By the Sun-Reporter Staff
Before the tech boom. Before the Summer of Love. Before the cable cars and the Painted Ladies and the sourdough and all the rest of it.
Before any of that, Black people were here.
- A woman named Juana Briones was born near what is now Santa Cruz. Her parents were Native American, African, and European. She challenged the Catholic Church to get free from an abusive husband — which in 1802 was not a small thing — raised eleven children on her own, and built a 4,400-acre ranch. When California became part of the United States and men came for her land, she fought them in court and kept it.
You probably didn’t learn that in school. Most people didn’t.
By the 1870s the whaling industry had moved from New Bedford, Massachusetts to San Francisco, and it brought a large number of African American crew members with it. They settled. They built. A man named William T. Shorey became the only Black West Coast ship captain in 1886.
Thirty-seven Black San Franciscans founded the Mutual Benefit and Relief Society to help newcomers with employment and housing. Someone started a newspaper called The Mirror of the Times — the first African American newspaper on the West Coast. It published pieces against racial segregation and laws that barred Black people from serving as witnesses in court cases involving white people.
They were fighting the same fights. They just had to do it without the internet.
- A California legislator introduced a bill that would have banned the immigration of Black people to California entirely. Every Black person already living in the state would have been required to carry identification papers at all times. Those who couldn’t prove California residency before 1858 would face deportation.
The bill died in committee. Barely.
Many Black San Franciscans had seen enough and began making plans to leave for Canada. The city’s Black population would not boom again until after World War II — when the Fillmore district became what people started calling the Harlem of the West. Jazz clubs. Community. Culture. A neighborhood that belonged to the people who built it.
Then came redevelopment. Then came displacement. You know the rest.
This is Black History Month 2026 — one hundred years since Carter G. Woodson started Negro History Week because he understood that a people who don’t know their history are a people who can be told their history by someone else.
San Francisco’s Black residents built this city. They sailed its ships and farmed its land and fought its laws and raised its children and opened its newspapers and played its music and made its streets worth walking down.
They are still here. Still building. Still fighting.
That’s the story. It starts in 1802 and it isn’t over.
Black History Month runs through February 28, 2026. The African American Art & Culture Complex hosts a Black History and Futures Celebration on February 28, 1–4pm, inviting community members to share stories across generations.
