San Francisco's Black newspapers, Civil War era
San Francisco's Black newspapers, Civil War era
Mary Ellen Pleasant & the Executive Committee
San Francisco’s “Executive Committee” was a group of educated Black elite: ministers, teachers, business owners, from across California who came together and consolidated power through the California Colored Convention in 1855. They implemented programs and policies that would benefit the Black population throughout California.
In 1858 the California Legislature, led by Mississippi transplant, the slaveowner Senator William Gwin, passed a slew of laws stripping California’s Black people of the right to own property and the right to testify against a white person in court.
Black pioneer, journalist and entrepreneur Mifflin Gibbs declared that there was no point in remaining. He gathered seven hundred Black San Franciscans and took them to join an established free Black community in Victoria, on Vancouver Island.
The one thousand who stayed in San Francisco maintained a small, politically active community boasting three churches, two joint stock companies, building and loans, restaurants, barber shops, shoe stores, furniture stores, liveries, mechanics, a literary society and a Masonic lodge. There were Black-owned saloons, night clubs and gambling resorts; and a Black paper, the Mirror of the Times—founded by Gibbs and editor Jonas H. Townsend, then run by Peter Anderson. And as the Civil War raged, a more powerful Black newspaper became an Executive Committee priority. Veteran newsman of Eastern abolitionist papers, Philip Alexander Bell, was brought in to co-edit the Pacific Appeal with Anderson.
More on the Executive Committee
Read After the Gold Rush from the beginning
Unfortunately there are few photos of the members of the Executive Committee and none of them together. This photo from the excellent book Pioneer Urbanites is the closest image I’ve been able to come up with to illustrate the power and elegance of the Committee. Obviously it is from several decades later, but shows a group of San Francisco businessmen.
AFTER THE GOLD RUSH, Chapter 44
April, 1862, San Francisco, California
The Executive Committee: Philip Alexander Bell, Peter Anderson, James Madison Bell, J.J. Moore, W.H. Hall
“An organ of some kind was indispensable, to refute the many slanders which had been set forth by the minions of the slave-power. Thousands of the inhabitants of this State had been led to believe, in consequence of there being no public medium for their refutation, that we were all an ignorant "Jim Crow" set of beings, not capable of knowing the nature of an oath, and therefore not capable of testifying in a cause wherein white persons were parties. To disabuse the minds of the masses, we started the Appeal at that time, that our grievances might be made known, and as a vehicle wherein our whole talent might be concentrated.” —Philip Alexander Bell
“He who would be free, himself must strike the blow.” - Motto of the Pacific Appeal
At the April meeting, Philip Bell reported to the Executive Committee on the Committee’s petition to rescind the ban on Negro testimony. The petition had landed a respectable number of prominent backers: two hundred and fifty signatures. The California Assembly had been open to the motion—but the Senate refused to hear it.
The disappointment in the room was palpable, but in his crusty way, Bell tried to find words of practical encouragement.
“Action was commenced this year too late. Nothing was done until after the Legislature had convened, and then a petition was hastily got up in this city. Our action was crude, hurried and underdeveloped. Notwithstanding, we did wonders: we achieved a triumph in the Assembly, and with a full house, we should have succeeded also in the Senate.”
He went on to argue that the Committee had a full year to rally a larger effort, and that what we needed was a rallying point. We needed distribution, we needed a common agenda, a way to get names on court petitions quickly. The Committee wholeheartedly agreed.
We needed a newspaper.
Black newspapers connected our communities all over the free states of the nation. They shared political information, travel recommendations, employment opportunities and stories of the South—told by those who escaped.
Peter Anderson took up the cause. “A weekly paper is needed…one which will be the exponent of our views and principles, our defense against calumny and oppression, and our representative among one of the recognized institutions of civilization.”
“We have many white friends whose papers speak nobly in our favor; but we can best tell our own story, and advocate our own cause.”[4]
Our first Black paper in San Francisco, the Mirror of the Times, had gone out of business. It was time to replace it.
The Pacific Appeal launched in April of 1862 as“The Official Organ of the Colored Citizens of the Pacific States and Territories” to be “devoted to the interests of the Colored People of California and to their Moral, Intellectual and Political advancement.”
At the same time, J.J. Moore began San Francisco’s first Black literary magazine, the Lunar Visitor, devoted to our “spiritual, political, and literary elevation.”
The Appeal’s inaugural issue included four of James M. Bell’s antislavery poems. James himself asked me to be at the Executive Committee’s next publishing committee meeting.
I wouldn’t say the other men wanted me there. Philip Bell wasn’t known for camaraderie with the ladies. But they for sure wanted my money. Until they got five hundred subscribers, they’d be in the red. And five hundred was almost half of Black Californians in the City.
There was a definite tension in the room when I walked in. But I’d had plenty of practice making myself invisible.I sat by myself beside the coffee table, at the fringes of the meeting, and let them have their man-talk, eavesdropping while I read through the inaugural issue of the newspaper.
I could see a clash of the two editors coming from the very start. Peter Anderson had been an early leader of the community from the beginning of the California Colored Citizens Conventions, but he was a gradualist. He’d wanted to stand down after John Brown’s raid, and before the Mirror had folded, his editorials had become more timid and conservative.
