1. San Francisco Pacific Appeal, Sept. 20, 1862, p. 2.

2. Interview, Matt Crawford, Aug. 3, 1976.

3. Shadrack Howard was a sailmaker, a seamen, and a "victualer" in New Bedford before migrating west. He also had a reputation as an inventor. San Francisco Elevator, Dec. 1, 1865, p. 2, and Pacific Appeal, Sept. 19, 1863, p. 3. James Abajian was kind enough to provide information on Howard's early years. On Dyer, Elevator, April 7, 1865, p. 4, April 5, 1867, p. 4, June 18, 1869, p. 2; Pacific Appeal, Sept. 19, 1863, p. 3. Henry G. Langley, comp., San Francisco Directory, 1868 (hereafter referred to, with the appropriate year, as City Directory ). Another noteworthy business, the Cocoanut Pulverizing Company, was formed in 1874. Elevator, May 16, 1874, p. 3, Aug. 22, 1874, p. 2, Nov. 14, 1874, p. 3; Articles of Incorporation of the California Cocoanut Pulverizing Company, Office of the Secretary of State, California State Archives, Sacramento.

4. City Directory, 1860 lists Peter Anderson as a tailor. According to his newspaper, the Pacific Appeal (April 19, 1862, p. 4), he was a "coat renovator" and "steam scourer"; [United States Census Bureau], Original Schedule of the Eighth Census, 1860, San Francisco, California (hereafter cited as Manuscript Census, with the appropriate year), lists Anderson as the proprietor of a clothing store; it also gives the occupations of Brown, Smith, and Cornish.

5. San Francisco Examiner, June 16, 1889, p. 10.

6. Elevator, May 14, 1869, pp. 2-3; New York Weekly Anglo-African, Nov. 19, 1859, p. 1, and June 23, 1860, p. 2. James A. Fisher, "A Social History of the Negro in California, 1860-1900" (M.A. thesis, Sacramento State College, 1966), ch. 4; Delilah L. Beasley, "Slavery in California," Journal of Negro History III (Jan. 1918), 44; Elevator, April 17, 1868, pp. 2-3; John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (New York, [1969] ed.), pp. 240-41, 267-68.

7. Neil Larry Shumsky, "Tar Flat and Nob Hill: A Social History of Industrial San Francisco During the 1870's" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1972); and Oscar Lewis, Silver Kings: The Lives and Times of Mackay, Fair, Flood, and O'Brien, Lords of the Nevada Comstock Lode (New York, [1971]) analyze these developments.

8. The "Madame" prefixed to Mrs. Phillips's name indicates the high esteem in which she was held. Elevator, June 11, 1898, p. 1 notes that she won a gold medal at the California Midwinter Exposition; San Francisco Pacific Coast Appeal, Jan. 17, 1902, p. 1, and May 3, 1902, p. 4; Oakland California Voice, Dec. 18, 1925, p. 6; San Francisco Spokesman, March 16, 1933, p. 1.

9. Pacific Coast Appeal, Jan. 17, 1902, p. 1; Robert C. Francis, "A Survey of Negro Business in the San Francisco Bay Region" (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1928).

10. Elevator, May 2, 1885, p. 2; Pacific Coast Appeal, Jan. 17, 1902, p. 4; Peter R. Decker, Fortunes and Failures: White-Collar Mobility in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Cambridge, Mass., 1978).

11. Francis, "Survey," pp. 4, 40; Ivan H. Light, Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare Among Chinese, Japanese, and Blacks (Berkeley, 1972), analyzes reasons for business failures among Blacks and compares them with other non-white groups.

12. California Voice, Aug. 6, 1926, p. 2; Francis, "Survey," pp. 18-19.

13. William E. B. Du Bois, The Black North: A Social Survey (Atlanta, Ga., 1901), p. 44; Crisis VI (Aug. 1913), 194.

14. Pacific Coast Appeal, Jan. 17, 1902, p. 4; on the growth in Fresno, see San Francisco Sentinel, Dec. 13, 1890, p. 2; and in Seattle, Sentinel, Sept. 29, 1890, p. 2.

15. The Colored American Magazine IX (Nov. 1905), 648-50, and XII (Oct. 1907), 269-72.

16. Oakland Western Outlook, Jan. 2, 1915, p. 2.

17. Delilah L. Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (New York, [1969] ed.), p. 54; and Pacific Appeal, April 5, 1862, p. 2; Rudolph M. Lapp, "Negro Rights Activities in Gold Rush California," California Historical Society Quarterly XLV (March 1966), 8-10; Mifflin W. Gibbs, Shadow and Light: An Autobiography (New York, 1969 ed.), p. 46.

18. Gibbs, Shadow and Light, p. 54; San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 2, 1895, p. 7; the Pacific Appeal and the Elevator chronicle the civil rights and political struggles, summarized in subsequent paragraphs, of the 1860s and 1870s.

19. San Francisco Daily Evening Post, June 25, 1873, p. 1.

20. William H. Blake to Governor George B. Stoneman, Jan. 1883, California State Archives.

21. Petition of William H. Blake, March 25, 1903, California State Archives.

22. Brochure of the first meeting of Afro-American League, in the California Historical Society Library, gives this information.

