Civil Rights, Racial Protest, and Anti-Slavery Activism in San Francisco, 1850-1865

Broussard, Albert

This essay will examine racial activism, civil rights, and antislavery activity throughout the state in the decade and half prior to the Civil War. It will attempt to illustrate how black and white Californians, through a variety of strategies and protest campaigns, contributed to the development of an emerging national consciousness that ultimately came to view the enslavement of another human being as inconsistent with the principles of a democratic, egalitarian nation. Similarly, the essay will demonstrate how black and white activists in California used the state as an important symbol of the resistance to slavery that swept the nation. Finally, these antislavery activists, through their words as well their deeds, should be viewed as part of the national Underground Railroad, that vast network of roads, stations, routes, and safehouses that assisted enslaved people in their escape to freedom. As the historian C. Peter Ripley writes, “As a formal term it [the Underground Railroad] refers to the movement of African-American slaves escaping out of the South and to the allies who assisted them in their search for freedom