Philip Bell was older, but bolder. His articles in the Mirror had been a standout from the dry and too carefully pedantic rhetoric of some other Black journalists. He put some fire into the argument.
He had a way of expressing outrage while yet praising white folk who acted in good faith. Perhaps even exaggerating their good faith—to help them rise to better expression of it. Like in this first editorial:
“We believe next year the Senate will be composed of better men. We thank those noble men, in both houses, who, by their votes, showed that they believe a negro can speak truth, and that the ermine of justice is not soiled, nor the Courts disgraced by admitting his Testimony. For the others, we will bring no railing accusation against them: we pity their wilful ignorance and blinded prejudices. Despair not, brethren! Another trial is all that is needed. We must Appeal from Senators besotted with hatred, injustice, oppression and secession tendencies to the people, sober with loyalty, humanity and justice…We shall Appeal to the hearts and consciences of the people. In the name of every age and sex, we shall Appeal for right and justice. Despair not, then, but hope on, hope ever!”
It was plain to me that Bell saw the big picture. Any newspaper article potentially had a far greater reach than just our people in California. Articles could be picked up and reprinted in any number of newspapers across the nation, it’s how that business worked. Bell was committed to establishing communication and collaboration between Black newspapers and journals throughout the nation, to the building of a Black literary body of work.
I also found him pedantic as all hell. He took twenty words to say what a few would cover. But finally he summed up:
“We have a year before us in which to work for the obtainment of our rights at the hands of the next Legislature.”
Then talk turned to a press for Black troops.
Free Black men had been trying to enlist in the Union Army since Fort Sumter, but Federal law barred Black men from bearing arms for the U.S. Army. The law could be changed, but Lincoln had been skirting the issue, apparently out of fear that arming Black men would cause the border states to secede.
In March, Congress passed an Article of War that said fugitive slaves must be admitted to Union camps. And in April, Congress took advantage of the Southern desertion of Washington to pass a “compensated emancipation” in the District of Columbia.
“The problem is Lincoln,” Philip Bell stated bluntly. “He continues to resist the notion.”
James Bell spoke quietly. “Our own people are themselves forcing the issue of an Emancipation Proclamation. Thousands of enslaved are fleeing the plantations and taking refuge with the Union camps.”
It was true, but there had been a backlash. Slaveholders in Virginia and Maryland began to sell their slaves further south to avoid the same.
I could not keep my thoughts to myself. “Is it soldiering that will get us status as equals?”
Philip Bell barely looked at me as he replied pompously, “One Black regiment alone would be, in such a war, the full equal of two white ones. The very fact of color in this case would be more terrible than powder and balls.”
Of course I knew he was quoting Douglass. Was this some kind of a test? I turned to stare into his face and gave the same speech back to him:
“We are striking the guilty rebels with our soft, white hand, when we should be striking with the iron hand of the Black man, which we keep chained behind us.”
“But you don’t agree?” he challenged me.
I could not help thinking of John Brown. “To my mind, we need to be making money, not martyrs.”
I don’t think the others even heard me. Bell went right on as if I hadn’t spoken. “If Black men serve, and die, then men of conscience cannot deny us the vote.”
And then I just said it. “The vote for you, you mean. Not for me.”
Well, that was the end of that conversation. When I walked out, the others didn’t even see me go.
They would keep pushing for the enlistment of Black soldiers. Truth is, I’d have fought myself, if I’d been in the South. But I was hundreds of miles from the war. And there had to be somewhere for the escaped to go.
That took money, and it took connections, and that was what I was good at. And my business model was working just fine.
When I stepped out onto the street, W.H. Hall was on the sidewalk, standing beside a lamp post, smoking a cigar. He nodded to me and stubbed out the cigar.
I hadn’t seen him leave. Now it seemed he’d been waiting for me. He looked good. I could smell his scent, cigar and man. For the first time in a while I could feel Mistress Erzulie stirring inside me. It gave me a bit of a glow and made me remember how long it had been since I’d been with anyone that way.
But all the good men I knew, including W.H., were married, and I didn’t want the trouble anyway.
He gave me a flash of a smile. “Make money, not war?”
Well, I knew his business was thriving.
“Would you leave your saloon to go for a soldier?” I snapped back.
“Hell no,” he admitted, and then his voice took on a mocking, oratory tone. “Wealth, and the knowledge how to apply it, is to the colored American the alchemy that turns everything it touches to gold, changes their dark repulsive features to a tolerating hue, penetrates and exhibits qualities before unseen, transforms him from a thing uncared for to the sublimity of manhood, a citizen, and a brother in all that tends to conduce to prosperity and happiness.”
He dropped the posture and finished, “It makes you white, don’t it?” he cut his eyes at me. “Hell of a trick. You might think of bottling that.”
“Bottle something no one should need,” I muttered.
“No one should,” he agreed. “But meantime, ‘Mrs. Smith’—you keep doing what you do. We need you.”
Many editions of the Pacific Appeal from the years 1862-1880 are archived online at the UCR Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research and free to read.
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