 All right, good afternoon everyone and welcome to today's program. My name is Anissa I am a librarian at the San Francisco Public Library and we want to welcome you here today from wherever you're tuning in. And we're happy to have you and join us for this month's nature boost. We at San Francisco Public Library would like to acknowledge the unceded land of the Eloni tribal people and acknowledge the many Romitosh Eloni tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands in which we live and work here in the Bay Area. SFPL is committed to uplifting the names of these lands and community members from these nations with whom we live together. SFPL encouraging you to learn more about first person culture and land rights and are committed to hosting events and providing educational educational resources on these topics. I'm going to give you a couple announcements about the libraries campaigns and upcoming events. We're celebrating our 16th one city one book. And honoring Chanel Miller for her book know my name, the story of her sexual assault on the Stanford campus and her experience with the judicial system and how she's overcome and survived and what she does now amazing artist amazing woman. She will be in our virtual library on March 16. So make sure you tune in for that. We have on Thursday, February 21 25, our famous Effie Lee Morris lecture, and we'll be featuring Jason Reynolds, and the transformative power of reading and writing. So please make sure you tune in for that one as well. So we are celebrating our black history month, which we call more than a month at the library and it runs from January through February, and celebrating all kinds of amazing people and all kinds of amazing work. And we have lots of events still coming up for that. So we need to know about our local bookstores and that we still support them and that we continue to support them. We would not have the vibrant city we have without these bookstores. And this month we're supporting borderland books and Marcus books, the oldest, the nation's oldest black owned independent bookstore. We love bookstores. We've turned out about more than a month and all of those great events on our website. As, as a part of our more than a month celebration today's event is part of. So we would like to acknowledge our partnership with the National Park Service and the Presidio Trust. Someone once called, I'm not sure who coined it, but the Rangers are the librarians soulmates, and I love that. They're almost like the librarians of the natural world. So we have a really great partnership with them and are very honored to continue this partnership. So we'd like you to let us know how you like our programs and you can type that in the YouTube chat or contact us through through the library. This is a proud partnership that we continue and look forward to more events in the future, March, April, May and summer. So please tune in. Today we are so happy to have Ranger Hector and Ranger Alana, both going to be here telling us about faces of resistance. And without further ado, our partners. Thank you for that introduction. So hello everyone. Thanks for joining us for our presentation faces of resistance. My name is Alana Smith. I'm the Presidio Education Program Manager, and I'm joined today by my colleague. Hi folks, my name is ectod, and I am the footprint education program manager, also working at Golden Gate National Recreation Area with Alana Smith. Yeah, so we're both with the National Park Service. We're out of San Francisco. And yes, our park is Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and the land of our park really tells the stories of so many different groups of people that have been here before us you know starting with the indigenous people of this land the community, and then continuing on with folks arriving to the area in various waves of migration, particularly over the past couple hundred years. So in honor of Black History Month. We would like to take a closer look at the contributions of San Francisco's black Americans and see how they contributed to civil rights activism, and how that connected to nationwide efforts. So we're going to be looking at the later 1800s and early 1900s, which I know when you think civil rights movement, usually we're not thinking that far back, but the truth is that even in the 1800s, there were some really remarkable acts of resistance. It wasn't all you know just about slavery and struggle, but some really empowering stories to share so we're going to be diving into those today and then also be thinking about how that connects to acts of resistance that we see today in movements. So to get us started, I thought is going to talk about some of those patterns of migration and that early forming of the black community of San Francisco. Hi folks, so if we switch to our first slide here. We're going to be taking a look, we're kind of going to be zooming out so to speak a little bit in order for us to focus on our first story which is the story of the John Harris v. Sutro Babs case but first we need to kind of set the scene here as my colleague has mentioned to understand the patterns of both voluntary and forced migration of black people to San Francisco. So all the way to the set from the 1700s to the mid to late 1800s, which is a time period that we are going to be talking about today. So to kind of remind ourselves of some of the earlier migration patterns that we don't often think of the settlement and colonization of the Bay Area by the Spanish in the 1770s and the mid and the late 1700s actually brought a lot of folks who were African descended living in Mexico. So these were people who at one point had been enslaved, they lived in Mexico and they came up on trail such as the Juan Batista the answer trail, along with Spanish settlers so some of the first governor some of the first I've got days like the political power in California were actually descended, partially from indigenous people in Mexico and also also partially from African descended folks as well so it's just something to sort of remind ourselves that people who were African descent we're actually living in parts of the Bay Area in California before people of Anglo or English a descent as well so