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Reflections - Follow the North Star

Riding the Rails with Black Pioneers

By Evelyn C. White

Topless is legal. These are not the watchwords that guided Harriet Tubman as she spirited fugitive slaves to Canada in the 1850s. Still, I suspect that the famed conductor of the Underground Railroad would have admired the rebelliousness of that credo— one I saw scrawled on a boxcar during a recent train trip north to Canada.

I was riding the rails to retrace the path of the courageous blacks who had made this journey a century and a half before, leaving the Bay Area to begin a new life on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia.

The whistle blew, and the Coast Starlight Superliner left the downtown Oakland Amtrak station, carrying me down history’s tracks to a time when the free state of California became a less hospitable home to blacks who had settled here. In the 1850s, a new federal fugitive slave law made it legal for enslaved blacks who’d made it to freedom to be captured and returned to bondage. In California, legislation was passed that prohibited blacks from testifying in court disputes involving whites. And the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 ruled that blacks were not citizens and had no claim on rights that whites enjoyed.

From its first constitution, enacted in 1849, California outlawed slavery. But the banning of slavery may have had more to do with gold than support for abolition. As Rudolph M. Lapp recounts in Blacks in Gold Rush California and Crawford Killian notes in Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia, the welcome was tepid for the African Americans who migrated to the Golden State during the late 1840s. It seems that with the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada, many lawmakers feared that Southerners would flock to California bringing enslaved blacks who, “seasoned” by plantation life, could outwork the 49ers in the mines.

Settling mostly in San Francisco and the Sacramento area, blacks comprised about 4,000 of the half million people living in California in 1857. A self-sufficient and contained group (many had bought their own freedom and later that of family members still in slave states), blacks in California generally prospered as farmers, merchants and trades people. But in April 1858, angered by the Dred Scott decision and a pending referendum that would have required them to carry “pass books,” about 600 blacks decided to leave the Golden State for Canada. There, plantation-style slavery had never thrived, and the “peculiar institution” had faltered by the 1790s.

A poem recited by a black woman during a pre-departure meeting at a church in San Francisco reflected the sentiments of the day:

    Far better breathe Canadian air,
    Where all are free and well,
    Than live in slavery’s atmosphere
    And wear the chains of hell.

    Farewell to our native land
    We must wave the parting hand
    Never to see thee any more,
    But seek a foreign land.

The pass book requirement was not enacted, but blacks in California still felt under siege. So hundreds left behind the debate about slavery and migrated to Victoria, British Columbia. Encouraged by Canadian provincial governor James Douglas (himself of Guyanese and Scottish ancestry), many families continued to nearby Salt Spring Island, where they were deeded free parcels of land to clear and claim as their own.

I reclined in the roomy passenger seat, and the Coast Starlight clackety-clacked its way north—through Redding, Portland, Seattle, and across the Canadian border. Harriet Tubman settled in an area of Canada just beyond Niagara Falls, after fleeing a Maryland plantation. But she returned to the South numerous times to rescue other fugitives, including her parents.

Outraged by her daring, slave masters put a $40,000 bounty (about $1 million today) on Tubman’s head. Never captured, the woman revered as Black Moses later proclaimed that she could have freed many more blacks had they “only known they were slaves.”

Less well known, but no less courageous, was Margaret Garner, reputedly the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved. In January 1856, Garner and her children escaped from Kentucky to the free state of Ohio. When cornered by bounty hunters emboldened by a Fugitive Slave law that netted them $10 for each arrest of a runaway, Garner slit the throat of her infant daughter and swung a shovel at the head of her son.“Before my children shall be taken back to Kentucky, I shall kill every one of them,” Garner wailed. She was captured and put in shackles, with the blood of her own flesh dripping from her hands.

From Vancouver,B.C., it was a boat that carried me—as boats had the black pioneers— to Salt Spring Island, home to a tranquil farming and sheep ranching community of about 10,000. In addition to Coast Salish Indians and the blacks who’d made an exodus from California, the island’s early settlers included many Japanese and Hawaiian families. Today, poets, painters and filmmakers from all over the world are drawn to the bucolic landscape and shimmering waterways.

The first teacher on the island was John Craven Jones, an African American and a graduate of Oberlin College who demanded of his students proficiency in Greek, Latin and elocution.

THE COAST STARLIGHT CARRIES ME SOUTH—clackety-clack— through Tacoma, Salem, and Sacramento, toward Oakland. This path also retraces the same route later ridden in the 1940s by multitudes of blacks in a more hopeful time—a time when well-paid and respected work as Pullman railway car porters drew many blacks to the West and to Oakland. C.L. Dellums (1900-1989) organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—the first labor union in the country to be led by African Americans—in the late 1920s. Today a towering statute of Dellums—the uncle of veteran politico and Oakland mayoral candidate Ron Dellums—stands welcoming passengers at the Jack London Square train station.

After years in the computer industry, Glenn San Luis had enough of his desk job and, a few years ago, hopped at the chance to become a train attendant. It was the chance to travel and meet so many different people that drew him to the rails. “I must admit that I didn’t know anything about the Underground Railroad or Pullman car porters when I started this job,” he says. “But as a person of color, I’m proud to be a part of the legacy.”

What will that future legacy be? A week after I disembark, I attend the Oakland Ballet’s opening night gala, where dancers pirouette across the stage performing Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid, a ballet first staged in 1938 about the settling of the American West. I hear the clackety-clack of the train and feel the rhythm of the rails, and with the journey I’ve just finished, I imagine those dancers onstage interpreting the pioneer history of African Americans in California. I see the dancers conjure the comings and goings of C.L. Dellums, Sylvia Stark and the unnamed black woman who recited the heartfelt poem during the church meeting in San Francisco.

I hear the words of the civil rights anthem, about the blacks who woke up with their minds “stayed on freedom.”