A Conversation With the History Curator of the California African American Museum

Black residents make up a relatively small share of California’s population. But the state is so big that it’s still a significant number of people: Roughly one in 20 Black Americans lives in the state, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Since February is Black History Month, I reached out to Susan D. Anderson, the history curator at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, to learn a bit more about Black history in the state, which stretches back to colonial times.

“What I find is that every phase of Black history in California is misunderstood or not well-represented,” Anderson told me. “It doesn’t matter if it’s the 18th century or the 20th century — Black history in California just doesn’t get its due.”

Here’s our conversation, lightly edited.

Why do you think Black history in California has been overlooked?

People assume that because California was a free state, there were no enslaved people and slaveholders didn’t bring enslaved people into the state. So there’s just assumptions that are wrong.

But the other piece of it is that academic historians still haven’t really shifted their attention to the West as deeply or as broadly as they have paid attention to things like the 13 colonies or the South. If the West is an underdog in our historical understanding, then certainly Black history in the West, and in California, has been overlooked for a long time.