According to 2019 United States Census Bureau estimates, residents of the state of California identified solely as African American or Black constituted 5.8% or 2,282,144 residents in California. Including an additional 1.2% who identified as having partial African ancestry, the figure was 7.0% (2.8 million residents)."U.S. Census Bureau, 2011-2015 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates." American FactFinder. United States Census Bureau. As of 2021, California has the largest multiracial African American population by number in the United States. African Americans are the fourth largest ethnic group in California after Hispanics, Whites, and Asians. Asians outnumbered African Americans in the 1980s.
The Black community is prevalent in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, and Solano Counties in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento County, and San Joaquin County. In Southern California, the population is concentrated in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and San Diego Counties.
California also has a growing Afro-Caribbean and African immigrant population to the United States. Most African immigrants in California come from Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. Many Ethiopians live in Little Ethiopia in West Los Angeles. California has one of the highest concentrations of black Africans in the Western United States. 41,249 Afro-Asians live in California. There is a Blaxican community in California. There is also a growing Blaxican population in Los Angeles. California claimed 113,255 African-born residents in 2000. The majority came from Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa. There is also a sizable Jamaican, Haitian, Caribbean, Afro-Latino, and Belizean population in California. There is also a small Bahamian, Barbadian, Bermudan, British West Indian, Dutch West Indian, and Trinidadian population in California. There is a large Garifuna community in Southern California.
The earliest black residents were the first pioneers of Alta California and were Afro-Latino slaves (or mulatto) brought by the Spanish. African Americans (and Louisiana Creole) migrated from Southern states like Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, Alabama, Georgia and Oklahoma, to California during the Second Great Migration (1940s–1970s).
The Black population in California has been declining since 2016, and moving out of the state. Gentrification in California has caused some African Americans in California to become homeless and has pushed them out of historical urban centers like Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and into new cheaper suburban regions, like East Contra Costa, Inland Empire, and Central Valley. For example, many blacks from Los Angeles have moved to desert areas such as Palmdale and Lancaster in the 1990s. The black population in Los Angeles County has been rapidly declining. The black population has also declined in San Francisco. African Americans have the second highest poverty rate in California, after Hispanics. This has caused many blacks from California to move back to cities in the Southern United States, such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Birmingham, Memphis, San Antonio and Jackson.
The black population has decreased in many neighborhoods and cities in California. Many areas such as Compton, Inglewood, and Watts that were once predominately black are now predominately Latino. Many Mexicans and Central Americans have displaced them in their historical areas. In 2019, African Americans were more likely to become homeless in California.
There is also a black foreign born population from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean in California. 3% of black people in California are noncitizens, and 4% are naturalized immigrants. African Americans mainly live in Los Angeles, the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento. Solano County has the highest black percentage by county. Cities with the largest black population in the San Francisco Bay Area are African Americans in the Bay Area are Oakland, Vallejo, Antioch, Suisun City and Richmond.
Black immigrants in California mainly come from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Kenya and Belize.
History
Before the arrival of European colonists and African slaves, the Indigenous peoples of California mainly inhabited the region. Native Americans were initially enslaved before Africans were brought to the area.
California was named after a fictional black character named Queen Calafia, in Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s 16th-century Spanish novel "Las sergas de Esplandián."
18th century
People of African descent first appeared in California from Mexico due to the Spanish conquest. Spanish soldiers, priests, and settlers brought black slaves and free blacks into the state in the 18th-century. The settlers and escort soldiers who founded the towns of San José de Guadalupe (San Jose), Yerba Buena (San Francisco), Monterey, San Diego, and La Reina de Los Ángeles (Los Angeles) were primarily mestizo and of mixed Negro and Native American ancestry from the province of Sonora y Sinaloa in Mexico. There were also many mulattoes (part black, part Spanish) in Alta California.
Spanish military commander and explorer Juan Bautista de Anza brought Afro-Latinos of mixed African, Indigenous and Spanish ancestry to the region.
19th century Influential people of African ancestry were among the earliest California settlers and landowners. Pío Pico was a Californio politician, ranchero, and entrepreneur of mixed-race with African ancestry, he had served as the last governor of Alta California under Mexican rule (from 1845 until 1846). Juana Briones de Miranda was a Californio business woman of mixed-race with African ancestry, she is considered the "Founding Mother of San Francisco", as an early settler of Yerba Buena (now San Francisco). William Leidesdorff was black and multi-racial, he was one another founder of San Francisco.
