FIRST -- English-Speaking Black Man in California - Los Angeles, CA - First of its Kind on Waymarking.com

The plaque says, "Black Americans In The Golden State

Africans have had a presence and stake in California since before there was a California. Some 300 Africans accompanied the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes to the New World in 1519. And more than two and a half centuries later, the founding families brought up from Mexico to settle the pueblo of Los Angeles in 1781 numbered among them
several Mexican-born black families

The first English-speaking black man in California was known as "Negro Bob, " who jumped from a ship in 1816 and settled Santa Barbara. Nearly a hundred years after the United states was created, African Americans - freeborn and slaves - flocked to California's gold fields in the mid-19th century. And World War II-era African Americans came to California to find good-paying jobs in defense plants.

This long history is treated at the California African American Museum (CAAM), a state-owned museum founded in 1977 and opened in 1984 during the Summer Olympic Games.

Designed by African American architects Jack Haywood and Vincent Probv as a low, sleek, one-story building, CAAM's permanent collection includes more than 3,300 objects of art, historical artifacts and memorabilia that document the history, art and culture of African Americans.

Pioneers In Art and Politics

Then and now, the legacy of the African American experience has made artistic and cultural contributions to the settlement of the western United States. Exhibits on view at the museum include art created by African American artists who have lived and worked in the Los Angeles region.

[sidebar] Biddy Nelson, African American pioneer.

"The African American Journey West," an exhibit that opened in 2003, interprets through objects, art, historical records and memories the struggles and successes of African Americans as they journeyed westward from the western Coast of Africa across the United States into California and the western United States.

[sidebar] A female war worker poses with the airplane she is helping to build, 1940s.

The museum's permanent collection also features a sculpture entitled, "Profit and Loss" by John T. Riddle, Jr depicting the slave trade. Riddle was one of several black artists who literally picked up the pieces of history, and incorporated them into his work to make statements on political and social issues that affected black life in Southern California and the rest of the nation. "Profit and Loss" was the last piece of art created by Mr. Riddle, a former museum curator, artist and teacher who died in 2002.

[sidebar] Singer Ella Fitzgerald is presented a coveted resolution from the City of Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, 1966.

[sidebar] Martin Luther King Jr. Mrs Bradley and Mayor Tom Bradley attending a Black History exhibit at City Hall.

Other permanent collections feature artworks from West Africa, the personal possessions of jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald and the LAPD lieutenant badge worn by Tom Bradley, the sharecropper's son who went on to shape modern Los Angeles as the city's first black mayor, serving five terms and taking two failed runs at being elected governor of California.

Over the years the museum has featured exhibits on the lives and work of prominent figures like photography Gordon Parks, Singer Paul Robeson, writer W.E.B. Dubois and writer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, political leaders Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X, former slave and fiery orator Sojourner Ruth and jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.

The newly renovated California African American Museum also has a research library and a museum store.

[sidebar] Black Muslim defended William Rogers, in wheelchair, conferring with Muslim leader Malcom X, 1963

[sidebar] Mayor Tom Bradley and Muhammad Ali, 1980

Heroes and Heroines Come Alive For Visitors

For additional insights into the achievements of African Americans, visitors can participate in museum events. Children can "meet" historical characters through actors in performances that have [illegible]

Noah Purifoy. and panels on such topics as black women in film and the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that ordered the end of segregation in public schools."

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