The African American West in 20th and 21st Century History and Culture

​      Most African American communities west of Austin were minute and were racially tolerated (at least prior to the influx of war industry workers in the 1940s). In contrast, where the South transitioned into the West, Black communities were Jim Crowed and did not undergo racial desegregation until after landmark U.S. Supreme Court rulings that led to the passage of civil rights legislation for fair voting and fair education in the mid-1940s, i.e. Smith v. Alright (1944), Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma (1948), Sweatt v. Painter (University of Texas) (1950), and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950).  According to historian Alwyn Barr, in Texas this condition traced back to Black freedom in 1865 where “black social life in the late nineteenth century became….more self-contained than during Reconstruction, because of continued economic limitations and anti-black violence coupled with growing segregation and discrimination by law and custom.” 

 

      By 1900, most African American Texans struggled just to make a living as sharecroppers and independent farmers. They worked on extremely small plots and lacked sufficient credit, financial resources, and up-to-date technology that included tractors to make a quality living on par with their white counterparts.  In spite of this, Blacks such as the Amos and Doris Ball family were determined to counter segregation as land-owning farmers.

 

      In South-Central Texas, the Ball family formed the core of two of the first five African American families in Greater San Antonio. In 2015, they owned more than 1000 acres of arable land in Seguin’s Zion Hill area, much of which they had purchased in the 1940s. Ball family member Joseph Ruffin purchased a 200-acre cotton farm in nearby New Berlin through a determined charismatic appeal to the local power structure of German Americans, hard work, and using the Ball-Ruffin-Hysaw family network to obtain a prime loan from a banker—a Ball, who publicly passed as a white German American. [2]

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      Other early-twentieth century Black westerners countered racial subordination by establishing all-Black towns. This development was rooted in Seminole/Maroon settlements in places such as Fort Mose, Augustine, Florida (1738), and after the Civil War in the all-Black town, Davis Bend, Mississippi—self-segregated utopias that presented hope to African Americans as self-governments shielding community members from hostile race relations and provided them reprieve from poverty as entrepreneurs and farmers on fertile soil. 

 

      From Nicodemus, Kansas (1879) to Dearfield, Colorado (1921), the formation of Black towns, as the ultimate expression of African American self-determination and economic self-sufficiency, had its greatest development in Nicodemus, Boley (Oklahoma), Langston City (Oklahoma), Allensworth (California), and Dearfield. Most Black town developments went into decline in the 1910s-1920s, following the death of their patriarchs such as Colonel Allen Allensworth, the postwar agriculture depression(s), and as residents transitioned to western cities like Boise, Idaho, to pursue living wage employment.  Following World War I (1919), the African American West experienced a profound shift from the frontier to the city through a movement better known as the Great Migration. [3]

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      Since the 1980s, historians have been challenging the traditional Great Migration narrative, from Rudolph Lapp who traced the voluntary mass movement of African Americans to California during the Gold Rush (1850s) to Bernadette Pruitt’s work on the 1900s Black mass migration to Houston which she referred to as “The Other Great Migration.” 

 

      Similar to Dallas and Omaha, which were booming industrial cities in states that have come to geographically and characteristically represent both the South and the West that bordered the Deep South, a great intraregional migration of African-European-Mexican-and-Native descendants converged onto Houston from numerous nearby places including Walker County, Texas. Black pioneers like Luther and Louis McBride resettled to Houston, taking on the risk that they could find quality housing and living wage employment.  Most notable about their collective quests for freedom was that unlike the First and Second Great Migrations (ca. 1915-1970) this movement was not sparked by industrial recruiters. Instead, African Americans chain-migrated to border cities like Houston and Kansas City on the premise that there existed safe-spaces to live quality lives that were free of overt structural racism associated with debt bondage, lynching, poverty, prison labor, unfair education and unfair housing.

 

      From 1917 to 1923, this mass search for equal living and equal rights came into direct conflict with segregationists in places like Houston, Omaha, and Tulsa, which led to an urban crisis in the form of widespread race violence and property destruction. 

