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• 1 2019-08-21T14:56:17-07:00 Early Black Migrations and Dislocations By Adrienne R. Hall 2 By Adrienne R. Hall plain 2019-08-21T14:56:41-07:00 Little is known about the 400 Black people who were counted in San Francisco during the first state census of 1852, for example, when and how they got there, and what became of their descendants. Popular teaching of US/Black history often does not account for the violence and resistance that shape Black migration patterns in this country. In 1858, hundreds of Black people migrated out of San Francisco via the steamship SS Commodore to Vancouver Island, British Columbia in response to racial violence and exclusion that they experienced. The next federal census of 1860 counted the Black population at 1,176. This gap in the records masks the mass exodus that occurred just 2 years earlier. Today, at a time where Black people in San Francisco are being pushed out at historic rates, faster than the census can register, it is important to visualize these earlier dislocations and migrations for their significance to the present. 
         The dominant historiography of California as a new “free state”to the union erases the material realities of life for Black people during the slavery period and in its aftermath. From colonization, to the sighting of gold in 1848, and statehood in 1850, whiteness, property ownership, masculinity, and wealth were (and in many ways still are) the basis for full enjoyment of citizenship in the newly formed state. During this period, free-born, enslaved, and formerly enslaved peoples of African descent migrated to San Francisco in order to escape the violence of the plantation South and in order to find social, political, and economic freedom and opportunity. Some of them journeyed on long steamer ship routes from New England, down through Central America, and up the Pacific Coast to land in San Francisco. Some of them were kidnapped and trafficked there by slave owners. Some were used to traversing arduous journeys because of fleeing bondage, aiding others in the Underground Railroad, and traveling to preach the gospel of abolition wherever they could. Most were because of how placelessness and dislocation has been sentenced upon poor Afro-descendant people since the transatlantic slave trade. The creative cartography that follows maps the journeys of four central figures in early Black San Franciscan history: Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, Jeremiah B. Sanderson, Archy Lee, and Mary Ellen Pleasant.