A couple of years ago, John Webb III moved to Morgan Hill from
the Chicago area. A neighbor of mine, the computer consultant
recently told me about the shock he gave a clerk at a South Valley
store when he went in to set up an account.
A couple of years ago, John Webb III moved to Morgan Hill from the Chicago area. A neighbor of mine, the computer consultant recently told me about the shock he gave a clerk at a South Valley store when he went in to set up an account.
With a chuckle, he recalled how the woman looked at him, a friendly black man, with astonished eyes and exclaimed: “I didn’t know that any black people lived in Morgan Hill.”
Black people do indeed live in Morgan Hill. They also make their homes in Gilroy and San Benito County. According to U.S. Census Bureau figures, blacks make up less than 2 percent of the population of our region. Not a large number, to be sure, but roughly 2,000 of our locals – the entire population of San Juan Bautista – consider themselves black.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is on Monday, so I thought it would be a fitting time to consider the influence of black people in California’s history as well as in our own South Valley region.
One interesting bit of trivia to impress your friends with is that California was named after a black woman. During the 1500s when Europeans explored North America’s western coast, a romance novel written by Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo became a blockbuster best seller in Spain.
The novel depicted an island of beautiful warrior women with dark skin led by a powerful queen named Calafia. The island was called California – land of Calafia – in honor of this ruler. From their initial exploration of the Baja peninsula, the Spanish sailors believed they had discovered a very large island. So, inspired by Montalvo’s novel, they named this land mass California.
Blacks played an important role in the early Spanish settlement of California. In 1781, of the 46 original settlers of Los Angeles, 26 were black or mulatto. In 1785, the population of Santa Barbara’s mission was made up of more than 19 percent blacks and mulattos. In 1790, blacks and mulattos made up nearly 18.5 percent of the settlers in the port village of Monterey.
During the Spanish and Mexican eras in California, blacks were given more political power than later when the Americans controlled California as a state. Mexico had two governors of African descent in charge of California, starting on Jan. 31, 1831, when Emanuel Victoria, a mulatto known as “the black governor,” took the office.
In 1845, Pio Pico, a mulatto, became the second black governor of California and held that office for one year, leaving in exile after the United States captured Sonoma during the Mexican-American War.
California’s history had several black explorers including Peter Ranne, who accompanied mountain man Jedediah Smith on the first overland party to California in 1826.
Certainly the most fascinating black explorer to explore the West Coast passed through our own South Valley region. Jacob Dodson was a 19-year-old who served on Captain John C. Fremont’s 1845 expedition to California. He was a free black servant working on the estate of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Fremont’s father-in-law.
Lured by the adventure of the West, he accompanied Fremont over the snow-covered Sierras, scouting out the descent to Sutter’s Fort in California’s Central Valley for the party. He was considered the expedition’s strongest man, and Fremont valued him for his intelligence and trustworthiness.
Dodson accompanied Fremont on his brief 1846 defiant stand at Gabilan Peak (later renamed Fremont Peak), a prominent point in the South Valley’s Gabilan Mountain range.
As California’s Bear Flag Revolt heated up, Dodson, along with Fremont and Don Jesus Pico, in March 1847 made an arduous 800-mile horseback ride from Los Angeles to Monterey and back in eight days to seek help from American forces.
With American statehood, California’s history includes at least one black man among the 48 delegates at the Constitutional Convention of 1849. Antonio Maria Pico was a mulatto who had served at one time as San Jose’s prefect and mayor.
California’s early days also had its successful black entrepreneurs. One of them, merchant William Alexander Leidesdorff, came to California from the West Indies in 1841 and operated a trading vessel between San Francisco and the Hawaiian islands. He became so successfully that in 1846, Leidesdorff purchased real estate in what’s now the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. He built the city’s first hotel there.
An uncomfortable historical fact that greatly surprised me is that, even though California joined the Union as a free state in 1850, slavery did occur here. Historian Kevin Starr, California’s state librarian, estimates between 200 to 300 black people were held as property in California during a 15-year period. Up until the end of the Civil War, Sacramento newspapers published advertisements of slave purchases and runaway notices. Just as on the East Coast, an Underground Railroad network of abolitionists helped California’s black slaves escape their masters.
In our own modern age, genetic research gives us a greater understanding of human history. Last month, scientists at Penn State University announced they discovered the evolutionary DNA change that accounts for white skin. They reported they found a genetic mutation that occurred in an individual tens of thousands of years ago that changed the skin’s pigment color from black to white. Astoundingly, out of the 3.1 billion letters of the DNA code in the human genome, only a single letter difference gives a person black skin or white.
Centuries of injustice and bondage of humanity have been committed due to a minuscule difference – one single letter – in our genetic programming.
Research in human genetics has also discovered that all people are essentially Africans. We all descended from a small band of Homo sapiens who left what’s now the Kenya region of Africa about 50,000 to 80,000 years ago to populate Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas.
Perhaps the woman who told John Webb she didn’t know black people lived in Morgan Hill should open her eyes. We all share an African heritage.
