Pre-Columbian

​800 (BCE): Some contemporary scholars suggest that African explorers may have visited the Americas prior to Columbus in 1492. One example of this claim is seen in the stone carvings that appear to bear “Ethiopian” features on the Olmec colossal heads in Veracruz, Mexico.

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16th Century

1492-1501: Black explorers such as Pedro Alonso Nino participate in the Spaniards first expeditions into the Americas.

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1501: Spanish King Ferdinand II of Aragon permits enslaved Africans to be trafficked into Colonial Spain.

 

1508: Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo writes the novel Las Sergas de Esplandian, or The Deeds Of Esplandian. The name “California” probably derived from this Spanish tale of chivalry, in which a queen called Califa ruled an island-empire (Baja California) populated by brown-skinned Amazons with gold weapons.

 

1517: Friar Bartolome de Las Casas petitions to Spain to reform the genocidal impact that its debt peonage and wage labor system was having on indigenous Americans, by replacing them with enslaved Africans. He later regrets this appeal and becomes a strong proponent for gradual abolitionism in New Spain.

 

1518: Charles I of Spain enacts the regulation of slave trading into the Americas with the Asientos de Negroes, which are royal license(s) privileging requesting merchants, government officials, conquistadors, and settlers for the right to import slaves without customs or duties taxes. Control of the contracts was generally monopolized by Portuguese merchants for most of the sixteenth-century, Dutch merchants for most of the seventeenth-century, and the English after 1713.

 

1519: The first African presence in North America accompanying Europeans occurs during the Hernando Cortes expedition into Veracruz, Mexico.  

 

1528: Esteban de Dorantes of Azamor, an enslaved Moor, is the first person of African descent to experience the U.S. West. He is a shipwrecked survivor enslaved by the Karankawa Indians at Galveston Island. 

 

1539: Esteban as scout for the Franciscan Friar Marcos de Niza’ expedition into the northern interior, seductive reports re-sparked the Spanish interests in exploring and conquering the Southwest for riches and imperial expansion.

 

1541: Persons of African descent participate in Francisco Vasquez de Coronado’s expedition from Mexico City to New Mexico to Kansas.

 

1570: Colonial Mexico’s population includes 20,569 Black and 2,435 Mulattoes.

 

1571: Black women and Mulattas have to be married to Spaniards if they are to wear gold, silk and pearls.

 

1598: Free Mulatta, Isabel de Olvera, is part of the Juan Guerra de Resa expedition, which colonizes New Mexico.

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17th Century

1600-1790s: Multiracial settlements with high populations of persons of African linage are founders of northern frontier settlements in the contemporary Southwest stretching from Texas to California, including El Paso, San Antonio, Laredo, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Tucson, San Diego, Monterey, San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles.

 

1618: After resisting capture for nine years (since 1609), the Mexican maroon community of San Lorenzo de los Negros battles the Spanish to a truce, resulting in the first officially recognized free black community in the Americas. Since 1932, San Lorenzo de los Negros has been renamed Yanga (in Veracruz, Mexico) after its Nigerian-Muslim founder Gaspar Yanga.  

 

1619: Around twenty Africans arrive in the English settlement of Jamestown, Virginia on board a Dutch slave ship, are sold to colonists, and become indentured servants in exchange for food. After seven years as indentured servants, most black Virginians gain their freedom, purchase land, engage in commerce and have political rights. This pattern changes after the 1660s when blacks are no longer accorded that opportunity. *Important for this study, 1619 is when most U.S. histories falsely begin African American history.

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18th Century

Early-1700's: Blacks enslaved from South Carolina and Georgia colonies find refuge in Seminole colonies at St. Augustine, Spanish Florida.

 

1750: According to the census of Albuquerque, 25 percent of the families have African ancestry.

 

1777: California’s first civilian settlement in El Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe (or San Jose) is founded by 68 settlers, 15 of whom are persons of African heritage (22 percent). Of the original fifteen families, four are headed by men of African descent which represents 27 percent of the founding population.

 

1778: In San Antonio, Texas, of 759 male residents, 151 are blacks. Only four are enslaved.

 

1781: Los Angeles, California’s second civilian settlement is founded by 46 people, including 26 Afro-Mexicans primarily from Sinaloa, Northwest Mexico.

 

1787: The Northwest Ordinance becomes U.S. federal law, warning European powers that lands north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River will eventually become part of the U.S. and are to be regulated in development. Working in accordance with the Missouri Compromise of 1819/20, the Ordinance becomes a policy for accelerating westward migration for slave and free states such as Texas and Oregon in 1845.

 

1793: 6,100 Blacks and 369,790 Mulattoes reside in Colonial Mexico.

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19th Century

1803: Louisiana Territory is purchased from the French for 3 cents an acres, or 15 million dollars, as Napoleon Bonaparte’s hopes for North American dominance are dashed in relation to the successes of the Haitian Revolution. As a result, the U.S. doubles in size; sparking the Lewis and Clark expedition. 

 

1803-1806: York, an enslaved English speaking black man, participate in the overland expeditions of Lewis and Clark as a hunter, explorer, scout, diplomat and trader.

