In Search of the Racial Frontier

by Quintard Taylor

The American West has long been narrowly labeled as a region with few African Americans and virtually no black history. In Search of the Racial Frontier challenges that view in a rich, complex chronicle of Western African Americans that begins in 1528 with the arrival of the Moroccan Esteban in Texas, the first of many hundreds of Spanish-speaking blacks. By 1800 the earliest of the English-speaking blacks had moved West as slaves, fur trappers, or servants, creating the nucleus of post-Civil War communities Thousands of African Americans later migrated to the high plains while others drove cattle up the Chisholm Trail - the famous black cowboys - or served on remote army outposts. Mormon slave Bridget "Biddy" Mason reached Utah in 1847, gaining freedom through the legal system nearly a decade later in California, and in 1872 founded Los Angeles's first black church. The West's black civil rights movement began in San Francisco during the Civil War when women challenged the city's stre