About
Herbert G. "Ruff" Ruffin II
Author & Webmaster
Welcome to BlackWest.org. This site was originally conceptualized at Claremont Graduate University in a digital humanities course in October 1999. It was shaped in 2000 at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institutiion in preparation for co-coordinating its Black West symposium, A Quest for Freedom (2001).
BlackWest was active from 1999 to 2005, and featured the “Africans on the North American Frontier, 1528-1848" exhibit that is featured on this new site. BlackWest reemerges after years of encouragement from mentor, friend, research partner and BlackPast founder Dr. Quintard Taylor. Up until 2026, part of what what prevented its relaunch was 18 years of work with BlackPast and purpose.
BlackWest’s goals are to strengthen the understanding and study of the African American West, and to create a new audience and new generation of scholars. It combines my research with liberal arts scholarship, public history, and research tools for anyone to conduct their own examinations on the complex and varied African American experiences in the U.S. West from Spanish America to the present.
Finally, as a Black study, my approach to African American western history is as a Black West study, undergirded by interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary methods that bridges disciplines for significance and aims to produce relevance based on new knowledge that often transcends the academy.
Biography
Herbert G. Ruffin II is a historian, Black studies scholar, and former department chair currently serving as an Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Syracuse University. Ruffin holds a Ph.D. in American History from Claremont Graduate University, California.
His research examines African American experiences in the U.S. West, and in particular, social movements and the process of urbanization and suburbanization in the San Francisco-Bay Area, Greater San Antonio, and in 19 states that constitute the region as a place. Ruffin has published two books on the Black West with the Oklahoma University Press in Uninvited Neighbors: African Americans in Silicon Valley, 1769-1990 (2014) and Freedom’s Racial Frontier: African Americans in the West in the Twentieth Century, co-edited with Dwayne Mack (2018). He has also published a book on African independence in Illuminations on Chinua Achebe: The Art of Resistance, co-edited with the late Micere Githae Mugo for Africa World Press (2017), and wrote the forward for Timothy E. Nelson's, Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900-1930 (2023).
His current book project is coauthored with the late Quintard Taylor and examines the 20th century African American urban West. In addition, Ruffin has authored numerous articles, book covers, digital humanities projects, and has been an active consultant in regard to leadership, documentaries, public exhibits, and historical presentations on Africa and African Diaspora history and culture, including work with Blackpast.org, C-Span, National Archives, National Parks and Services, Organization of American Historians, Smithsonian Institution, and serving as U.S. Historian Delegate to South Africa, to name a few.
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