There is a deep history of Black people and African Americans in the Southwest that has been erased and forgotten, explains Meskerem Glegziabher, clinical assistant professor at Arizona State University's School of Human Evolution and Social Change.
Glegziabher recently published an essay, “Where Are All the Black Folks? Popular Narratives and the Erasure of Black History in Arizona,” in the Journal of Arizona History. “Black people, African American and immigrant alike, are labeled as outsiders and largely excluded from narratives about the past, present and future of Arizona,” Glegziabher said in the essay.
In the essay, Glegziabher talks about Black soldiers, farmers, loggers and merchants who grew Arizona as a territory long before statehood. “When contemporary Arizonans imagine territorial Arizona, with its cowboys and ranchers, how many of us picture Black horse riders? In fact, how many of us think of the Valley of the Sun as a place for thriving cotton farms recruiting Black laborers from across the American South?” Glegziabher said.
ASU News talked with Glegziabher about her recent work.
The Erasure of African American Landmarks
Here in the Valley, more than half of the 175 historic properties identified by the city of Phoenix’s 2004 African American Historic Property Survey have been torn down. Among some of the most notable are the Rice Hotel downtown and the former Booker T. Washington Hospital. The former was one of the only downtown accommodations that would serve African Americans and is listed in the 1940 “Negro Motorist Green Book.” It was torn down along with several other businesses to build Chase Field.
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The latter was opened in 1921 by the city’s first Black physician, Dr. Wilson Hackett, and was the first hospital to serve African Americans in the city. That location is now an empty lot. While the demolition of these two properties may have been unrelated, their absence from the city’s geography serves the larger sanitation of the state’s history that excludes itself from national narratives of Jim Crow and racial segregation, which are often erroneously mapped onto a North-South binary.
Phoenix’s 2004 African American Historic Property Survey determined, through archival research and oral histories, 175 individual properties to be of high significance due to their connections with people prominent to the city’s African American community from 1868 to 1970. These were the properties that the City of Phoenix Historic Preservation Office took special interest in.
These were locations where Black Arizonans lived, worked and worshipped. At a time when they weren’t tolerated across a large swath of the country, they were actively recruited to come to Phoenix, Glegziabher said - and many of them did.
Winston Hackett, Phoenix’s first Black physician, opened the Booker T. Washington Hospital on 1342 E. Jefferson St. in 1921. Arthur Randolph Smith operated The Phoenix Tribune, the first African American newspaper in the state, out of 923 E. Jefferson S. Roy Lee served as the first Black principal at the Phoenix Union Colored High School, later called George Washington Carver High, at 415 E. Grant St.
Where Booker T. Washington Hospital once stood near downtown Phoenix is now an empty dirt lot. During the first three years of its opening, it saw more than 300 patients, according to the City of Phoenix’s 2004 African American Historic Property Survey.
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Phoenix is far from being the only place in the country where the history of African Americans is being erased. The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, led by Brent Leggs, has invested $25 million to save a number of historic African American buildings and grounds in Oklahoma and Virginia.
“The traditional preservation movement has honored and preserved places associated (with) a few privileged Americans, and that being mainly white Americans,” Leggs said. Arizona Reps. “Those monuments were put up during the time of Jim Crow. They wanted to intimidate and keep African Americans in their place with the threat of white supremacy,” Geraldine Peten said in a 2017 Arizona Capitol Times interview.
Some city residents, like third-generation Phoenician Rodney Grimes, are taking the task of raising awareness of the state’s Black history into their own hands. Driving past the empty dirt lots and brick office buildings that now line Jefferson and Washington streets, he can still see the original structure of Booker T. Washington Hospital, which closed its doors in 1943 when Hackett’s sight began to fail.
Third-generation Phoenician Rodney Grimes takes a drive down memory lane, as he recalled the Black community and businesses that inhabited Phoenix when he was younger. “I like to come by and look and remember,” Grimes said.