just something to kind of think of as we go along. So we're going to set back the timeline on black settlement into the Bay Area and the West Coast in general. When we look at different types of migration patterns of black people as well. One of the most interesting ones for me to explore actually is a sort of big purple arrow that we see here going from the East Coast of the United States, all the way down to Central America and then up the West Coast to San Francisco so this would have brought East Coast groups of black people such as the New Bedford whalers and other people who are coming from already existent communities of freed people living on the East Coast of the United States and even some people who would have been recently freed or this is actually that would come down to Central America and cross there down your Panama and then come back up the coast to San Francisco and actually some black Americans ended up settling in parts of Panama and Nicaragua. So just sort of expanding again our idea of where black Americans were during these time periods, we oftentimes get a very narrow view of this from our history books. And so this is when we start to see these waves of settlement happening, obviously 1848 1849 is when we see the gold rush occurring so this is one of the big pushers for getting people of all races out to California and into San Francisco. In the middle of the continent, I included sort of a land route that was part of a forced migration of black people to San Francisco in the Bay and gold rush areas as well. And we have to acknowledge the fact that there was a lot of southerners going to California at the time, and some of these people would have owned enslaved people. So, you know, we look at the word migration is problematic because we don't want to look at enslaved people as immigrants right there's a forced perspective, there's a, there's a forcing going on so to speak. So that kind of land route it might not have been as common as we imagine, but there would have been enslaved people working in the gold fields of California. And as this community started to burgeon in San Francisco, not only did it have people who were descended from more prosperous freed communities in the East Coast, but those people who had that prosperity, and we're part of a burgeoning black community, we're also helping people who are formerly enslaved. Some of these enslaved people are actually working in the gold fields to buy their own freedom and then buy the freedom of their families. So a lot of different perspectives that we're looking at throughout time. Let's zoom in now on the next slide we're going to take a look at what kind of made a community in San Francisco for black people. We have to understand that the neighborhood where black people would have lived in San Francisco is different where is then where it is today. So, these are some historical photos showing Stockton Street California Street. This is kind of like so much like actually a Chinatown area we can see in this first photo on our left. We have that arrow is pointing to the AME Zion church which is a black church. And this photo is taken in 1870 and right down the street we see the first Presbyterian Chinese church so there's actually an old book from the 70s called a walking tour of historic black San Francisco and Alana and I did that in our first week working here at Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and we're walking around Chinatown the whole time. And it was for me something really interesting to note that like these communities live very closely to one another. The AME Zion church also had a small school in it called the Livingston Institute. And we're learning more and more about this community every day. Again, it's something that you have to dig quite a lot in I'm going to be citing some researchers later and some of the shoulders that we stand on when we look at this information, but it's important to note that before the 1906 earthquake and basically from like the 1870s until like the early 1900s, one of the centers of the black community in San Francisco was this area. Clay Street Stockton Street, kind of like soma area and this next this picture on the right here that we see is one of my favorite pictures I just found it recently. It's sourced from the Bancrop Library and actually is part of this big document called the SF City Planning African American Citywide Historic Context Statement, which is a long document full of lovely information. And it has this photo of, you know, we can see this black family here on Clay Street towards Stockton. You know, some things that stand out for me is like seeing people in like relatively nice clothes like, you know, enjoying a social event. And this really important for us when we approach conversations of resistance that people were fighting a fight for a life worth living. There was so many things happening in this community, social organizations communities being formed people dancing together having relationships forming bonds over time. So it's just fascinating to me to look back in time and see a community that was very different. And so I also want to acknowledge that the black community in San Francisco is in different places today. So the Fillmore, what's now known as the Western Edition and the Bayview, those are really some of the big centers of black community today. This is what we're looking at in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And really the pillars or foundations of this community and the next slide we'll get into that a little bit. And so we're going to look at some of the roots of political resistance in the late in the mid to late 1800s. And really what we find is that there's kind of three things that stand out particularly for me is that community resistance is a very important business in financing money to be able to support what was happening. They needed community organizations so people who are willing to kind of get the community together to decide on a common goal. And they needed the press, particularly the black press had a big impact on San Francisco, and it was able to link different communities all around the country. And so in terms of business and financing here I put up Mary