Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Glenbrook Park & Lake Olympia Collection

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Title: Black Life in the Sacramento Valley (1919-1934) Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Glenbrook Park & Lake Olympia Collection Author: Thomas C. Fleming Source(s): Sacramento Public Library # of Pages: 36 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-01-08 13:14:08 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 03:11:48 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 03:11:48

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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Black Life in the Sacramento Valley Page 12 of 37 Besides the black churches, Chico and other towns had branches of black fraternal organizations, which were national in origin. Blacks throughout the country were not admitted to any of the white-run fraternal orders, such as the Masons, the Elks and the Knights of Pythias. So they formed their own chapters, patterned after the white ones. These fraternal orders were an important social force in areas of the United States with a small, widely dispersed black population, such as the Sacramento Valley. Less than 1 percent of the valley was black, but there were two black-run chapters of the Knights of Pythias—one in Chico, and another in the much larger city of Sacramento. These organizations planned a lot of social events. Chico had a big dance every year on January 1, Emancipation Day. That was the day the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. You used to see things about it in the national black press, but it's no longer publicized. Everybody came-all black people. They'd get a band of black musicians from Sacramento, of about eight pieces—piano, two trumpets, a trombone, two saxophones, a drum, and a tuba for the bass line, because the string bass hadn't come in style yet. Generally, whatever blacks were doing in high school in any of those towns, you'd eventually hear about it. In Chico, Oroville, Marysville, Sacramento, Red Bluff and Redding, black youths on athletic teams in the high schools played against one another at track, baseball and basketball. And there were the band meets, which were held annually in the small town of Princeton. The bands competed against one another, and included blacks from many towns throughout the Valley. Marysville, 45 miles south of Chico, fielded a black semi-pro baseball team, the Marysville Giants, who played ball every Sunday, and blacks within a radius of about 100 miles would come to the games. They were great social gatherings. Sacramento had a black baseball team also, and there were Japanese teams in Marysville and Sacramento that played against the black teams. By the time I was 14 or 15, I was well aware of the activities of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which has waged the battle for first-class citizenship longer than any other civil rights organization in the country. It was still a fledgling organization at that time, whose membership was perhaps 150,000 nationally. It never did achieve a million members, even though the dues were only a dollar a year. I thought that was terrible, when you consider the work it did. The Sacramento Valley had three branches of the NAACP-—in Sacramento, Marysville and Redding—and people from the surrounding area would come in to attend the meetings, maybe two or three members from each little town. At the meetings, the NAACP looked at racial problems as being national. I just went to listen. At that period, I hadn't made my mind up that I was going to leave Chico, so I accepted things the way they were. It was not until after graduation, when I left Chico and moved to Oakland in search of a job, that my dislike of Jim Crow became an obsession to me. Now and then I would run across a stray edition of The Crisis, the journal that was the editorial voice of the NAACP. Robert Bagnall, a field organizer for the NAACP from New York City, would come to Marysville each year to speak. News of his visits always spread to other towns in the Sacramento Valley, and sometimes my mother, my sister and I would go down there to hear him. http://www.cmonline.com/boson/freebies/blackhistory/fleming2.html 12/28/04