I See by the Papers...

"I firmly believe, from what I have seen, that this is the chosen spot of all this earth," wrote Luther Burbank in his first letter from Santa Rosa in 1875. But then he added a qualifier: "...as far as Nature is concerned."

Something about Santa Rosa apparently didn't sit well with old Luther, but we'll never know what. The town was welcoming to "immigrants" such as himself, yet it was still rough around the edges - a Chinese man had just been shot in the back and no one seemed very interested in finding out who did it. It was also a saloon town, where men argued endlessly about race horses and politics, topics which didn't hold any interest for Burbank. Or maybe he didn't know what to make of a "humor" item which appeared in the local newspaper around the time he arrived. It went like this: An ex-slave encountered a friend of his former "Massa" and said all the changes since the Civil War had left him sad. While he managed to save enough before the war to buy his freedom, now he wished he kept the money instead. The punchline: As a slave he was worth $1,000 - now he wasn't worth a damn. 

The weekly Sonoma Democrat regularly offered racist items like that - so many that it would be easy to mistake it for a newspaper published in the Deep South. That vignette, in fact, was reprinted from a paper in Mississippi.

This article is a coda to the series "THE HIDDEN LIVES OF BLACK SANTA ROSA," which explored how the Democrat in the late 19th century ignored African-American townspeople, even when they were men and women of distinction. It disappeared them by rarely offering obituaries and not mentioning weddings, deaths, births, arrivals and departures. But that doesn't mean the paper ignored African-Americans; it published something about them almost every week - albeit only things which ground them down by reinforcing the ugliest racist stereotypes.

Blacks in the late 19th century faced myriad problems nationwide, although today we focus mainly on the dramatic acts of violence and overt acts of discrimination - lynchings, the Klan, Jim Crow laws and the like. But reading the old Democrat it's shocking to discover how normalized racism was in Santa Rosa. Those toxic little stinkbombs in the paper reminded African-Americans they were inferior and fair game to be pushed around, and they sent a clear message to whites that blacks deserved lowly status. And probably worst of all, it taught white children all this was just the way of the world. Coming soon: White Supremacy, The Next Generation.

Let Gentle Reader be forewarned that this is not the sort of historical amusement usually found here, and what follows will stray into uncomfortable territory - reading (or writing) about hateful speech is No. Fun. At. All. But we can't discuss Santa Rosa's history without being honest about how ugly some of it really was. We can debate how much this material shaped the town, but we can't deny it existed. And we can't pretend this problem stopped when the Sonoma Democrat folded in 1897; the Press Democrat continued dishing out offensive racial jokes and short fiction well into the 1930s, only not as vigorously.

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