The Golden State’s Veiled Dichotomy

Abstract

Abstract Visions of the West and specifically California as a free domain captivated many Americans leading up to, during, and after the Gold Rush. This perception was a myth that did not mesh with the reality of the blatant slavery and racism that existed there. This dichotomy remained largely veiled since then, only to resurface as recent scholarship revealed that California was not a shining beacon of virtuousness in the mid-nineteenth century. This article explores the impact of California’s overt tolerance for racism and slavery during its formative years of statehood. The legislated but unjust denial of civil rights to the state’s Black community also impacted its Chinese, Californios, and Indigenous peoples, with the latter group enduring horrific genocide. Their collective struggle for equality in a free state remained entangled in a web of statewide bigotry and White dominance that permeated all three branches of the state government. Interwoven with such inconsistencies is the scandalous development of San Quentin prison, a financial sieve that facilitated the slaveholding lessee’s largely unreported for-profit kidnapping and sale of two Black inmates (one a slave and the other a freeman) in 1855. The active racism, the cases of free and fugitive slaves being returned to their owners under the state’s own unique fugitive slave law, and the abduction of these two Black prisoners echo similar behaviors in slave states. They lay bare the myth of a free California that was, on the contrary, connected to the national slavery conundrum and was not the glowing outpost of freedom often described then in the eastern press and still believed by many, even today. Suffice it to say that the origins of the current reparations movement for California’s eligible Blacks can be traced to the mid-1850s history of California.