Racist government officials were an obstacle to employment for Blacks. In 1894 the mayor of San Francisco attempted to fire the Black clerk in City Hall solely because of his race. Chronicle, Aug. 11, 1894, p. 5; Aug. 12, 1894, p. 15; a complaint on job patronage was also voiced by the Elevator, Feb. 21, 1874.

23. Clipping, "Appeal to Reason," dated late 1906, in Negro Pamphlet Box, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Elevator, June 28, 1873, p. 2.

24. Interviews, Vivian Osborn Marsh, Aug. 16, 1976, Royal Towns, Aug. 30, 1973. Information on Ruth Acty is in the East Bay Negro Historical Society, Oakland. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York, 1971 ed.), pp. 256-63; Patricia Myers Davidson informed me of this book's section on San Francisco.

25. Interview, Royal Towns, Aug. 30, 1973.

26. Ibid.; Lillian Dixon expressed the same opinion in a conversation with me (April 3, 1975), as did Tarea Hall Pittman and other activists in the Oral History Collection of the Oakland Museum and in the Earl Warren Oral History Project of the University of California, Berkeley. I would like to thank Mary Perry Smith and the Cultural and Ethnic Affairs Guild of the Oakland Museum for permitting me to listen to its tapes.

27. Interview, Ed Johnson, Aug. 14, 1973.

28. Interview, Eleanor Carroll Watkins, July 30, 1976.

29. Interview, Royal Towns, Aug. 30, 1973.

30. Interview, Alfred Butler, July 29, 1976. Nat Love, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" by Himself (New York, 1968 ed.), p. 135; interviews, Ed Johnson, Aug. 14, 1973, Aurelious Alberga, July 27, 1976; Western Outlook, July 22, 1916, p. 2.

31. Elevator, March 16, 1866, p. 2, June 30, 1865, p. 3.

32. Oakland Sunshine, June 21, 1902, p. 6; Western Outlook, Nov. 28, 1914, p. 2.

33. Several informants said that passing was common, and at least one was so light-complected that I mistook his race on our first encounter. See Fannie Barrier Williams, "Perils of the White Negro," The Colored American Magazine XIII (Dec. 1907), 21-23, for a contemporary opinion on passing. Family albums and photographs at the East Bay Negro Historical Society reveal the wide variation in skin tones among Black pioneers.

34. Alex Haley, ed., The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York, 1965) abounds with examples of hustling and "street smarts."

35. "Oakland Business Men," The Colored American Magazine IX (Nov. 1905), 648-49; interview, Ed Johnson, Aug. 14, 1973.

36. Pacific Appeal, April 26, 1862, p. 4; Elevator, July 5, 1867, p. 1.

37. City Directory, 1869; Sunshine, June 21, 1902, p. 5; Elevator, Feb. 12, 1869, p. 3, Feb. 19, 1869, pp. 2-3, Feb. 26, 1869, p. 3; Sentinel, Sept. 20, 1890, p. 3, Dec. 6, 1890, p. 1; Sunshine, June 21, 1902, p. 8; Pacific Coast Appeal, Jan. 4, 1902, p. 8, Jan. 18, 1902, p. 7, Dec. 19, 1903, pp. 6-7.

38. Elevator, June 22, 1872, p. 3; Beasley, Negro Trail Blazers, pp. 121, 194-95; Chronicle, Jan. 18, 1922, p. 14; Oakland Western American, Oct. 12, 1928, p. 1. Interviews, Royal Towns, Aug. 30, 1973, Eugene Lasartemay, July 23, 1976, Claudia Cheltenham, April 17, 1973.

39. City Directory, 1865; Pacific Appeal, Aug. 1, 1863, pp. 2-3. Beasley, Negro Trail Blazers, p. 54; Rudolph M. Lapp, "Jeremiah B. Sanderson, Early California Negro Leader," Journal of Negro History LII (Oct. 1968), 321; interview, Martel Meneweather, June 13, 1975.

40. Interview, Ed Johnson, Aug. 14, 1973. In times of financial hardship, his clientele was generous: "After they found out I had that trouble, my dad dying and everything, they . . . . people gave me, I think they gave me just because they heard I'd had my troubles . . . . I made $300 in November just before Christmas. . . . Every night they'd hand me something." Ibid.

41. United States Census Office, Fifteenth Census, 1930: Population (Washington, D.C., 1931), IV: 21, 38, 39; VI: 67; Amelia Neville, The Fantastic City: Memoirs of the Social and Romantic Life of Old San Francisco (Boston, 1932), p. 148. Anne Pindell, a music teacher, gave concert performances, did fancy needlework, and was an example of a versatile woman of the mid-nineteenth century; Weekly Anglo-African, Dec. 17, 1859. p. 3; Elevator, July 28, 1865, p. 3, Dec. 18, 1865, p. 4, Jan. 12, 1866, p. 3. Other women, such as Mrs. Irwin Johnson and Mrs. John A. Barber, at the turn of the century, and Ethel Terrell, in the 1920s, took in boarders; Elevator, June 18, 1892, p. 3; Western Outlook, Jan. 27, 1900, p. 3; and interview, Ethel Terrell, April 20, 1973.

42. Fifteenth Census, 1930, VI: 50, 64-65.