A Stellar Synthesis of Black Western History

Abstract

A Stellar Synthesis of Black Western History David Goldstein-Shirley (bio) Quintard Taylor. In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. 415 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95 (cloth); $15.95 (paper). What surely will be a generation’s indispensable text on African American western history, Quintard Taylor’s ambitious, weighty book represents the state of the art on the subject. Resisting pat generalizations, oversimplifications, and entrenched but inaccurate myths, In Search of the Racial Frontier offers scholars a finely argued and expertly synthesized narrative of nearly half a millennium of black history in western North America. Whereas many accounts of western black history begin in the nineteenth century, Taylor reaches back to 1528, when a black Moroccan slave came ashore in present-day Texas with the survivors of a Spanish conquistador’s storm-wrecked ship. Enslaved by Gulf Coast Indians, the shipwrecked crew dwindled in number until the last four of them, including Esteban, the black slave, escaped in 1534, trekking for eighteen years all the way south to Mexico City. Hired there as a scout, Esteban joined an expedition back north across the Rio Grande, and eventually entered what is now the border region between Arizona and New Mexico, where Indians killed him. The expedition, however, “profoundly changed the course of western history” (p. 28), Taylor writes, because it helped establish Spanish claims to western North America. This tale exemplifies what Taylor has achieved in this book: we no longer can look at the American West as a place in which persons of African descent were latecomers and peripheral to the main action; from the time of Contact with native peoples, blacks were central to the story. Although the book focuses principally on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it consistently maintains its argument that western history is unintelligible without understanding the role of black women and men. Taylor also sustains a nuanced balance between two competing paradigms of black western history: Did the West represent the last best hope for nineteenth- and twentieth-century African Americans? Was it a racial frontier beyond which lay the potential for an [End Page 430] egalitarian society? Or did the region fail to match the unobtainable promise imposed upon it by legions of boosters, to provide both political freedom and economic opportunity? (p. 17) Rather than attempt to answer that unanswerable set of questions, Taylor demonstrates in each of his ten chapters that every stage of western history hosted a balance of oppressive racism on the one hand and, on the other, the opportunities to mitigate, resist, or even overcome it. One of the book’s many strengths is its comparison of rural experience with urban experience. As historians learn more about African American cowboys, for example, we sometimes neglect the city-dwelling black men and women in the West, who significantly outnumbered those living on “the rural frontier” (p. 22) as early as 1870. Among the largest western cities, San Antonio, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Houston, for example, had more than 10,000 black citizens each by 1920 (p. 223). The black population of Los Angeles exploded from about 16,000 in 1920 to nearly 64,000 twenty years later (p. 223). This book deals a blow to the myth that most nineteenth-century black westerners lived on ranches and farms, and to the oversimplified notions of the buffalo soldier and the “‘motherly but single’ elderly black female pioneer” (p. 22). By dedicating about half the book to urban, western blacks, Taylor provides continuity in the story of African Americans in all regions of the young nation without losing sight of western distinctiveness. As a social history, Taylor’s study provides great detail regarding the daily lives of “ordinary” black citizens. He writes more about families and communities than about remarkable individuals. Everyday issues such as education, housing, and employment occupy his interest, but he includes enough exceptions to generalizations such that the narrative retains depth. For example, he points out that most western blacks, until World War II, were relegated to domestic service employment, as was so throughout the nation. “One occupation—motion picture actor—was exclusively...