What he does vividly still see in his mind today is the horrific photograph of 14-year-old Emmett Till’s brutalized body on the cover of the 1955 Jet magazine - as haunting now as it was when he was a little boy. It served as a reminder, growing up, that he must know the limitations of where he could and could not go in Phoenix because of his skin color.
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Reminiscent of today’s monumental upheaval over the publicized murder of George Floyd, he also recalls marching down those same streets in March 1964 to protest segregation in places of public accommodation. He stood with other protesters outside the Capitol, near the memorial to Arizona Confederate Troops that had been installed just three years earlier-the very same monument that Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs asked Gov. Despite today’s renewed and growing outrage to remove the monuments, Ducey has mostly stuck to his original stance.
Hammons lectures and organizes art exhibitions and events to educate the Phoenix community about the historic truth of Black migrants in Arizona. During a recent lecture for an exhibit she curated, she talked about the slaves who walked the Trail of Tears side by side with Native Americans, and said the woman who is often cited as the first African American to come to Arizona with her children in 1868 was, in fact, a former slave who continued to work for her master’s family.
“The systemic racism in Arizona is undeniable. Hammons’s exhibit-titled “The Great Migration: Indiscernibles in Arizona” and located in Heritage Square, Phoenix’s original town center-was inspired by the lack of acknowledgement for and awareness of the presence of African Americans in Arizona.
Phoenix artist Clottee Hammons painted a depiction of her great-grandmother, Effie, and her dog, Chip, standing near her cotton bush in her front yard. Hammons remembers one afternoon when she was a little girl, a Black man pulled off a piece of cotton from a plant growing in the front yard of the Phoenix home of her great-grandmother, Effie Stamps, a native of Mississippi.
In her yellow and pink apron, Effie chased the man, and when she caught up to him, she jumped on his back and hit him in the back of the head just to get her cotton back. Through her organization, Emancipation Arts, she created a literary event called the Emancipation Marathon, where members of the community gather every June and read selected literature about the American chattel slavery to commemorate its victims. The Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts will also broadcast the videos on its YouTube channel, Scottsdale Arts, accompanied by blog posts.
Like Hammons, Leggs said that Americans need to understand that the founding of the nation was rooted in slavery. “Preservation mirrors social values in America. And what I mean by that is a structural racism that has existed,” Leggs said. “It’s a lack of cultural competency. But that’s a difficult task when the knowledge of Black history and presence in the state is dependent on disconnected and scant artifacts, events and oral histories, Hammons said. “There is also, within the greater metropolitan Phoenix area, a notable lack of will to create new spaces and include Blacks in public art, politics and media,” Hammons said.
That’s in part because Phoenix was heralded as an “Anglo utopia” by the white population that first migrated to the city, Glegziabher said. “Most African Americans in Phoenix when they moved here either worked in the fields or were domestic workers. And that’s sort of the reality, and there’s no shame in that,” Glegziabher said. “There should be an acknowledgement of that history.
Why African-Americans left the south in droves — and what's bringing them back
The workers arrived in Phoenix lured by the false promises of clean cabins and sanitary working conditions that were made in flyers distributed primarily in Black Southern towns by the Works Progress Administration, a 1935 American New Deal agency created by former President Franklin D. The housing quarters were, in fact, in “deplorable condition,” concluded J.D. Dunshee, the former director of local health administration for the state health department.
A 1941 Works Progress Administration flyer was distributed throughout Arizona, advertising cotton picking jobs throughout various cities. A version is on display at the “The Great Migration: Indiscernibles in Arizona” exhibit at Heritage Square. Hammons said that many cotton-pickers died of diphtheria and tuberculosis-the latter a disease that, ironically, played a major part in white migration to Arizona’s dry climate for convalescence. The crops they tended were also sprayed with DDT, a chemical originally developed as an insecticide but later determined to be hazardous to human health. Some collapsed from heat stroke, others were bitten by rattlesnakes.
