Archy Lee: A California Fugitive Slave Case

Rudolph M. Lapp;
Foreword by Shirley Ann Wilson Moore

The historic case of a black man’s quest for freedom in 1850s California

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 his "master," his status in the free state of California becomes the focus of controversy. Lapp tells of the narrow escapes, disappearances, legal maneuvers, and tenacity involved in the black community's fight for civil rights, and the throngs of people—black and white—who took to the streets in celebration of Archy's eventual release.

When it was first published in 1969, this deeply researched book was a pioneering study in nineteenth-century black western experience. It tells the little-known history of the organized civil rights movement of free blacks in post-gold rush California. Black organizations and their press, legal struggles, and mass mobilizations all come to life in the tale of Archy Lee—a thrilling and ultimately uplifting story of courage and defiance.

About the Author

Rudolph M. Lapp (1915–2007) was born in Chicago. Drafted into the United States Army Air Corps in 1941, he moved to Berkeley in 1946, where he studied under the revered historian Kenneth Stampp. Lapp joined the College of San Mateo faculty in 1955, becoming the first professor to teach black history at a California community college. He originally published Archy Lee in 1969. He is also the author of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated Blacks in Gold Rush California (Yale University Press, 1977) and Afro-Americans in California (Boyd and Fraser, 1979).