Book Description
From the eighteenth century, African Americans, like many others, have migrated to California to seek fortunes or, often, to pursue the more modest goals of finding work, owning a home, and raising a family relatively free of discrimination. Their search and its outcome is the concern of Seeking El Dorado.  Whether they settled in major cities or smaller towns, African Americans created institutions and organizations--churches, social clubs, literary societies, fraternal orders, civil rights organizations--that embodied the legacy of their past and the values they shared.  Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries African American leadership in the state consistently focused on achieving racial justice.  The essays in this book speak of triumph and hardship, success, discrimination, and disappointment. 

About the Author
Quintard Taylor is Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West,  1528-1990 and The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era.  Lawrence B. de Graaf is professor emeritus of history at California State University, Fullerton, and is the author of numerous articles on black history in the West.  Kevin Mulroy, the author of Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas and is Director of Research Collections at the University of Southern California Library.