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Black Pioneers in San Diego
1880 - 1920
Actually, the black presence in what is now San Diego County was established long before whites from the
United States began arriving in numbers. During the Spanish and Mexi can periods blacks, who had accompanied Cortez in 1519
and had been slaves until 1829, as well as mixed-blood Californios were found at all levels of society. They had been assimilated
into the population of Mexican-ruled California. In fact, Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California, was part black
-- his grandmother was described as a "mulatta" in a census taken in 1790.1 The first known black from the United
States to set foot in San Diego was a sailor named John Brown who in 1804, while the naval vessel O'Cain was anchored in San
Diego Harbor, jumped ship and successfully deserted.2 When California entered the Union in 1850 only eight blacks
in a total population of 798 resided in the county. In 1870 there were only seventeen, but by 1880 there were fifty-five.
The great majority came from the rural South, which is noteworthy in that proportionately fewer blacks migrating to other
parts of California came from the former slave states.
Before the population boom of the 1880s most of the new black arrivals were slaves, ex-slaves, or employees
of whites whom they had accompanied. One such person was Nathaniel Harrison, born a slave in 1820 in Tennessee, who journeyed
to San Diego in 1848 and became the county's first permanent black resident. Harrison built his cabin on a 160 acre farm 3,000
feet up on the western slope of Palomar Mountain. He became the most widely known black of his day and lived to be one hundred
years old. One of the earliest black women to arrive was America Newton who came from Missouri to settle in the Julian area
in 1872. Unlike Nathaniel Harrison who raised and sold livestock and worked on nearby ranches, Miss Newton mainly earned her
living laundering clothes. The dusty trail near her cabin was named America Grade in her honor. Likewise, Nathaniel Harrison
Grade appears today on a street sign in Pauma Valley leading motorists up a road past the location where his cabin once stood.
Want to know more? Also See Julian Black History
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