 

      The 1917 Houston riot was sparked by a wave of police abuse of African American soldiers, and, in particular, the police assault and imprisonment of Corporal Charles Baltimore, which, in turn, triggered the retaliatory response of nearly one hundred fifty Buffalo Soldiers. This immediately led to the court-martial of 118 soldiers, 29 death sentences, 53 life sentences, only 7 acquittals, and Buffalo Soldier units being removed from combat. Houston’s riot and mutiny, and the unjust punishment of Black soldiers transformed urban African American political expression from accommodating Jim Crow to agitating against it.

 

      This developing sense of urgency ignited a brand of New Negro politics in the West, one that resulted in a conjunction of the fights for Black suffrage, fair labor, equal education and fair media representation, with self-help and economic empowerment. By 1924, New Negro politics expanded to small black communities such as El Paso, whose NAACP launched the nation-wide fight to end the white Democratic Primary after black physician Lawrence A. Nixon was denied the vote in that city. [4]

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      Unlike border cities such as Houston and Kansas City, most cities and towns west of Austin did not undergo a great black migration process until after 1915. West Coast and Intermountain West cities like Oakland and Denver did not capture the mass African American imagination prior to this period because of inconsistent and unsustained economic booms linked to the transcontinental railroad, the Depression of 1893-1898, and environmental disasters (i.e., earthquakes, fires, droughts and tornados). This moderately changed during the post-World War I era, stimulated by rumors within the black community that some cities like Los Angeles were places where blacks could escape Jim Crow and experience better living, better schools, and dignified jobs with living wages.[5]

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      Within BlackWest, “the Black community” refers to people of African descent who share a similar sociohistorical heritage which encompassed life in Africa, involuntary migration, chattel slavery, colonialism, de facto and de jure racial discrimination that intimately informs their continued search for equality and social justice.

 

      In the case of Oregon/San Francisco lawyer McCants Stewart and Portland civil rights advocate Beatrice Morrow Cannady, they came to the West with their families in search of fulfilling the promise of equal opportunity and conditions as outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  What they and most Black westerners encountered instead was another U.S. region that defaulted on the promissory note of “unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Conscious of this late developing “color-line” that increasingly feminized poverty in western Black communities, and had restricted most African Americans to low-paying manual labor and domestic work, people like Stewart and Cannady developed a collective sense of community and political urgency to make the U.S. West live up to their expectations of equality. 

 

      For example, in California this modern quest for freedom was sparked in 1915 by local NAACP’s efforts to censor the white supremacist motion picture The Birth of a Nation.  Whereas in 1920s Portland, a new era of protest combined the concepts of “self-help, hard work, thrift, and racial solidarity” with civil rights and women’s rights activism for first-class citizenship, which arose in direct opposition to the rise of Oregon’s Ku Klux Klan.  From these efforts emerged the modern freedom rights movement in the U.S. West, which included the working-class struggle for fair labor, fair housing, and racial regeneration and advancement.

 

      For instance in 1910s Los Angeles, rapid Black population growth and the formation of the first involuntary ghetto west of the ninety-eighth meridian resulted in the first election of an African American to public office since 1901 in California State Assembly member Frederick M. Roberts (R)—the first Black politician in high office on the West Coast. By the 1930s, New Negro politics and the ghettoization of most Black Los Angelinos resulted in what historian Douglas Flamming referred to as “one the most significant political realignments in American history” through the election of liberal Democrats, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (for president) and African American Augustus F. Hawkins (for state assembly). [6]

 