After the discovery of gold in California on January 24, 1848, African Americans in search of wealth, and freedom arrived in the state during the California gold rush seeking their own gold discoveries. Additionally, white Southerners brought black slaves into the California mines starting in 1849, and were primarily migrating from Texas, Mississippi, Missouri, and Arkansas. The Sweet Vengeance Mine was a gold mine in Browns Valley, discovered by African American miners during the gold rush. Moses Rodgers was considered one of the best miners in the state.
Some of the oldest African American churches in California are the Saint Andrews African Methodist Episcopal Church of Sacramento (founded in 1850, formerly known as Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church), the Third Baptist Church in San Francisco (founded in 1852), Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Bethel AME Church) in San Francisco (founded in 1852), African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AME Zion Church) in San Francisco (founded in 1852), and the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles (founded in 1872). In the 1870s, Rev. Peter William Cassey helped form two new Black Episcopalian churches in San Francisco; "Christ's Mission Church" (or Christ Mission Church), and he worked closely with the congregation from what later became St. Cyprian's Church, however neither group had a building at that time.
Many of the earliest African Americans in the state held the California State Convention of Colored Citizens, a series of colored convention events active from 1855 to 1902. At the conventions they had elected delegates from the various counties and would discuss topics like slavery, public education, and voting rights.
Archy Lee had been formerly enslaved African American and he was part of a series of notable 19th-century court cases that helped defined civil rights in the state by 1858. Edward Duplex was the first Black mayor in California, elected to office in Wheatland in 1888.
The first census recorded of African Americans in California appeared in 1850 with 962 people, and in 1860 with 4,086 people.Bradford, Eric. "Free African American Population in the U.S.: 1790-1860." NCpedia Home Page | NCpedia. Ncpedia, 2008. Then, in 1910 the number rose to 22,000.
20th century
In the 1920s during the end of the Barbary Coast-era, Terrific Street was an entertainment district in San Francisco and it was home to numerous black and tan clubs (interracial clubs that often highlighted African American culture).
African Americans migrated during the Second Great Migration from the Southern United States (places like Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas) to the Northeast, Midwest and West to escape Jim Crow laws, between 1940 and 1970. They also migrated to the state for better job opportunities, with many working in the defense industry and shipyards in California. Of the Black Louisianans who migrated to California, a number were Louisiana Creoles.
Before World War II, African Americans totaled to less than one percent of California's population. The California population of African Americans grew slowly, alongside other minorities, with only 21,645 African American residents in 1910 compared to 2 million white residents. Post-World War II, African Americans boosted their population enormously in California.
Between the late-1940s until the early-1960s in San Francisco and Los Angeles, a new style of jazz was developed primarily by African Americans called West Coast jazz.
Your Black Muslim Bakery was a chain of bakeries opened by Yusuf Bey in 1968 in Santa Barbara, and moved headquarters in 1971 to Oakland; it had been a model of African American economic self-sufficiency but was later linked to physical and sexual abuse, welfare fraud, and murder which forced its closure on August 9, 2007.
In 1991, Rodney King, an African American, was the victim of police brutality when he was beaten by three Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers during his arrest. The Rodney King beating was caught on videotape, and after the police acquittal verdict the event was followed by the 1992 Los Angeles riots. After the 1992 riots some 50 people were murdered, an estimated 2,000 people were injured and 8,000 people were arrested.
Affirmative action is a set of laws, policies, guidelines, and administrative practices "intended to end and correct the effects of a specific form of discrimination". In November 1996, affirmative action was abolished through Proposition 209 by California lawmakers.
21st century In the year 2000, California claimed 113,255 African immigrants in state, with the San Francisco Bay Area housing around 29,930 black immigrants. Most of the African immigrants came from Ethiopia. The next largest numbers were from Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa. Approximately 45,000 Ethiopians and 6,000 Eritreans live in Los Angeles. California is a destination for Egyptian and South African immigrants.
In the 2010s, California was a net loser of black migration for the first time in three decades. Most exiting California blacks are returning to Texas and the Atlanta metropolitan area. In 2018, there are Black neighborhoods and cities with Black populations surpassing 15% in Southern California like in Compton, South Los Angeles and Inglewood, and in Northern California like Stockton, Oakland, and Vallejo. Oakland has been noted for being a center of Northern California's black population, with it being at least 25% black as of 2020. Many African Americans who settled in California, likewise in Oakland, worked on the railroad in Oakland and East Bay areas in the early-to-mid 1900s.
In 2020, anti-Black hate crimes in California has increased. In 2020–2022, the COVID-19 deaths rose for African Americans in California, which had the lowest vaccination rates in the state.
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