The Black West by William Loren Katz

Author:William Loren Katz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
Published: 2019-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

Grafton Tyler Brown came to San Francisco to paint landscapes of the Pacific Northwest.

African Americans began to realize their problems were statewide, and as they had in the East and Midwest, summoned state conventions aimed at repeal of the hated Black Laws. On November 21, 1855, the first convention convened at Sacramento’s African American Methodist Episcopal Church with forty-nine delegates – lawyers, businessmen, journalists, ministers, teachers, and community leaders. J. B. Sanderson delivered the keynote speech, a stinging call for action: “the laws scarcely recognize us; public sentiment is prejudiced against us; we are misunderstood, and misrepresented; it is needful that we should meet, communicate, and confer with each other upon some plan of representing our interests before the people.”

Delegates were told of African American prospectors who had been driven from their claims and denied help from the legal system. In San Francisco a Black man had been stabbed by a white man in front of twenty Black people, delegates heard, only to be exonerated since there were no white witnesses.

The convention listened to a report that the state’s African American population stood at 4,815 people who owned $2,413,000 in real and personal property. “Immense sums,” the report noted, had been paid by individuals to purchase the liberty of loved ones. The data, unknown until then, were issued to instill confidence in communities and impress white residents. Delegates also proposed creating a community newspaper and a bank, and urged public demonstrations against discrimination.

In September 1855, California’s first Black newspaper, Mirror of the Times, appeared and was circulated weekly by agents in thirty counties from the Mexican border to the Oregon line. When legislators ignored petitions signed by three hundred lawyers and others, the paper’s editorial called them hypocrites and “liars.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.