What is the Black West?
The African American West is an exciting subject in the social and political-economic history of the United States. Since the 1990s, it has established itself as an integral topic in the contemporary telling of the U.S. West history as a “place” in communities that rested west of the 98th 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.
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This “Black West logic” is central to many African American West scholars theoretical framework because it centers the region as a “place” that factors-in race, social history, Black empowerment, and urbanization as essential concepts, as opposed to a “process” that celebrates white conquest of the American frontier and through westward migration from the East.
As a “place,” the West has offered Black people opportunities to act as agents of their own development and survival. Unlike in many parts of the South, slavery and Jim Crow did not dominate most western regions, and the West has historically been a multiracial society. Together, these factors helped create a distinct racial environment for African Americans.
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For example, before the Second Great Migration (ca. 1942-1970), African Americans in many western communities experienced a racial dynamic that differed from that of Blacks in the East and South. In the West, some of the harshest forms of systemic discrimination were directed toward larger populations of Latin American and Asian American descent. As a result, Black westerners sometimes shared or deflected bearing the full weight of the region's racial oppression in ways that contrasted with the experiences of most Black Americans elsewhere in the United States. This distinct racial environment, shaped by the lived experiences and collective memories of multiple racial and ethnic groups, influenced the development of race relations throughout the West.
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Currently, the largest and most dynamic area of African American western study has focused on the Black urban experience and Black political expression in the twentieth century—a period when the region’s Black population grew from 710,400 persons in 1940 to almost 6 million persons in the 2000 census.
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Subgenres that still privilege the western frontier approach take their cues from sophisticated histories written in the 1970s by Kenneth M. Hamilton and W. Sherman Savage, among others, whose framework often intersected the concepts of process with place. This hybrid framing of the rural Black West and African American-Indigenous American relations has provided firm ground from which subgenres such as the study of Black Homesteaders and Black Towns have emerged, evolved, and flourished from an older group of scholars like Kevin Mulroy, Shirley Ann Wilson Moore and Bruce Glasrud to a new generation of scholars, including Kalenda Eaton, Kendra T. Fields, Tiya Miles, Timothy E. Nelson, and Bernadette Pruitt.
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Items to Consider
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Black people have existed in every western state.
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The Black West has been framed in several ways, with the most popular framing as a “place.”
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In the 2010s, scholarship like Shirley Ann Wilson Moore's Sweet Freedom’s Plains (2016) introduced a hybrid model to the place-process concept in which Black westward migration is sharply differented from white westward migration as its own unique movement as "Black overlander" migration and not traditional settler colonialism.
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Where the West begins is another concept that must be seriously considered. Traditionally, for most process/frontier historians the West could have been Syracuse, New York or the Ohio River Valley, as new places of hope driven by white entitlement masked as Manifest Destiny from old places east of these communties, like Boston, when hope erodes.
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The Mississippi River as the gateway to the West: Up to the mid-20th century many people commonly made this assertion. Here are 3 scenarios to consider:
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St. Louis, Missouri and New Orleans, Louisiana as most Black overlanders earliest entry into the American West, best examined in Sweet Freedom’s Plains. ​
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Upper Midwestern states which merge with the Northern Plains (and I-35) as the West, recently framed by scholars like Donald H. Strasser and Medlodie Andrews, who include Iowa and Minnesota in their new western histories. ​​
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Where this communities west of the Mississippi River as the West concept weakens is in areas that had strong slave socioeconomies like Arkansas, Louisiana, East Texas and the Gulf Coast.
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Within my work the West begins in states where the 98th meridian rest. Within the "place" framework whose regional definition is rooted in the 1980 U.S. Census, Houston is the most difficult place to conceptualize because it is both the most southern region to new western scholars, and the most western region to new southern scholars—with its legacy of the Bufallo soldier, Black rodeo, and multicultural societies uniquely influenced by the Southwest and New Orleans. After three decades of conversations with my Texan family and Texan scholars on the subject, I concluded to frame western communities that rest east of the 98th meridian as “borderlands” or “west-east borderlands”; and Houston as the “South-West” and not the "Southwest."
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Finally, in your conception of the West, does it include Alaska, Hawaii, and the Pacific Region? Please note that with each exploration is the possibility to unlock a new Black western logic in the interdiciplinary and transdisciplinary study of the African American West.
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Images:
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Top: 2020 African American West Map, Copyright Herbert G. Ruffin II and Oklahoma University Press
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Left: Texas Geographical and Regional Map. Image taken by Herbert G. Ruffin II at the "Texas Wild Gallery" exhibit in the Witte Museum, San Antonio, Texas, July 2024
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