Ellen pleasant, a woman who actually has a park named after her in San Francisco it is the smallest park in the city. It's not a national park service but I have yet to go see it, I need to go and check it out. Mary Ellen pleasant life I can talk about her all day. Very interesting woman, her origins are on are not very well known she was either a bonds person in the north which is essentially a form of kind of shorter term enslavement that was happening. There she could have also come from Georgia as well there are different sources that indicate where she came from. At the other day she was a light skinned black woman who lived in San Francisco, and she became a very prominent business woman and abolitionist in the 1850s so this set up the timeline for us before 1863 black people could not legally testify in court in San Francisco, and black people were not permitted to vote until 1870, but Mary Ellen pleasant set herself up as a domestic worker in houses and prominent homes in San Francisco and was able to kind of glean information and learn how to invest the money that she was making into businesses that were needed in the community. So she had a lot of investment, boarding houses, laundries. In the last slide that we looked at actually there was a, that picture of a me zion church right on that street Mary Ellen pleasant how to boarding house that she own. And Mary Ellen pleasant used funds from her business ventures to support abolitionism and the early civil rights movement as well. So she, we know that she sent money back east, possibly for a variety of abolitionist movements there's a connection between her and who obviously led the John Brown Harper's fairy resistance of enslaved people against their enslavers, we it's sort of an interesting connection we know that she she may have donated some money to him, although the value of the money we're not entirely sure there's some people that put it up all the way to $30,000 which is a lot back then. But at the end of the day she was responsible for funding abolitionist movement. She would oftentimes give formerly enslaved people work in her boarding houses. She was really using her finances to try to prop up this nascent black community in San Francisco. Community organizations were an incredibly important part of the community whether it was schools churches, political organizations like the Afro American League. These organizations are really responsible for activating the black political voice before voting was legal. And they would oftentimes be a part of these big congregations that would go out to the state capital and advocate for anti discrimination law so that black people could have more access to public space and public commerce as well. And the awfulest Morton was the president of the Afro American League we're going to be touching on another community organization that actually helped John Harris as well later on in our presentation. The black press was incredibly important. Phillip Alexander Bell was a renowned journalist and he was the editor of the elevator which was a big black newspaper during this time period in San Francisco. We don't actually have any newspaper black newspapers that I know of that reference John Harris so you'll notice those newspapers we look at are going to be generally like white San Francisco kind of city newspapers, but we do know that the impact of these papers like the elevator was connecting this network of black communities all throughout California and even back east with one another and keeping that net of communication resistance going. As we move to our next slide, we're going to kind of learn a little bit about the fact that these cases this case of John Harris versus sutra baths these test cases these civil rights cases we're not living in a vacuum. As I mentioned before, you need a community to sustain this resistance and this resilience over time. And really I think when we set the timetable back on civil rights in the United States. We have to look at the case of Charlotte Brown, who Elaine Ellison references in her article lane is a big researcher shout out to her I hope she's in the ground today. And I use a lot of her. A lot of her works in this presentation as well. But you know we can look at Charlotte Brown as a sort of Rosa Parks of San Francisco in the sense that again she didn't just sit down on a bus and move things forward but she had the support of a community as well so the story of Charlotte Brown I'm going to keep it short is she was actually trying to get picked up by a streetcar and what today would be the Marina down on like Fulbert Street I think, and the conductor of the streetcar asked her to get off she was permitted to ride any longer. And he cited that it was because she was a colored woman a black woman. Charlotte Brown filed a lawsuit with the support of her father as well, and she was able to galvanize the community and actually eventually won that lawsuit. Again, these lawsuits when they would be one there wouldn't be a lot of financial recompensation, but she started a trend and also 1863 as I mentioned before was the first year that black people could testify legally in courts in California. She was taking advantage of the time period this kind of this freedom that had been earned by her predecessors, and now she was using it in order to continue this pattern of resistance throughout time. Later on, Mary Ellen Pleasant would actually sue the omnibus railroad company as well. And so, there was a lot of folks kind of chipping in within the black community to push forward. There was a lot of resistance in a legal sense. And remember this was during the Civil War, and black women were already standing up against racial discrimination out west and, you know, all over the country as well. So in our next slide. We're going to get to the story that went down at Sutro Babs in 1897 so we're kind of jumping forward in time, about 30 years, but there's still a lot of discriminatory laws to deal with. At this point black people can legally testifying court black men can vote. They can vote in state elections and in federal elections as well in California. But there is still a fight left to fight. And when we look at Sutro Babs today oftentimes what