Rich Essays on Experiences of Black Settlers

At a heated moment in a debate over museum politics in Southern California, a Native American activist dismissed the Autry Museum of Western Heritage as “a cowboy museum.” The ongoing controversy focuses on the contemplated merger of the Autry Museum and the Southwest Museum, which would bring a rich collection of Native American artifacts and relics to the Autry’s facilities in Griffith Park. But the remark understates and misstates the role that the Autry has claimed in the study and celebration of the American West.

To be sure, the Autry was founded by one of Hollywood’s earliest and most enduring “singing cowboys,” Gene Autry. But the museum that bears his name has distinguished itself by reaching far beyond the cowboy myth in chronicling the American West. The Autry exhibit titled “On Gold Mountain,” for example, celebrates the Chinese immigrant experience, and an upcoming exhibit will do the same for the pioneering Jewish families of the American West.

Yet another example of the expansive way in which the Autry Museum defines its mission is “Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California,” edited by Lawrence B. de Graaf, Quintard Taylor and Kevin Mulroy (Autry Museum of Western Heritage/University of Washington Press, $45 cloth; $22.95 paper; 550 pages), a collection of 13 scholarly essays that explore the African American experience in California.

Significantly, the book is an outgrowth of a series of programs that brings African American historians to the Autry Museum to present their work in the study of what Kevin Mulroy, director of research at the Autry, calls “new Western history.” Along with such scholarly enterprises are movie screenings, rap concerts, and hands-on demonstrations of arts and crafts that focus not only on the African American experience but also on the whole spectrum of races and cultures of the West. “Suddenly,” writes Mulroy in “Seeking El Dorado,” “the Autry had become a town hall for racial and gender issues.”

That’s why, for example, the book does not confine itself to the black-skinned cowboys of the American West. Rather, the book surveys all aspects of African American history, ranging from the 300 Africans who accompanied the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes in the 1530s, to the “freeborn blacks from northern states [who] rubbed shoulders with slaves from Georgia and Texas” during the Gold Rush, to the fine points of “coalition building” that earned Tom Bradley five terms as mayor of Los Angeles--”the most impressive African American political victory in California,” according to contributor Raphael J. Sonenshein.

El Dorado was the mythical city of fabulous wealth that attracted the Spanish conquistadors to the New World, and it is used here to symbolize the allure of California to people of all races as a place of opportunity. Indeed, “Seeking El Dorado” offers a healthy reminder of the ways in which the settlers of California were very much alike in their motives even if they were different in their skin color. For African Americans, no less than Americans of European descent, California always represented the opportunity to reinvent oneself--and what was at stake for black settlers was even greater than that of their white counterparts because blacks were escaping not only poverty but also slavery.

“African Americans have had to confront overwhelming odds in their pursuit of the California Dream, yet have seldom lost faith that they could attain it,” write co-editors de Graaf and Taylor. “This timeless and fervent search for El Dorado, more than any other single factor, has defined the history of African Americans in California.”

The book’s scholarship is authoritative, disciplined and meticulous, and the historical sweep ranges from Jack D. Forbes’ “The Early African Heritage of California” to Willi Coleman’s “African American Women and Community Development in California, 1848-1900” to Gerald Horne’s “Black Fire: ‘Riot’ and ‘Revolt’ in Los Angeles, 1965 and 1992.” Although the contributors remind us of the racism that is the dark side of the California Dream, they often strike an upbeat and even redemptive note.

“Popular preoccupation with the ‘pathology’ of ghetto life obscures the fact that African American communities have considerable resources,” insists Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo in a study titled “Urban Poverty and African American Community Mobilization.” “The majority of residents--poor and working class--have continually struggled to keep their families together, build and maintain community-sustaining institutions, and challenge racial stereotypes and restrictions.”

Ironically, the focus of the Autry Museum on the African American, Chinese and Jewish communities of the West, among many others, actually honors the primacy of Native Americans and heightens our consciousness of the fate that befell those whom pioneering newspaperman Charles Fletcher Lummis called “the First Californians.”

“Seeking El Dorado” allows us to see that multiculturalism in California began on the day when the first Spanish conquistadors set foot in a place that, until that moment, belonged only to the Native Americans.

West Words looks at books related to California and the West. Jonathan Kirsch can be reached at jkirsch@kirsch-mitchell.com.