumulated an estate valued at $300,000.8 Pleasant’s name was also linked intimately to the antislavery movement in California, for she contributed unspecified sums to the campaigns to hide fugitive slaves . The fugitive slave Archy Lee resided at the boardinghouse of Mary Ellen Pleasant. And although it has never been verified, Pleasant allegedly served as one of the principal financial backers of the white abolitionist John Brown’s abortive raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859.9 It is highly probable that Pleasant and other free African-Americans contributed modest sums to assist John Brown, but unlikely that she gave Brown the sum of $30,000, which she alleged late in her life. 8Lynn M. Hudson, “When Mammy Becomes a Millionaire: Mary Ellen Pleasant, An African American Entrepreneur,” Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1996. 9Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 100, 152; “Mary Ellen Pleasant,” in Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, eds., Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York: Norton, 1982), 495-96. 6 The majority of African-American workers were not as fortunate as either Gibbs or Pleasant, for they owned neither property nor worked in the skilled trades in San Francisco. Most found work as unskilled laborers or in domestic service, jobs which paid considerably less than skilled jobs and were not protected by unions. Small wonder that the majority of black San Franciscans, in tandem with their counterparts throughout the state, often linked their own struggle for civil rights and racial equality with the larger struggle against slavery. The two campaigns were inseparable. Organized black protest, therefore, to eradicate slavery and to eliminate racial discrimination were integral features of San Francisco’s early history, and black leaders were in the vanguard of this movement. In 1851, African-American leaders, led by Jonas H. Townsend and Mifflin Gibbs, printed a resolution in the Alta California, a local newspaper, protesting the denial of the franchise and the right of blacks to testify in court cases involving whites.
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