Oakland, the Story of a City by Beth Bagwell

Like Native Americans and Asians, African Americans could not testify against whites in court. Personal security must have been on the minds of African Americans because, without the protective right to testify on one’s behalf, the possibility of being kidnapped into slavery was not a remote one at all. Essential to African Americans gaining equal footing in California was winning the “right to testimony” in civil and criminal cases, equal taxation, suffrage, and settling the homestead question (the right to purchase and protect property). Subsequently, another debate followed: whether any slave, by being brought into the state, would be, therefore, free. Though California entered the Union after long and passionate debates as a free state in 1850, one of the key political issues that concerned African Americans in the state was the issue of slavery. For example, in 1874, according to historian Beth Bagwell, twenty percent of Oakland’s African Americans worked for the elegant Tubbs Hotel in nearby Brooklyn. With more people coming into town jobs in the hospitality industry became more common. Though the work was arduous, it gave these women and men an opportunity to see the country, to earn better wages than the average day laborer or domestic, and to learn about other communities.

They worked long, hard hours, traveling back and forth across the country, serving train passengers on an as-needed basis. The Pullman Company hired only African American men and women to work as railroad porters and maids. Train travel became popular, and with the creation of the Pullman sleeper car, much more comfortable. The Transcontinental Railroad (the Central Pacific, later the Southern Pacific) employed African Americans as porters, maids, cooks, redcaps and waiters. Once the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, with Oakland as its western terminus, the city’s African American population grew steadily. In those early days, African Americans in Oakland worked as sailors, laborers, draymen, barbers, maids, dressmakers, railroad porters, hotel workers, cooks, and waiters. The first East Bay census, taken in 1852 when the city was founded, recorded that five African American men and one African American woman, and eight foreign-born African American men lived in Oakland. They had come accompanying slave masters. They had come to California to start new lives unharnessed by tradition and restriction. The same dreams of personal and economic freedoms that brought whites west drew African Americans to the state. The original town ran along 14th Street over to the estuary, from the tidal slough we know as Lake Merritt to West Street. And while that is an amazing history, the story really began nearly 100 years before when Oakland was little more than dirt roads and clapboard buildings. For most of us, the story of African Americans in Oakland begins with the westward migration during World War II.

Oakland, the Story of a City by Beth Bagwell