Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California

Lawrence B. de Graaf · Kevin Mulroy · Quintard Taylor

jul 2014 · University of Washington Press

Acerca de este libro electrónico

From the 18th century, African Americans, like many others, have migrated to California to seek fortunes or, often, the more modest goals of being able to find work, own a home, and raise a family relatively free of discrimination. Not only their search but also its outcome is covered in Seeking El Dorado. Whether they settled in major cities or smaller towns, African Americans created institutions and organizations—churches, social clubs, literary societies, fraternal orders, civil rights organizations—that embodied the legacy of their past and the values they shared. Blacks came in search of the same jobs as other Americans, but the search often proved frustrating. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, African American leadership in the state consistently focused on achieving racial justice. The essays in this book speak of triumph and hardship, success, discrimination, and disappointment.

Seeking El Dorado is a major contribution to black history and the history of the American West and will be of interest to both scholars and general readers.

Acerca del autor

Quintard Taylor is the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Emeritus Professor of American History at the University of Washington and founder of BlackPast.org. Among his many publications, he is the author of In Search of The Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990 (Norton, 1999) and The Forging of A Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (UWP, 1994) and co-editor of Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California (UWP, 2001) and African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). He is the series editor for the University of Oklahoma Press's series Race and Culture in the American West.