Seattle's first black resident was a sailor named Manuel Lopes who arrived in 1858 and became the small community's first barber. He left in the early 1870s to seek economic prosperity elsewhere, but as Seattle transformed from a stopover town to a full-fledged city, African Americans began to stay and build a community. By the early twentieth century, black life in Seattle coalesced in the Central District, a four-square-mile section east of downtown. Black Seattle, however, was never a monolith. Through world wars, economic booms and busts, and the civil rights movement, black residents and leaders negotiated intragroup conflicts and had varied approaches to challenging racial inequity. Despite these differences, they nurtured a distinct African American culture and black urban community ethos. With a new foreword and afterword, this second edition of The Forging of a Black Community is essential to understanding the history and present of the largest black community in the Pacific Northwest.

Indigenous peoples and racial minorities have lived and thrived in Oregon for centuries. Their legacy is interwoven with the state's history and culture even as they continue to struggle with prejudice, environmental pressures, shrinking state revenues, the effects of globalization, and the changing dynamics of the state economy. Current U.S. immigration policy and the forces of globalization have played a critical role in creating a dynamic process named the 'browning of Oregon.' This anthology brings together a group of noted multidisciplinary scholars, who explore the rich and varied experiences of Oregon's native communities and racial minorities. Anchored in a 'power relations' perspective, the book has been organized around several key historical themes, including: the foundation of ethnic communities; civil rights; social justice; ethnicity and labor; and various forms of cultural traditions. As disparate as they seem in style and topic, this collection of essays highlight the distinctive experiences of Oregon's people of color and communicates the broader interlocking categories of social identity. The book is essential reading for students, teachers, and the general public interested in contemporary racial politics.

From the 18th century, African Americans, like many others, have migrated to California to seek fortunes or, often, the more modest goals of being able to find work, own a home, and raise a family relatively free of discrimination. Not only their search but also its outcome is covered in "Seeking El Dorado." Whether they settled in major cities or smaller towns, African Americans created institutions and organizations--churches, social clubs, literary societies, fraternal orders, civil rights organizations--that embodied the legacy of their past and the values they shared. Blacks came in search of the same jobs as other Americans, but the search often proved frustrating. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, African American leadership in the state consistently focused on achieving racial justice. The essays in this book speak of triumph and hardship, success, discrimination, and disappointment.

"Seeking El Dorado" is a major contribution to black history and the history of the American West and will be of interest to both scholars and general readers.

Seattle's first black resident was a sailor named Manuel Lopes who arrived in 1858 and became the small community's first barber. He left in the early 1870s to seek economic prosperity elsewhere, but as Seattle transformed from a stopover town to a full-fledged city, African Americans began to stay and build a community. By the early twentieth century, black life in Seattle coalesced in the Central District, a four-square-mile section east of downtown. Black Seattle, however, was never a monolith. Through world wars, economic booms and busts, and the civil rights movement, black residents and leaders negotiated intragroup conflicts and had varied approaches to challenging racial inequity. Despite these differences, they nurtured a distinct African American culture and black urban community ethos. With a new foreword and afterword, this second edition of The Forging of a Black Community is essential to understanding the history and present of the largest black community in the Pacific Northwest.

African Americans in the American West
1528–1990

"This is an enthralling work that will be essential reading for years to come. You finish it understanding how integral a part blacks were of the making of the West and, indeed, America." — David Nicholson, Washington Post

A landmark history of African Americans in the West, In Search of the Racial Frontier rescues the collective American consciousness from thinking solely of European pioneers when considering the exploration, settling, and conquest of the territory west of the Mississippi. From its surprising discussions of groups of African American wholly absorbed into Native American culture to illustrating how the largely forgotten role of blacks in the West helped contribute to everything from the Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation ruling to the rise of the Black Panther Party, Quintard Taylor fills a major void in American history and reminds us that the African American experience is unlimited by reion or social status.

"[Rich] in scope and scholarly detail — it will certinaly stand as the definitive work on the subject for some time to come." — James A. Miller, Boston Globe

"[B]y far the most complete general history of blacks in the West." — Scott L. Malcolmson, Newsday

• "An absorbing chronicle." — Publisher's Weekly
• "Those looking for a solid overview of the African-American presence in our region would do well to let Quintard Taylor be their guide." — John C. Walter, Seattle Times

Quintard Taylor is a professor of history at the University of Oregon. He lives in Eugene, Oregon.

"Reconstructs the history of black women's participation in western settlement"

" "A stellar collection of essays by talented authors who explore fascinating topics."--Journal of American Ethnic History"

"African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000" is the first major historical anthology on the topic. The editors argue that African American women in the West played active, though sometimes unacknowledged, roles in shaping the political, ideological, and social currents that have influenced the United States over the past three centuries.

