I See by the Papers...

There were worst places to live in California than Santa Rosa in the 19th century - there's always gotta be someplace worse - but if you were an African-American, this town was a hard place to call home.

There are 23 African-Americans buried at Santa Rosa's old graveyard, the Rural Cemetery (listed below). We don't know much about most of them aside from vitals - birth/death, coroner's reason why they died, maybe their job. At least four had been slaves, possibly up to seven. Very few had an obituary in a newspaper; what little trace remains will appear in the revised cemetery book which comes out later this year with thumbnail profiles on almost every person there, which will instantly make it the most important work on local history ever published. About half of the African-Americans buried there are lost, meaning the locations of their graves are unknown. Any wooden or temporary markers are long gone.

But three of them have remarkable histories which are explored in the following three articles; John Richards, Edmund Potter and Henry Davidson deserve to be remembered and honored.

Their stories are intertwined with Santa Rosa as it existed in their day - which is to say, a shockingly racist small town. While it's always been generally well known that this village was a cheerleader for the Confederacy around the Civil War, little has been detailed about the way black members of the community were treated here in the decades after, often facing routine cruelty and sometimes violence. Yes, Santa Rosa discriminated against the Chinese and like many communities in the West formed an Anti-Chinese League in 1886, but that hostility simmered down. Not so the feelings toward African-Americans.

Other towns in California were sympathetic to the antebellum South, but try and find another place where anger at its defeat burned for decades like a fire which would never extinguish. Read the old Democrat newspaper and enter a world with upside-down racial grievances; everything would be okay if only African-Americans just went away (somewhere); there was sometimes inchoate rage that slaves had (somehow) instigated the Civil War. The Democrat liberally sprinkled its pages with the "n word" and other racial slurs before, during and after the war, often reprinting the most racist filth scraped from Southern newspapers. The hatefulness in that paper was unrelenting and often savage.


The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.

- Jeff Elliott