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200,000 Africans were forcibly transported between 1521 and 1821.
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Beginning in the 1600s, the newcomers settled on the northern frontier of the Spanish colony, seeking to improve their lives and escape the social discrimination of the central region.
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Isabel de Olivera was typical of the hundreds of Spanish-speaking black settlers who founded and populated cities and towns from San Antonio to San Francisco. In 1781, they comprised a majority of the founders of Los Angeles.
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When Mexico declared its independence from Spain in 1821 - abolishing slavery and guaranteeing full citizenship rights to all, regardless of color - hundreds of free African Americans crossed the border into what was then Mexican Texas to seek the freedom denied them in the United States.
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Between 1830 and 1850, nearly seventy thousand Native Americans were forcibly relocated from the Old South to Indian Territory
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But Texas revolutionaries crushed the aspirations of free blacks and runaways when they transformed the new Republic of Texas into a vast slaveholding empire in 1836.
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African Americans had ventured into Oregon Territory as early as the 1840s, and Colorado Territory after the Pikes Peak gold rush
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n 1851, miner Peter Brown wrote home to his wife in Missouri about his good fortune: "California is the best . . . place for black folks on the globe. All a man has to do is work and he will make money."
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In 1877, a white developer, together with six prospective black homesteaders from the South, founded the town of Nicodemus.
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In a 1902 autobiography, Shadow and Light, he recalled those early days:
Thanks to the evolution of events and march of liberal ideas the colored men in California now have a recognized citizenship, and equality before the law. It was not so at the period of which I write. With thrift and a wise circumspection financially, their opportunities were good [but] from every other point of view they were ostracized, assaulted without redress, disfranchised, and denied their oath in court. -
Black land ownership peaked at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1910, it was in decline, and many of the children of the first generation of Exodusters now fell easy prey to the siren call of the cities.
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Progress was slower for women; by 1950, more than half remained in domestic service, but a few were beginning to work as clerks, stenographers, and secretaries.
