Working for Justice: African Americans’ Actions against the California “Black Laws,” 1850–61

In California from 1850 to 1861, a small but outspoken cohort of African American reformers fought to overcome their legislators’ and judges’ use of the law to deprive them  their full rights. Race and rights in antebellum California had a messy, complex history. Even while it was geographically distant from the Pacific coast, slavery was a national institution that influenced people even there. Exploring African Americans’ actions and arguments against the state’s racist legislation reveals much about how race affected rights in a nation dividing over slavery. The reformers who worked against California’s racialized laws deserve a place in the early history of the Civil Rights Movemen. They represented an early western expression of that broader struggle.

California was divided about race from its earliest days. Efforts to establish legal slavery there faltered under pressure from local anti-slavery advocates, but nonetheless the institution existed in California from the Gold Rush era onward. Slaveholding migrants brought slaves with them there up to 1861, and, as elsewhere in antebellum America, even people who opposed slavery expressed bias against free African Americans. Over the course of the 1850s slavery’s influence hardened local racial boundaries, and wide-ranging discrimination against African Americans quickly came into effect there. The state legislature enacted limits on the franchise, barred African Americans from court testimony, the jury box, and most schools, prevented them from homesteading, and forbade intermarriage. A diverse and cosmopolitan group of African American activists around the state used direct action (including aid to fugitive slaves), the courts, and their own organizations to fight for their rights. They also used petition campaigns, Black Conventions, fundraising, and newspapers to publicize their claims for equality (Taylor, 1998). A closer look into the civil liberties tactics these early California activists developed to oppose racial limitations on their rights is essential.