 

1806: Edward Rose, in the legacy of black mountain men like Chicago’s founder Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, works as an envoy, guide, language interpreter, mountain man explorer, and Afro-Native war chief in the Missouri River Valley and northern Rocky Mountains in the U.S. In these regions, he is the first of several dozens of black fur trappers and traders.

 

1819: Juan Cristobal exemplifies the common experience of many individual black males upon entering Mexico from 1819-1848, in that he finds refuge in a place like Spanish California, is immediately emancipated (by custom until 1829), and becomes a citizen with the caveat that he convert to Roman Catholicism and declare his loyalty to Mexico.

 

1819: The Cherokee General Council ratifies a slave code to regulate black behavior and preserve slavery, which is similar to slave codes in use in the cotton-belt South.

 

1820-1850: The Missouri Compromise of 1820 regulates the admission into the Union, with the line between slave and free states drawn along the 36°30′ Parallel west of the Mississippi River. The Compromise is intended to balance the number of slave/free states. Missouri is admitted as a slave state while an area of Massachusetts is separated into the state of Maine and admitted as a free state.  

 

1820-1825: Free and enslaved blacks from the U.S. find sanctuary and thrive in Mexican Texas.

 

1821: Moses and Stephan Austin found an Anglo American colony in Mexican Texas along the Brazos and Colorado Rivers (today the colony has expanded into Austin city).

Early-1820s: Mexico’s policy to attract Anglo-American settlers to Texas for economic development backfires—by 1835, of the estimated 43,000 inhabitants, approximately 30,000 are Anglo Americans, 7,800 are Mexican Texans, and 5,000 are free and enslaved African Americans.

 

1825: Afro-Mountain man James Beckwourth, works as a fur trapper for the first time in the Rockies for William Ashley’s The Rocky Mountain Fur Company in the Missouri River Valley.  This is the first excursion of many in his illustrious career which spans the years from the 1820s to 1850s, as an adventurer, entrepreneur, explorer, and Afro-indigenous member of several nations.

 

1825: In Austin colony, 69 of 1,347 residents own 443 enslaved African Americans.

 

1828: Mexican Texas establishes a contract labor system that resembles slavery.

 

1828-1842: The Trail of Tears relocates approximately 70,000 Native Americans and hundreds of African Americans to Indian Territory from Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee by treaty, deception, force, and intimidation. Nations forcibly relocated include the Cherokees, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminoles (or the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes”).

 

1828-1861: The relocation of southern nations to Indian Territory and westward expansion into the South opens 25 million acres to gold seekers, land speculators, white settlers and deeply entrenches slavery just as Mexico and the U.S. North are abolishing the peculiar institution.

 

1829: The Constitution of the Mexican Republic abolishes slavery and guarantees equality for all Mexican citizens.

 

1831: Afro Mexicans, Pio Pico and Manuel Victoria, are governors of Mexican California. Pico is also the last governor of Mexican California, 1845-1846.

 

1835: On March 2, the Anglo dominated General Council of Texas announces Texas’s independence from the United Mexican States.

 

1835: On March 6, Mexican Army General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna captures the Alamo. During this war for independence, hundreds of enslaved blacks “leave the farms and plantations to join or support the Mexican Army.” Larger percentages of enslaved African descendants use the conflict as cover for their flight across the Rio Grande River into Northeastern Mexico in the west or across the Red River into Indian Territory in the north.

 

1836: On April 21, free black Emily D. West (a.k.a. Yellow Rose of Texas) is erroneously credited with purposely keeping General Santa Anna occupied and helping the Texans “win the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive battle in the Texas Revolution.”

 

1836: During the immediate aftermath of the Texas Revolution, the Constitution of the Republic of Texas reversed the Mexican Constitutional statute concerning fugitive slaves, stating that fugitive slaves entering the nation shall retain the status of a slave.

 

1842: The Seminoles are defeated after several wars with the U.S., South Carolina and Georgia militias, and white settlers, finalizing the Native American removal to Indian Territory.

 

1844: The Provisional Government of Oregon’s Legislative Committee enacts the first of several black exclusion laws.

 

1844: In response to Oregon’s black exclusion laws, free black George Bush and Missouri emigrants move to sparsely populated Centerville north of the Columbia River, and in 1853, successfully petition Congress to create the Washington Territory.

 

1845: The U.S. annexes the Republic of Texas.

 

1848: The Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo officially ends the U.S.-Mexican War, dividing Mexico approximately in half, thereby extending U.S. boundaries from Texas to California.

 

1847: Of Utah’s 151 founders, three were African Americans—Green Flake, Hark Lay, and Oscar Crosby.

 

1847: Bridget “Biddy” Mason, along with nine other blacks, arrive in Utah with the second Mormon expedition.

 

1847: Black entrepreneur and city legislator William A. Leidesdorff, is elected to the town council in Yerba Buena (San Francisco); and sails “the first steamboat, the Sitka, to San Francisco Bay” then bringing the boat up the Sacramento River. The following year (1848) he is elected town treasurer and school board member.

 

1848/49: The Californian Gold Rush begins.

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