we see is this beautiful area on a rugged coast, and we don't see any indication as much of what was there we kind of see what might have been these these large pools but this was an incredibly huge like swimming facility that could fit up to 10,000 people. And today when we look at this site we often admire it for its natural beauty, but I hope the next time that you go down there you can look at Sutro Babs as a site of a fight for civil rights in 1897. There's actually a plaque down there that tells the story of John Harris V Sutro Babs and I have to shout out again to Elaine Ellison one of the researchers I really did a lot of work to to find the story of John Harris versus Sutro Babs and Lynn Fampa as well the former education specialist who pushed forward interpretation and education on this man and on the connection of him to the greater black community and the struggle for resistance as well. Again we see these pictures of Sutro Babs was a really huge facility, probably the only colored photo that you'll see of Sutro Babs or of any but this is the only color photo that we have in this presentation basically I just wanted to give you all a little bit of like brightness here. You know there would have been this huge complex was built in 1896 and it was the pools were like, in a sense like climate controlled like temperature controlled. There was people coming from all over the state all over the country to go and be in these Babs and be in these pools. And there was also kind of an entertainment conference as well so you can go and eat in a restaurant you can go and see like a museum of different things from all around the world and there was street car connections that would take people from downtown and different kind of farther away parts of San Francisco and bring them out to Sutro Babs which is very far away from things at the time and also in the background of this first photo on the left we can see Sutro. I ate off sutra's mansion it off sutra was the person who built Sutro Babs was also a former mayor of San Francisco so he had a big mansion that kind of overlooked is his empire so to speak. And so I say here fun for all because even though Sutro Babs is made in this very egalitarian way this way of like we're going to create a space where everyone can come and enjoy. That was not the experience that John Harris had. So the story of John Harris goes that in 1897. He came to visit sutra Babs first on July 4 and then on July 11. On July 4 he came with a friend with a group of white friends, and he was, he was able to pay his admission which was 25 cents at the time, his admission would give him access, not only to, to the stores and kind of activities to do inside of sutra Babs but also give him access to the actual bath so he could go swimming. He was turned away from using the bathing facilities who is not able to get to enjoy the same privileges that his white colleagues were able to enjoy with their 25 cents. So he left and he came back and again on July 11 and had a similar experience, even though he was more than willing to pay his admission, he was turned away. And so if we switch to our next slide here. We can kind of understand, we can get to understand what is it that John Harris did when he was faced with this discrimination. He was told that he wasn't permitted to go into this space because of the color of his skin. And so on August 1 he filed a lawsuit against sutra Babs. Now I have a photo here of it off sutra in the middle. And a couple of once again a lot of the information that we're getting is coming from newspaper clips from these primary sources that are really important for us to understand throughout time. And so some of these newspaper clips kind of reference what John Harris was fighting for, which was civil rights. So he's, you know, they're kind of citing who's refused admission, etc, etc, what I had explained, and he had filed suit on August 1. In a way that sutra Babs actually kind of defended their position on this. They didn't really cite any sort of legal precedent or anything like that, and they actually would have been expected at this time to at least have separate facilities for black people. So if anyone knows the Plessy v. Ferguson court case that happened in 1896. So a year later, there was already a precedent for having separate spaces for white and black people to be. That was obviously not provided to John Harris, but Plessy v. Ferguson was not even really cited because the defense from Edgar sutra, the manager of sutra Babs and also the son of Adolf sutra was that it would be ruinous. Now I'm going to use this word in a historical context I would not use this word normally to allow Negroes in the baths, because the white people would be unwilling to mingle with them, and there were not enough color people to justify separate baths for them. This is essentially the legal argument that the sutra families lawyers at it wasn't really based in a precedent. And they didn't want to go with the decision of Plessy v. Ferguson which made it so that they had to have separate facilities because that meant that they would be providing facilities for people they feel weren't going to use the baths or you know they didn't want to waste money so to speak on providing a space for black people to go and bathe and swim. And so with this as their legal argument, John Harris was able to use his legal team and the people who were supporting him to say his side of the story and defend himself in court against these two instances of discrimination so let's see John Harris's side on the next slide here. John Harris was able to get help, possibly from the African American Assembly Club, which is a social organization that comprises about 160 kind of this black middle class that we had mentioned this community of people who was living in the city. By August 1 they were already being cited in newspapers that they were going to be throwing their support behind John Harris. So we know that he would have probably received support from them possibly financially. He had a lawyer named Alfred black that I don't know much about I believe he was a white lawyer, but he may have been hired by the African American Assembly Club. Alfred black use the Dibble Civil