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Black Life in the Sacramento Valley (1919-1934) (36 pages)
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Page: of 36
Black Life in the Sacramento Valley Page 15 of 37
I was reading a lot of American history then, and my sympathy was on the side of the white settlers,
because it told how they were always attacked by the Indians. But I started to question that literature
when I saw the conditions in which those Indians were living in their village in Chico. It was frightful.
The Chinese segregated themselves, because they seemed to have a desire to live together for cultural
reasons. Nearly every town in California had a Chinatown. Chico had two—both of them just one block
long. The smaller one had mostly old men, living in red brick buildings that had been built especially for
them. The bigger one, a block from city hall, was where the Hai family lived. Three of the brothers,
Hong, Wing and Wong Hai, were part of our gang. The oldest brother, Kim, associated more with white
kids. Some people asked me, why did I run around with those Chinese boys? I said because they were
fun, and they were friends.
Their father, Chung Hai, was called the mayor of Chinatown. When he died, the family had one of those
big Chinese-style funerals and put a lot of food on the grave. Then Hong went over and put a $10 bill on
there. We heard it was a Chinese custom to do that so it would pay the dead person's fare into heaven.
Well, as soon as Hong got out of sight, Henry and I grabbed that $10.
Right alongside the railroad tracks, as in other towns, they had what they called the jungle, where the
hobos lived. They observed what was happening, then came over and got the food and ate it.
On Memorial Day, one of the Hai brothers put that money down on the grave again. We were waiting.
But he put it right back in his pocket; he was going to make sure we didn't get it.
Chico had some Mexicans; we didn't use the word "Latino" then. Most of them worked for the Southern
Pacific Railroad as section hands; they took care of the tracks so the trains could run smoothly. The
company took wheels off some old boxcars, laid them alongside the tracks, and converted them into
two-room cabins where the Mexicans lived. They had a lot of kids. The ones at my school took a lot of
abuse, that the black kids wouldn't take.
There would probably be four or five families living together, in several boxcars. You found them right
outside of most towns in California; it was part of the landscape. They might have been the only ones
who wanted to do the job, because they got the lowest pay of any railroad workers.
In the 1920s, you saw whites and blacks married to one another in California, even in some small towns.
But if two people from different racial groups wanted to get married on the West Coast, they would have
to go up to Washington, where it was legal. California did not repeal its law against interracial marriages
until 1948. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that all such laws were unconstitutional.
In Los Molinos, a small town located midway between Chico and Red Bluff, there was a black
businessman named Ross, who operated one of the early stores that was a combination gas station and
grocery store. Ross was well liked, and the people of the community did not seem to resent that he was
married to a white woman.
I didn't date anyone during my four years at Chico High School, because there was no one for me to
date. There were five black girls in Chico in my age group—all sisters of my friends. But I wasn't looking
at them, because I saw them too often. I don't know whether there was any taboo against interracial
dating at the high school, but it just never happened.
Just because there wasn't segregation in California doesn't mean there wasn't discrimination in hiring.
Most professions in California were closed to black people, no matter how light they were. Apart from
http://www.cmonline.com/boson/freebies/blackhistory/fleming2.html 12/28/04