“We know that hospitals were segregated. We know that graveyards were segregated,” Hammons said. Hammons hopes to make “The Great Migration: Indiscernibles in Arizona” a traveling exhibit, heading to cities like Chandler, Gilbert and Florence, all of which had the cotton farms listed on a New Deal’s Works Progress Administration flyer.
Before he met adoring fans during his European tours; before he performed with Ray Charles, Muddy Waters and B.B. King; before he was inducted into the Arizona Blues Hall of Fame, Big Pete Pearson, Arizona’s King of Blues, writhed in pain every night before collapsing into an unsettled slumber. Today, there’s hardly any mention of the cotton pickers’ contribution as driving forces of the area’s economy. Only one cotton field lives on, on the far-west end of the city.
“We often have a tendency when we do recognize these omissions of history as it being somehow accidental, and it wasn’t accidental,” Glegziabher said. The nationwide protests, spurred by the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and countless other Black individuals, are just one moment in time against the systemic racism that is rooted deeply in the country’s founding. Hours before Floyd died on May 25 in Minneapolis, an Arizona Department of Public Safety trooper shot and killed Dion Johnson thousands of miles away.
Preservationists blame misguided efforts at urban renewal for the devastation of historically Black neighborhoods. Leggs listed many examples of places once thriving of Black culture and businesses that were decimated in the name of progress-the Southwest Waterfront in Washington, D.C., redeveloped in the 1950s and ’60s and Oklahoma City’s Deep Deuce district renovated from the 1960s to ’80s-because the systems that guide the decisions over what should and shouldn’t be preserved are, at their core, racist systems.
“When municipalities are looking to grow, develop, alter a city landscape, these places have been deemed worthy of preservation,” Leggs said. Grimes wishes for racial justice and change. “With the level of frustration across the board, something good could happen,” Grimes said. To Pearson, that’s one way to right the wrongs of the past that still haunt him.
“Yesteryear, it was super bad, but we still have the same problem. You just don’t see it as much. You don’t hear it as much. But, undercover, behind somebody’s door, somebody still feels the same way he did 60, 70 years ago,” Pearson said. “A lot of young kids don’t even know what happened yesterday.
Early Black Presence in Arizona
TUCSON, Ariz. (13 News) - The history of African Americans in southern Arizona begins as far back as the 1500s. This Black History Month, we are going back in time to learn about the first non-Native person to ever set foot in Arizona. “Most African Americans at this point in time talk a lot about the Buffalo Soldiers who were here in the 1800s, but there was a huge diaspora happening way before that,” said Cultural Historian Dr. Michael Engs.
A lot of people don’t know that Estevan Park in Tucson is named after the first African American explorer of the southwestern United States, and some call him one of the greatest explorers of all time. Dr. Engs says the first non-Native person to enter Arizona near present-day Tucson was an enslaved man, named Esteban de Dorantes.
Esteban’s journey to become one of the greatest explorers of all time began in 1528. He was one of the only survivors of the failed Spanish mission to explore and colonize Florida, known as the Narváez expedition. The journey was led by Panfilio de Narváez. “Of the party of 300 that came ashore with Narváez in 1528, after eight years of traveling back to Mexico City, only four survived. Esteban had been one of them, and he thrived,” Dr. Engs said.
The leader of the Spanish, Antonio de Mendoza, was impressed, which is why they chose to send Esteban north as a guide with priest Fray Marcos de Niza on the search for the Seven Cities of Gold. The Seven Cities of Gold was a mythical group of cities said to be filled with gold and riches in the American Southwest.
Esteban and de Niza had a disagreement on the trip, so Esteban journeyed ahead. “And that is why Esteban walked across that invisible line between what is now Mexico and what is now Arizona,” Dr. Engs said. Esteban was never seen again. “It’s said by most authors who write about Esteban that he died at the hands of the Zuni but he never was found,” Dr. Engs said.
