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

In 1971, a young professor launched his career as a specialist in the study of the African American West following what should have been a basic discussion on the topic of slavery in the U.S., but which turned into an inquiry on the presence and impact of African Americans in the West. The discussion occurred in a course on African American history at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.

 

      The student who so profoundly impacted the professor by his interest in the history of Black westerners was undergraduate Billy Ray Flowers, a student-athlete. This professor, who at the time conceptualized African American history in the frame of the North-and-South, “confidently replied that none existed. Undaunted, Billy Ray challenged [him] to experiences.” [1]

 

      Soon this professor, Quintard Taylor (pictured on the right), was interviewing African Americans throughout the western U.S. and studying the pioneering scholarship of “Lawrence De Graaf, Kevin Mulroy document what he knew to be true from his practical experience and community, Kenneth Hamilton, Gretchen-Lemke-Santangelo, Shirley [Anne Wilson-Moore], Albert Broussard, Kenneth Mason, and Lonnie Bunch,” to name a few. The result was the 1998 publication of In Search of a Racial Frontier, and Taylor was en route to becoming a preeminent scholar on the subject. [2]

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      Flowers’ basic question and challenge to Taylor, which initiated a profound inquiry into what was until that time no more than an interesting footnote to African American/U.S. West/U.S. history, was just one of many similar unrecorded exchanges between experts on African American history and life, and the people who experienced and represented the Black West. This included westerners, including most of the pioneers listed (and most of this volume’s contributors), who became motivated to examine the African American West as histories of the communities within which they lived.

 

      Since 1970, these “coming to consciousness” moments, have resulted in a growing number of scholars of African American West history producing an exciting new branch of scholarship. In 2017, the largest and most dynamic area of this study has focused on the Black urban experience in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This focus has taken the field beyond the classical Fredrick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb frameworks. The former author was centered on the presence and contributions of white males on the western frontier and the latter extended that focus to the pre-World War II West. [3]

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      The first regional synthesis to conceptualize how the African American western frontier connected to twentieth-century industrial-urban America was Taylor’s In Search of a Racial Frontier. Conceptually, this book was written in a manner that was mindful of the regional syntheses that preceded it about New Western History and of the West as a “place.”  What resulted, was the fresh telling of a previously marginalized area of human history centered on the significance of the African American West, which fluidly intersected race, class, gender, multiculturalism, community formation, and political expression in communities that rested west of the ninety-eighth meridian (or areas west of Austin, Texas) and in states that rest on that meridian, including North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.  The history ranged from enslaved Spanish explorer Esteban to the Los Angeles rebellion/riot of 1992. [4]

 

      Since In Search, several regional surveys have been published that have used the racial frontier framework. The result has been an invaluable expansion of how the story of the U.S. West has been told in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These regional surveys include African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000 (2003) edited by Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, African Americans in the West (2009) by Douglas Flamming, and Expectations of Equality: A History of Black Westerners (2012) by Albert S. Broussard. In Ruffin and Mack's volume, Freedom’s Frontier: African Americans in the West from Great Migration to Twenty-First Century (2018), the authors added to this rich, ever growing tradition, as a study of the Black western experience from 1900 to 2015—a period when the region’s Black population grew from 710,400 persons in 1940 to almost 7 million persons in the 2010 census. [5]

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​​NOTES 

[1] Quintard Taylor, “In Search of African American History in the West” in The Program of African American Culture, "A Quest for Freedom: The Black Experience in the American West (Conference Program)" (Washington, DC: Smithsonian National Museum of American History, February 2-3, 2001), 6.​

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[2] Ibid 8. Also see Lawrence B. de Graaf, "Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930-1950," (PhD. Dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 1962); Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (1993); Kenneth Hamilton, Black Towns and Profit (1991); Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (1996); Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910-1963 (2000); Albert S. Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900-1954 (1993); Kenneth Mason, Paternal Community: African Americans and Race Relations in San Antonio, Texas, 1867-1937 (1998); and Lonnie G. Bunch, Black Angelenos: The Afro-American in Los Angeles, 1850-1950 (1988).​

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[3] See Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the West, 1528-1990 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 19, 21; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), 17-34, and 322-350; and Walter Prescott Webb contends in “The American West: Perpetual Mirage,” Harper’s Magazine (May 1957).​

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[4] Mark Baldassare (ed.), The Los Angeles Riots: Lessons for the Urban Future (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 1-18; Gerald Horne, “Black Fire: ‘Riot’ and “Revolt’ in Los Angeles, 1965 and 1992” in in Lawrence B. de Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor (et al.), Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 377-404; Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 17-26, and 311-316.​

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[5] Social Explorer Datasets (SE), Census 1890-1940, Digitally transcribed by Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Edited, verified by Michael Haines. Compiled, edited and verified by Social Explorer; Social Explorer Tables (SE), Census 1960 (US, County & State), Social Explorer & U.S. Census Bureau; and Social Explorer Tables/Datasets (SE), Census 1970-2010, U.S. Census Bureau and Social Explorer.​

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