In search of the racial frontier

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 streetcar segregation. In Search of the Racial Frontier is, above all, a story of urban life, for throughout history black Americans in the West have mostly lived in cities. Reflecting that fact, this richly peopled story carries forward to the twentieth century when, during World War II, the prospect of good jobs and freer life led to a huge migration that increased black populations in Western cities tenfold and intensified the region's civil rights movements during the 1960s. This migration, in turn, paved the way for black success in today's Western politics and a surging interest in multiculturalism.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.