Rights Act which had come out only a couple of months before John Harris had actually been discriminated against as such a bad. And he cited that within the precepts of the Dibble Civil Rights Act, it gives black people it gives people of all colors all races all citizens. It's a very broad thing, very broad thing to say, access to the same accommodation as privileges of ends restaurants hotels eating houses barbershops anything that you can imagine you're supposed to go to this place and receive the same accommodation as anyone else, whether you're black or white or Chinese or any other sort of race. And so under the precepts of the Dibble Civil Rights Act, John Harris is able to be compensated he wins his core case. He receives a small amount of money for each case is maybe like $100 I think for each instance about $200 in total. It was not even really enough to pay his court fees. But what had been done he had given teeth to the Dibble Civil Rights Act which had actually been created by a Republican assemblyman from the south who had always tried to help out black communities even back there. And when he came to San Francisco he was doing the same but he was oftentimes encouraged and pressured by these groups like the African American Assembly Club and the Afro American League. In these colored conventions, even before black people could vote, they were already influencing politics by getting together, telling their legislators you need to help us out with this our community needs to grow with this, but also participating in what are called test cases. So these test cases test the limit of a law. The Dibble Civil Rights Act needed to be given teeth, it needed to be able to defend the people that it was intended to defend. So John Harris defending himself in a court of law with the help of his community gave this law what it needed to be effective. The Dibble Civil Rights Act stayed on the books until 1959 when it was transferred to be the unross civil civil rights act, which expanded that definition of all citizens to also include sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, genetic information and many other things. And the thing is that other other marginalized groups were able to add on to these laws over and over again so they're constantly being improved. So this legacy of test cases, I think really stands out as a testament to the early civil rights movement here in San Francisco, and the fact that when we start to set back the timeline on civil rights we can understand that people have been fighting against discrimination even during the Civil War. You know, while people while other black people were still enslaved in other parts of the United States as well so I hope it expands your narrative a little bit more. I've been able to kind of take a view into what the black community look like in San Francisco, and I'd like to toss it back over to Alana Smith as well where she's going to be explained to us. What did discrimination look like for Buffalo soldiers, and maybe what resistance looked like for Buffalo soldiers as well. Okay, thank you Hector. So yeah, we're going to now take a look at a story that is closely tied to the Presidio but it also connects nationwide to black Americans and those efforts of resistance. And so of course I'm talking about the story of the Buffalo soldiers. The Presidio of San Francisco has been a military fort since before the city was it was in existence so back dating to Spanish rule. And in the late 1800s this is where Buffalo soldiers lived, and they would live in the Presidio, they worked in the Presidio took care of their horses there. And then today about 400 Buffalo soldiers are buried at the San Francisco National Cemetery. And so these photos here on the left we have a photo of the ninth Calvary that's here in the Presidio. And then we have a photo of the stables. Now these stables were built just a few years after the Buffalo soldiers were here. The stables at the cemetery those are two places where we hold Buffalo soldiers programs and these are areas where we can really reflect on the connection of people to place and really think about the experience of the Buffalo soldiers. So let's go to the next slide please. And so I personally did not learn about Buffalo soldiers in school so this is a chapter of history that's left out of a lot of textbooks and left out of a lot of books. And so I just want to do a little bit of an overview on who the Buffalo soldiers were, and what were their main duties. So after the Civil War, black American men were allowed to join the US Army in separate segregated troops from their parts. And so that was the 9th and 10th Calvary and the 24th and the 25th Infantry. And so the first duty of the Buffalo soldiers was to fight in the Indian Wars. And so this is a time when settlers were moving out west, and we're running into conflict with the American tribes that were trying to defend their land from from these newcomers. And so the US Army wanted to, you know, quote unquote, keep the peace. And so sent troops out there. And so the Buffalo soldiers engaged in battle with Native Americans against the Native Americans. But this is where we get the name Buffalo soldiers from so it's believed that the Native American tribes saw the hair of the Buffalo soldiers and compared it to the fur of the buffalo or the animal known as the bison. And so that really became a symbol that was embraced by the Buffalo soldiers and it showed up on their uniforms as part of their patches. And so this drawing here is by Frederick Remington called the new sign language and Frederick Remington joined the Buffalo soldiers for a lot of their their daily life. Just kind of he witnessed a lot of the battles and documented he made many, many sketches that really give us a glimpse of what that would have looked like. So in addition to the Indian Wars, Buffalo soldiers also served in international wars. So the earliest of those were on the Spanish American War starting in 1898, and then shortly after the Philippine War. And then the third duty that is not really as well known is that the Buffalo soldiers were among the first park rangers so before the National Park Service was established. The army were the park rangers and