Dr. Engs says we can only assume that Esteban died a free man. No one had any authority over him once he left control of de Niza. Dr. Engs says this Black history is not known by many people. “There’s a lot of stories about African based people here in the southwest and they don’t get the credence that the stories in the east do because of the smallness of our population here,” Dr. Engs explained. “African Americans at this point in time only represent about 4.2% of the population of Tucson. It’s almost as if you could know everybody of African decent if you live in that community.” Estevan Park was officially established in 1943. It’s historically known as a park frequently used by Tucson’s African American community.
While it may not be the state first thought of when considering Black history, Arizona has a diverse and rich history of African American stories dating back to the 1800s. Yet most of the archives, stories and icons are not being preserved or celebrated.
Today, about 5% of Arizonans are Black and some community leaders and activists are working to ensure the buried history is uncovered. From academics to faith leaders, a new generation of voices are speaking up about the truth in Arizona's Black history.
This week on Valley 101, Pastor Warren Stewart of the First Institutional Baptist Church, equality consultant Channel Powe, Assistant Archivist of Black Collections at ASU Jessica Salow and ethnic studies professor Anthony Pratcher II are joined together in a round table discussion on the under-acknowledgement of the state's Black history.
Valley 101 is an Arizona Republic and azcentral.com podcast about metro Phoenix and beyond.
Some past Valley 101 episodes about Black history and leaders in Arizona:
- Lincoln Ragsdale Sr revolutionized Phoenix
- Ayra Hackett: founder of the first Black woman-owned newspaper
- Phoenix's history with redlining
- Richard E Harris: Arizona's first Black reporter
- Arizona's fight for MLK Day recognition
For more, please check out our archives.
While there are many reasons why it is important to reverse this erasure, I will point specifically to the fact that these erasures are a critical component of how public heritage is narratively constructed. This in turn delegitimizes, within the dominant public imaginary, Black folks’ claims to space and an Arizonan identity.
Arizona remains today a state where most residents came from somewhere else, either another state or another country. It is also a state where substantial tracts of land remain the property of Native nations--Navaho, Yuma, Pima, Apache, Pueblo, Papago, and Zuni.
The United States seized the area in the war against Mexico in 1846, but few Americans found reason to settle there until silver and cooper deposits brought miners starting in the late 1870s. An 1870 population of less than 10,000 grew to 122,000 by 1900. Whites comprised less than half of the turn-of-the-century population. One third were ethnic Mexicans, born either in the Southwest or Mexico.
The 20th century saw slow but steady migration into the lightly populated territory, which became a state in 1912. Until 1940, many of the newcomers came from Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas for the cotton boom that followed the building of the Roosevelt dam on the Salt River and expansion of irrigated agriculture.
World War II changed the state's economy as the federal government established military bases and defense installations, setting off the cycles of mass migration that have made Arizona ever since one of the nation's fastest growing states, its population regularly doubling every twenty years since 1940. The influx changed the state's ethno/racial mix. Until the 1980s, most of the newcomers were Whites, often coming from Midwestern states. Since then the largest contributors of new population have been California, Mexico, and Texas. As a result, Latinx Americans are once again about one third of the population.
Notice in the visualization below that the dark blue rectangle representing population born in Arizona remains smaller than the out-of-state born throughout the 150 year period. This visualization tool is hosted by Tableau Public and may take a few seconds to respond. If slow, refresh the page.
Note on data issues: Birth state information is missing for about 5% of US-born persons in 1970 and about 2% in 1960. These birthplaces are labeled "United States, ns" in the charts. Birthplaces were not recorded for enslaved persons in the 1850 and 1860 censuses, so it is not until 1870 that reliable data on African Americans became available.
Census data from the Minnesota Population Center's IPUMS USA: Steven Ruggles, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, and Matthew Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0 [Machine-readable database]. Maps, data development, calculations: James Gregory.
The enduring struggle for recognition
“Most African Americans in Phoenix when they moved here either worked in the fields or were domestic workers. And that’s sort of the reality, and there’s no shame in that,” Glegziabher said. “There should be an acknowledgement of that history.
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