Contributors to this volume explore African American women's life experiences in the West, their influences on the experiences of the region's diverse peoples, and their legacy in rural and urban communities from Montana to Texas and from California to Kansas. The essayists explore what it has meant to be an African American woman, from the era of Spanish colonial rule in eighteenth-century New Mexico to the black power era of the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1927, Beatrice Cannady succeeded in removing racist language from the Oregon Constitution. During World War II, Rowena Moore fought for the right of black women to work in Omaha's meat packinghouses. In 1942, Thelma Paige used the courts to equalize the salaries of black and white schoolteachers across Texas. In 1950 Lucinda Todd of Topeka laid the groundwork for the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. These actions - including sit-ins long before the Greensboro sit-ins of 1960 - occurred well beyond the borders of the American South and East, regions most known as the home of the civil rights movement. By considering social justice efforts in western cities and states, Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West convincingly integrates the West into the historical narrative of black Americans' struggle for civil rights. From Iowa and Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest, and from Texas to the Dakotas, black westerners initiated a wide array of civil rights activities in the early to late twentieth century. Connected to national struggles as much as they were tailored to local situations, these efforts predated or prefigured events in the East and South. In this collection, editors Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz bring these moments into sharp focus, as the contributors note the ways in which the racial and ethnic diversity of the West shaped a specific kind of African American activism. Concentrating on the far West, the mountain states, the desert Southwest, the upper Midwest, and states both southern and western, the contributors examine black westerners' responses to racism in its various manifestations, whether as school segregation in Dallas, job discrimination in Seattle, or housing bias in San Francisco. Together their essays establish in unprecedented detail how efforts to challenge discrimination impacted and changed the West and ultimately the United States.

Henry Ossian Flipper was one of the nineteenth-century West's most remarkable individuals. The first African American graduate of West Point, he served four years in the West as a cavalry officer but was court-martialed and dismissed from the service in 1882. He spent the rest of his long life attempting to clear his name.

Flipper's record of accomplishment was significant for any individual in any time, and for a nineteenth-century black American it was phenomenal. As historian Quintard Taylor points out, in his post-Army career Flipper was a surveyor, cartographer, civil and mining engineer, interpreter, translator, historian, inventor, newspaper editor, special agent for the Justice Department, deputy U.S. mineral surveyor, aide to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and consultant to the secretary of the interior. His work carried him to Mexico, Venezuela, and Spain, and he left a record of achievement that demonstrates his enormous talent and unrelenting effort.

"The Colored Cadet at West Point" contains Taylor's biographical essay, Flipper's account of his career at West Point, and a new index prepared for this volume.

Amid the deadly racial violence of the 1960s, an unassuming student from a fundamentalist Christian home in Omaha emerged as a leader and nationally recognized black activist. Ernest Chambers, elected to the Nebraska State Legislature in 1970, eventually became one of the most powerful legislators the state has ever known. Omaha native Tekla Agbala Ali Johnson illuminates his embattled career as a fiercely independent defender of the downtrodden. Tracing the growth of the Black Power Movement in Nebraska and throughout the US, Johnson discovers its unprecedented emphasis on electoral politics. For the first time since Reconstruction, voters catapulted hundreds of African American community leaders into state and national political arenas. Special-interest groups and political machines would curb the success of aspiring African American politicians, just as urban renewal would erode their geographical and political bases, compelling the majority to join the Democratic or Republican parties. Chambers was one of few not to capitulate. In her revealing study of this man and those he represented, Johnson portrays one intellectual's struggle alongside other African Americans to actualize their latent political power

From the 18th century, African Americans, like many others, have migrated to California to seek fortunes or, often, the more modest goals of being able to find work, own a home, and raise a family relatively free of discrimination. Not only their search but also its outcome is covered in Seeking El Dorado. Whether they settled in major cities or smaller towns, African Americans created institutions and organizations-churches, social clubs, literary societies, fraternal orders, civil rights organizations-that embodied the legacy of their past and the values they shared. Blacks came in search of the same jobs as other Americans, but the search often proved frustrating. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, African American leadership in the state consistently focused on achieving racial justice. The essays in this book speak of triumph and hardship, success, discrimination, and disappointment. Seeking El Dorado is a major contribution to black history and the history of the American West and will be of interest to both scholars and general readers.

In a debate in the Senate on July 9, 1866, contemplating the formation of a black infantry regiment, some senators observed that "if it was a privilege to serve in the Army, the colored troops had earned the privilege by their gallantry, and that if it was a duty, they should not be allowed to shirk it." Indeed, black soldiers had been serving since the Revolutionary War, but now, for the first time, they became part of the regular army, enjoying the same privileges, performing the same duties, and facing the same tedium and occasional danger that were every soldier's lot, but with the added burden of the intense racism of the time. Buffalo Soldier Regiment offers a detailed record of the service, exploits, travels, and traditions of one of these units, the "grand old Twenty-fifth."

Drawing on a wealth of official records, reports, and personal recollections, this book reconstructs the experiences of the Twenty-fifth Regiment from its formation in 1869 through its service in the border town of Nogales, Arizona, in 1926. Following the troops as they move all over the country, we see the soldiers engaged in scouting, escort and guard duty, and road building; skirmishing with Indians; quelling labor riots; fighting forest fires; and even campaigning in Cuba and the Philippines. From its moments of drama to its depictions of garrison life and accounts of the regiment's Bicycle Corps and baseball team, this volume preserves a vital part of America's complex history.