West of Jim Crow: The Fight against California's Color Line

Description

African Americans who moved to California in hopes of finding freedom and full citizenship instead faced all-too-familiar racial segregation. As one transplant put it, "The only difference between Pasadena and Mississippi is the way they are spelled." From the beaches to streetcars to schools, the Golden State—in contrast to its reputation for tolerance—perfected many methods of controlling people of color. Lynn M. Hudson deepens our understanding of the practices that African Americans in the West deployed to dismantle Jim Crow in the quest for civil rights prior to the 1960s. Faced with institutionalized racism, black Californians used both established and improvised tactics to resist and survive the state's color line. Hudson rediscovers forgotten stories like the experimental all-black community of Allensworth, the California Ku Klux Klan's campaign of terror against African Americans, the bitter struggle to integrate public swimming pools in Pasadena and elsewhere, and segregationists' preoccupation with gender and sexuality. | Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Freedom Claims: Reconstructing the Golden State 2 "This is Our Fair and Our State": Race Women, Race Men, and the Panama Pacific International Exposition 3 "The Best Proposition Ever Offered to Negroes in the State": Building an All-Black Town 4 A Lesson in Lynching 5 Burning Down the House: California's Ku Klux Klan 6 "The Only Difference Between Pasadena and Mississippi is the Way They Are Spelled": Swimming in the Southland Epilogue: Remembering (and Forgetting) Jim Crow Notes Bibliography Index| "West of Jim Crow explores the surge of violence precipitated by the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan. . . . Black Californians responded with grassroots activism as they continued to demand access to homeownership, schools, and public spaces. Through the men and women themselves, Hudson provides incredible insight to California's racial battlegrounds." —Pacific Historical Review "Hudson's book illuminates just that: how contestations over public and private spaces as they related to race were tied together through the web of resistance that Black Californians engaged in as they utilized tactics that would become better known in the mid-twentieth century." —Journal of American Ethnic History "Outstanding history and an absorbing read. . . . Highly recommended." —Choice | Lynn M. Hudson is an associate professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of The Making of "Mammy Pleasant": A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco.