The World War II years saw the single largest migration of{short description of image}
African-Americans to the West. Nearly half a million defense workers, soldiers, and their families crossed mountain and desert, following hot, dusty stretches of highways "with their mementos, histories and home all tied to the top of a car," writes the historian Lynell George. Those who arrived in Seattle, Los Angeles, and other West Coast cities entered the defense plants, and soon found opposition. "We rather resent that the war situation has been used to alter an old established custom," declared James Duncan, an officer in Seattle's Aero-Mechanics Local 751, which represented the Boeing work force, when he learned that black workers were about to be hired. But African-American women and men were determined to seize this unprecedented opportunity. Even before several hundred black women marched on the Los Angeles office of the U.S. Employment Service in July 1942, declaring they would make the place look like "little Africa" until the agency began referring them for aircraft production jobs, companies such as Boeing and Lockheed-Vega took heed and began to hire blacks in larger numbers. These women were supported by the federal government in the form of Executive Order 8802, issued by President Franklin D.Roosevelt in 1941, which banned discrimination based on race. The Fair Employment Practices Committee, which he appointed soon afterward, monitored hiring. Recalling the prodigious changes that occurred during World War II, Fanny Christina Hill, an aircraft worker in California, remembered, "The War made me live better. Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks' kitchen."
Social changes during this time gave rise to the civil rights activity that exploded in the region during the 1950s and 1960s. From San Antonio to Seattle,protesters, including many nonblacks, took part in the national campaign to eradicte racism, showing that this wasn't simply a Southern issue. They employed sitins and economic boycotts. Seattle 's Rev.John H.Adams indicated the extent to which protest had penetrated the West when he recalled, "By 1963 the civil rights movement had finally leaped the Cascade Mountains." In fact, the fight for equality out West had started much earlier. In 1947, after being denied service in an Albuquerque restaurant, a University of New Mexico student had led a student boycott of area restaurants. This generated New Mexico's first public accommodations law. In 1958 high school and college students in Wichita,Kansas, engaged in sit-in demonstrations at downtown drugstores, actions that predated by almost two years the more famous Greensboro,North Carolina, sit-ins. Later in 1958, Clara Luper, an Oklahoma teacher and civil rights activist, began a sit-in campaign that lasted almost six years -the longest in the West -in Oklahoma City. On June 2,1964, the city council finally passed an ordinance desegregating public establishments. That same year, 18 year-old Tracy Simms, a Berkeley High School student, helped lead the largest civil rights protest on the West Coast when she and some 1,500 demonstrators marched against the Sheraton Palace hotel for refusing to hire African-Americans. The group's attorney was Willie Brown, who is today the mayor of San Francisco. Simms nego- tiated an agreement, which generated nearly 2,000 hotel jobs for people of color. As the 2000 census shows, African-Americans continue to move West, although the pace has slowed considerably. But the newcomers still push the frontier to share in the region's riches, as did George Washington Bush, Mary Ellen Pleasant, William Leidesdorff,Clara Luper, and so many others whose names we don't yet know.

Quintard Taylor is a professor of history at the University of Oregon and the author of IN SEARCH OF THE RACIAL FRONTIER: AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE AMERICAN WEST, 1528-1990.

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