This timeline shares milestones involving cases impacting African Americans in California, as well as select African American jurists throughout California judicial branch history.
California entered the Union in 1850 with a state constitution that banned slavery.
Despite California being a free state, laws would hinder the development of African-American economic and political power in the state for the entire decade.
Known as the "Mother" of the early civil rights movement in California, Mrs. Pleasant was a self-made millionaire and abolitionist who helped fugitive slaves.
The state enacted a law that would help slaveowners recapture escaped slaves and return them to the South.
The enslavement and ultimate freedom of Archy Lee brought about cases that helped defined civil rights in the state of California.
22 years before the U.S. Supreme Court decided Plessy v. Ferguson, the California Supreme Court decided Ward v. Flood, which established "separate but equal" schools.
Granted freedom in California, Biddy Mason became one of the first African American women to become a landowner in Los Angeles.
African Americans from the South moved to Western states like California as well as other regions of the U.S. to escape racial violence, pursue economic and educational opportunities, and obtain freedom from the oppression of Jim Crow.
Edwin L. Jefferson was appointed to a judgeship in the Los Angeles Municipal Court by Governor Culbert Olson.
Vaino Spencer was the third African-American woman to be admitted to the California bar.
