The Rise of Black Phoenix: African-American Migration, Settlement and Community Development in Maricopa County, Arizona 1868-1930

Abstract

Matthew C. Whitaker [*] Phoenix is largest city in Southwest and one of largest urban centers in country. It has developed a popular reputation as a desert oasis, a which has risen from ancient Hohokam Indian ruins, bursting with social, economic, and political opportunity. This popular perception, created by city's modern Euro-American founders, pioneers, and commercial boosters, fueled enormous movement which has established Phoenix as one of nation's premier urban centers. Currently, more than half of all Arizonans live in Phoenix, center of one of most urbanized states in nation. A sunbelt metropolis founded in 1867, it is currently one of ten largest cities in United States. Although Phoenix has been marketed as something of a middle-class, white desert mecca, there have always been, despite their small numbers, minority communities which contributed greatly to social, economic, and political development of Phoenix. This paper will examine origins of African-American migration, settlement, and community maturation in Phoenix, Arizona, and their social, economic, and political impact on lives of African-Americans and Southwestern metropolis at large, to Deal era. It will focus on Black social, political, and economic opportunities, development of black leadership, and growth of protest organizations and mutual aid societies in greater Phoenix area. Black Phoenicians were not simply passive, insignificant residents of greater Phoenix area. African-Americans in Phoenix displayed agency and resilience in face of seemingly arbitrary white racial malevolence and apathy. They were struggling participants in a capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal system. This Euro-American social, economic, and political order systematically empowered and valued whiteness and affluence, while disempowering and devaluing people of color and poor. It sanctioned de jure and de facto forms of racial segregation, class discrimination and sexism by displacing minorities, indigent, and women because it denied them direct and indirect access to local and national means of production and distribution. Indeed, Phoenix has been microcosmic of larger American society insofar as socio-economic condition of its black community has in essence mirrored that of many African-American communities throughout United States. This is not to say that Phoeni x's black communities are identical to those elsewhere in United States, and it is certainly not little Chicago. Phoenix has never been destination of an enormous black migration, and site of an entrenched inner-city black population, most often associated with New York or Detroit. Yet black Phoenicians, like blacks in most cities, have battled nihilism that degradation, devaluation, second-class citizenship, and socio-economic ostracism have imposed upon them. [1] Like vast majority of whites in American cities, Phoenix's ruling white elite has from its beginnings supported systematic campaigns to create a flourishing community run by anglos, for Anglos. [2] Generally, Phoenix, like most American cities, has always been a municipality which affords social, economic, and political mobility and power to middle-class and affluent white men. In order to establish and maintain their social, economic, and political hegemony, white male founders of Phoenix quickly imported mechanisms from states such as Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, which formed gestalt of racial caste system, defining race relations and socio-economic mobility in Phoenix throughout second half of twentieth century. In 1901, Arizona law prohibited the marriage of a person of Caucasian blood with a Negro or Mongolian. [3] This legislation was a direct response to growing numbers of Chinese-American and African-American males in territory between 1871 and 1901. …