I am descended from people who have been in California for well over one hundred years. They were here prior to the gold rush, homesteading and running stage coach stations. They came from Ireland, the Isle of Man, England. They married native Americans in their gradual trek across the west and raised large families.
Having not grown up in the U.S. south, I grew up largely unaware of the racial history of California. As a child I often heard white adults make negative comments about every immigrant (recent or, like my family, not) that didn't have lily white skin. "They're lazy. They're stupid (can't speak English). They have too many children. They're all on welfare."
I didn't know, for instance, that in the thirty years after the gold rush in 1848, the native population in California went from 150,000 to 30,000. Mining ruined the natural environment that was the basis for food and shelter, and they were forced to raid camps and towns in order to survive. Of course, they were punished severely for their 'crimes.'
In addition, Chinese immigrants were harassed and killed for being interlopers in the gold fields, interfering with the white man's manifest destiny. Oh yes, they could toil away and build our railroads along side Irish immigrants, but if Chinese prospered, they were usually punished individually and collectively. Here's some familiar rhetoric:
"Congress then enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, prohibiting for ten years both immigration from China and the naturalization of Chinese immigrants already in the U.S. Aroused by the belief that low-paid Chinese workers were taking jobs away from whites, anti-Chinese violence had flared, influencing passage of the bill. 40,000 Chinese immigrants had entered the U.S. in 1881; within a year those numbers had dropped to just 23."
And lest we forget that being a black man in California could get you lynched:
A Cold Case: THE LAST CALIFORNIA LYNCHING
Copyright 1992 - Edward J. Begley
In the early morning hours of Jan. 6, 1947, a small mob of local ranchers wounded and captured a suspected cattle rustler on a ranch owned by a well known Yreka medical doctor near Gazelle in
Southern Siskiyou County, California. From there the black man was taken to the village of Callahan and hanged from the utility pole in front of Callahan's one room school house.
Siskiyou County Sheriff's Deputies, and officers of the California Highway Patrol conducted a preliminary investigation of the scene after students had arrived for school, and the Siskiyou County Coroner removed the victim's body at approximately 10 AM, just as Miss Mary Roff's students were
allowed outside for first recess.
On Friday, January 10, 1947, the (Etna/Scott Valley) Western Sentinel newspaper carried a front page story about the lynching of a butcher from Weed, California.
During the following weeks, an effort was made to recover all copies of the Jan. 10th issue of the Western Sentinel, and the school students were told that they were never to discuss the
incident again.
Now, 57 years later, the best evidence seems to indicate that, not only was no effort made to apprehend the perpetrators, but that there was an active cover-up of the crime by both local
and state officials from Yreka.
We may think our history here in progressive California is vastly different, and superior, to the American south. It is not.