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​NOTES

[1] Alwyn Barr, Black Texans: A History of Negroes in Texas, 1528-1971 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), 3-8; Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991); Paul D. Lack, The Texas Revolutionary Experience: A Political and Social History, 1835-1836 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1995), 238-252; Mulroy, Freedom on the Border, 35-60; and The Seminole Freedmen: A History (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 22-83; Kenneth W. Porter, The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996), 111-134; and Richard B. Sheridan, “From Slavery in Missouri to Freedom in Kansas: The Influx of Black Fugitives and Contrabands into Kansas, 1854-1864,” Kansas History 12:1 (Spring 1989), 28-47; and Freedom's Crucible: The Underground Railroad in Lawrence and Douglas County, Kansas, 1854-1865: A Reader (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, 2000); Harriet C. Frazier, Runaway and Freed Missouri Slaves and Those Who Helped Them, 1763-1865 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010); James Patrick Morgans, The Underground Railroad on the Western Frontier: Escapes from Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa and the Territories of Kansas, Nebraska and the Indian Nations, 1840-1865 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010). For Census data see Social Explorer Datasets (SE), Census 1890-1940; and Social Explorer Tables (SE), Census 1960 (US, County & State); and Social Explorer Tables/Datasets (SE), Census 1970-2010. Also see Shirley Boteler Mock, Dreaming the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 144-156; Bailey C. Hanes, Bill Pickett: Bulldogger (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989); and Joe Holley, “Sgt. Mark Matthews Dies; at 111, Was Oldest Buffalo Soldier” in Washington Post, September 13, 2005 (URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/12/AR2005091201663.html)

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[2] See Darlene Clarke Hine, “The Elusive Ballot: The Black Struggle against the Texas Democratic White Primary, 1932-1945” in Glasrud and Smallwood (eds.), The African American Experience in Texas, An Anthology, 280-282; Pruitt, The Other Great Migration, 166-170; Charles L. Zelden, The Battle for the Black Ballot: Smith v. Allwright and the Defeat of the Texas All-White Primary (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Dwonna Goldstone, Integrating the 40 Acres: The Fifty-Year Struggle for Racial Equality at the University of Texas (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2012), 14-30; Henderson, “Lucinda Todd and the Invisible Petitioners of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas”; Linda Williams Reese, “Clara Luper and the Civil Rights Movement in Oklahoma City, 1958-1964” in Taylor (eds.), African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000, 331-333; Cheryl Elizabeth Brown Wattley, A Step toward Brown v. Board of Education: Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher and Her Fight to End Segregation (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 2014); Whitaker, Race Work, 133-172. Also see Brent M. S. Campney, “’Hold the Line’: The Defense of Jim Crow in Lawrence, Kansas, 1945–1961: in Kansas Historical Society (Spring 2010), 22-41 (URL: http://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/2010spring_campney.pdf). Also, quoted in Barr, Black Texans, 110. Also see 70-111; and Bruce A. Glasrud and James M. Smallwood (eds.), The African American Experience in Texas: An Anthology (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2007), 173-179.

[5] Ibid 153, 156. Furthermore see Herbert G. Ruffin II, “I Try To Do the Best Job I Can: Herbert Ruffin I and Life in Central Texas and the San Francisco Bay Area, 1946-2002” (Oral History), Lone Star Legacy: African American History in Texas (Bi-Annual Journal) (Vol. 2, Num. 2, Fall 2013), 7-34; and "The Forging of an African American Community on the Outskirts of Alamo City: African American Suburbanization in San Antonio, 1980-2000,” in M. Scott Sosebee, and Paul Sandul (et.al) Lone Star Suburbs: The Suburban Process in a Super-State (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 2019). Members of the Ball family interviewed by Ruffin at San Antonio and Seguin from July 2009 to November 2015 include AJ Ball, Alfred Smith, Bernice Ball, Doris Ball, James Ball, Wade Leroy Ball, Renee Harris, Lilian Kyle, Earl Reddix, Wanda Louis Revels, Delores Ruffin, Honey Ruffin, Jozette Ruffin, Ruby Ruffin. Lastly, based on author interviews with Wade Leroy Ball, Honey Ruffin, and Wanda Louis Revels in San Antonio, Live Oak, and Seguin, Texas, November 2015. Joseph Ruffin was a Ball through marriage to Robert Ball’s eldest daughter, Alvernia.

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[3] Mulroy, The Seminole Freedmen, 8-9; Kathleen Deagan and Darcie MacMahon, Fort Mose: Colonial America’s Black Fortress of Freedom (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995); Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 29-106; and Janet Sharp Herman, “Isaiah Montgomery’s Balancing Act” in Leon Litwack and August Meier (eds.), Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 291-298. In additiona, see Hamilton, Black Towns and Profit, 5-42, 99-148; Delores Nason McBroome, “Harvests of Gold: African American Boosterism, Agriculture, and Investment in Allensworth and Little Liberia” in De Graaf (et al.), Seeking El Dorado, 149-180; Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 136-154;and Trevor Hughes, “For a time, all-black town was dear field of dreams” in USA Today, February 25, 2015 (URL: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/19/black-history-dearfield-ghost-town/21879605/).

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[4] Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 12-48, 94-117; and Bernadette Pruitt, The Other Great Migration: The Movement of Rural African Americans to Houston, 1900-1941 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2013), 1-15, 76.  For a few histories on early-twentieth race riots see Barr, Black Texans, 115; Robert V. Haynes, A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1976); Pruitt, The Other Great Migration, 141-147, 166-170; Calvin C. Smith, “The Houston Riot of 1917, Revisited” in The Houston Review: History and Culture of the Gulf Coast 13 (Fall  1991): 85-102; Alonzo Smith, “The Omaha Courthouse Lynching of 1919” in Blackpast.org (URL: http://www.blackpast.org/aaw/omaha-courthouse-lynching-1919); and Alfred L. Brophy, Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Hannibal B. Johnson, Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa's Historic Greenwood District (Fort Worth, TX: Eakin Press, 1998); James S. Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002); and Tim Madigan, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2001); and Hine, “The Elusive Ballot,” 280-282; and Charles L. Zelden, The Battle for the Black Ballot.

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[5] See Lonnie G. Bunch III, “’The Greatest State for the Negro’: Jefferson L. Edmonds, Black Propagandist of the California Dream” in De Graaf (et al.), Seeking El Dorado, 129-148; Douglas Flamming, Bound For Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 92-125; Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon (eds.), Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 34-38. In cities dominated by overt white supremacist activity, such as Portland, Oregon, Black population growth stagnated until the 1940s. For more on this history and the general First Great Migration narrative see Kimberley Mangun, A Force for Change: Beatrice Morrow Cannady and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Oregon (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2010), 5-39, 76-93; Elizabeth McLagan, A Peculiar Paradise: A History of Blacks in Oregon, 1788-1940 (Portland: Georgian Press Company, 1980), 108-146; Albert S. Broussard, Expectations of Equality: A History of Black Westerners (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2012), 60-95; and Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 222-250.

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[6] The Library of Congress, “14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution” in Web Guides (URL: https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/14thamendment.html). Quoted from Charles P. Henry, Long Overdue: The Politics of Racial Reparations (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 1. Also see Mangun, A Force for Change; and Albert S. Broussard, African-American Odyssey: The Stewarts, 1853-1963 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, 1998).  Expectations of equality concept is borrowed from Broussard, Expectations of Equality, xi-xvi. For more on African American economic opportunities prior to the enactment of Affirmative Action and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 see Broussard, Expectations of Equality, 62-72; Bruce Nelson, “The “Lords of the Docks” Reconsidered: Race Relations among West Coast Longshoremen, 1933-61,” In Calvin Winslow (ed.) Waterfront Workers: New Perspectives on Race and Class (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1998), 155-192; and Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 57-94; Terry H. Anderson, The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (URL: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/titlevii.cfm); and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, “Your Life Is Really Not Just Your Own: African American Women in Twentieth-Century California” in De Graaf (et al.) Seeking El Dorado, 211-12; Albert S. Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900-1954 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 77-81; Flamming, Bound For Freedom, 88-90, 146-147, 198, 200-201; and Shirley Anne Wilson Moore, “’Your Life Is Really Not Just Your Own’: African American Women in Twentieth-Century Calfornia” in De Graaf (et al.), Seeking El Dorado, 213, 217; Mangun, A Force of Change, 7. Final quoted is from Douglass Flamming, “Becoming Democrats: Liberal Politics and the African American Community in Los Angeles, 1930-1965” in De Graaf (et al.), Seeking El Dorado, 279, 281-286. The last Black politician to be elected to office before 1918 was North Carolina Republican George Henry White (1901) which can be read in Benjamin R. Justesen, George Henry White: An Even Chance in the Race of Life (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 276-311. Also see Michelle M. Mears, And Grace Will Lead Me Home: African American Freedmen Communities of Austin, Texas, 1865 to 1928 (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2009), 25-56, 137-153.

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