The Black History Missing From America’s Wild West Story
The history of Black people in the West began centuries before American westward expansion.
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Introduction
The history of Black people in the West began centuries before American westward expansion.
In 1528, Esteban, an enslaved African born in Azamor, Morocco, arrived near present-day Texas after surviving the failed Narváez expedition. His presence reveals that the history of African descended people in the West began centuries before the Louisiana Purchase or the westward expansion of the United States.
This visual essay follows the evidence slide by slide: Black people already living in the West, why Black Americans moved west after emancipation, what the Black experience in the West actually looked like, Black women building western communities, Black freedom on Indigenous land, and the Oklahoma “promise land.”
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Sources & Further Reading
- Hardaway, Roger D. “The African-American Women on the Western Frontier.” Negro History Bulletin 60, no. 1 (1997): 8–12.
- Littlefield, Daniel F., Jr., and Lonnie E. Underhill. “Black Dreams and ‘Free’ Homes: The Oklahoma Territory, 1891–1894.” Phylon 34, no. 4 (1973): 342–357.
- National Archives and Records Administration. “Exodusters & Western Expansion.” African American Heritage.
- National Park Service. “Edward P. McCabe.”
- National Park Service. “Exodusters.” Homestead National Historical Park.
- Roberts, Alaina E. I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
- Taylor, Quintard. “African American Men in the American West, 1528–1990.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 569, no. 1 (May 2000): 102–119.
- Taylor, Quintard. “Facing the Urban Frontier: African American History in the Reshaping of the Twentieth-Century American West.” Western Historical Quarterly 43, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 5–27.
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