African American

Afro-Latino Influence in California History
Damany M. Fisher

Although it is not generally apparent from paintings and other depictions of early California, many members of the pioneering Anza expeditions and Spanish California's most prominent families were of mixed race—Hispanic, Indian, and African. At a time when slavery was...

Jazz Idiom: Blueprints, Stills and Frames
The Jazz Photography of Charles L. Robinson; Poetic Takes and Riffs by Al Young

Jazz Idiom showcases the intimate photography of Charles L. Robinson. A friend to many of the jazz musicians photographed, he often caught them in moments of candor: Charles Mingus, goateed and pensive, hunched over a Steinway, phrases dancing in his...

Ticket to Exile
Adam David Miller

At age nineteen, A. D. Miller sat in a jail cell. His crime? He passed a white girl a note that read, "I would like to get to know you better." For this he was accused of attempted rape. Ticket...

The Port Chicago Mutiny
Robert L. Allen

During World War II, Port Chicago was a segregated naval munitions base on the outer shores of San Francisco Bay. Black seamen were required to load ammunition onto ships bound for the South Pacific under the watch of their white...

Archy Lee: A California Fugitive Slave Case
Rudolph M. Lapp;
Foreword by Shirley Ann Wilson Moore

Part courtroom drama, part adventure story, Rudolph M. Lapp's Archy Lee captures the essence of the celebrated 1858 trial of an alleged fugitive slave in California. When Archy Lee is arrested in Sacramento for refusing to return to Mississippi with...

Allensworth, the Freedom Colony: A California African American Township
Alice C. Royal with Mickey Ellinger and Scott Braley

In 1908, Colonel Allen Allensworth founded a small town in the dry alkaline soil of California's Central Valley. A high-ranking U.S. Army officer and chaplain who had escaped from slavery, he envisioned a utopian community where African Americans could thrive....