so the Buffalo soldiers would spend the winters in the Presidio and in the summertime they would travel to Yosemite National Park and Sequoia National Park and served as park rangers. So now we know kind of what they were were doing. It's really important to talk about the motivation so that's before we get into what the resistance looked like. And so we have two quotes here that really explain why black Americans wanted to join the Buffalo soldiers in the first place. And so by TG Stewart a chaplain with the 25th infantry, he said, I believe this war will very greatly help the American colored man of the south, and result in the further clearing of the national atmosphere. And then from Johnny Lewis of the 10th Cavalry. He said that it is time that every patriot hearted young colored man should come to the front and defend this honor and show that we are true American citizens that we can protect our homes and government. And so this really demonstrate kind of a this optimism behind behind this service so really hoping that the situation for black Americans would improve that they could could kind of prove themselves and be embraced as Americans. But there are also other motivations that included, you know, the opportunity to make money, the opportunity to travel learning new skills like how to use a weapon how to defend themselves. And so these are all reasons and motivations that draws people of color into the military today. Next slide please. Now, while many black Americans saw this as a great opportunity and wanted to join the Buffalo soldiers, there was also people were speaking out against this and people in the greater black community so not in the military. And so I want to start with Ida B. Wells who you know well known civil rights activist. She was also a journalist. And so she said that Negroes should oppose expansionism until the government can protect the Negro at home. She said this in 1899. And so she had a major campaign against lynching. She experienced or she had friends who were victims of lynch mobs and so she was speaking from a perspective where she was witnessing the violence that was happening for black Americans at the time. So in her view, she didn't understand why black Americans would want to join in on these wars when it was such a dangerous climate at home for them. And so next slide please. We have also john Mitchell junior and he was an editor of a black newspaper called the Richmond planet, and he said separate colored brigades mean separate colored officers, no officers, no fight. So what he's targeting in this quote is the white officers of the Buffalo soldiers. And so in our next slide, we have a picture that shows officers of the 25th infantry in 1901. And you look and there is just one black officer out of, I don't know it's about 14 or so. And at the time, the US Army didn't believe that black Americans were capable of positions of leadership, and this really was part of an ongoing long running narrative that black Americans are less capable in their white counterparts in a lot of different ways. And we also saw that you know resurface again around the World Wars, where it was believed that black Americans were not capable of being pilots. And then that was proven wrong by the Tuskegee airmen. And so people were really speaking out at this time that here the buffalo soldiers were making sacrifices and serving their country but they were not trusted to be black officers. And we have a quote here from a member of the 10th Cavalry who says, Mr editor, will the time ever come when the colored soldiers will be treated as men, the white officers who have that hatred against the colored soldiers should sever their connections with the colored regiment. And so we get this quote, this is from, you know, I want to shout out a really great book that provides important primary resources it's called smoked Yankees, and the struggle for empire letters from Negro soldiers. And so this is how we get so much of the information that we have about how the buffalo soldiers were feeling about their experiences in the military. And, you know, the experiences, you know, run a large range that so in this quote, we're seeing some of that, that disenchantment of, you know, the white officers were not treating the buffalo soldiers well, and buffalo soldiers were not able to be promoted easily. So our next slide please. We can see we have a newspaper clipping. The title is colored troops rebel, and I do want to point out that this is referring to the six Virginia companies. So this is a volunteer regiment so outside of the main four buffalo soldier regiments. And it does still really illustrate what it was like to be a black member of the military at the time. And so part of this article is saying that. Let's see that the men in these companies can make com commanded by these white officers were refusing to drill and subsequently refusing to do police duty. And so that shows that not only was there emotional resistance that was demonstrated by the buffalo soldiers who are writing letters and writing letters to editors, but there was also some physical acts of resistance. Can we go to our next slide please. So, while many buffalo soldiers and members, you know, outside of the military had some disenchantment over military service because of the lack of promotion opportunities and the white officers. There was also at least one other really major reason why there was some resistance and that had to do with this moral dilemma of buffalo soldiers who were going abroad to fight, particularly in the Philippines. And, and they were faced with fighting a group of people who they identified with racially the Filipinos, and they also identified with their struggle for freedom and independence. So we have this quote by Patrick Mason, who was in the 24th infantry. He says I have not had any fighting to do, since I have been here, and I don't care to do any. I feel sorry for these people, the Filipinos, and all that have come under control of the United States. I don't believe they will be justly dealt by. So we start to see that there is empathy that is coming from black American soldiers when they see they get over to Philippines and they see the atrocities over there and they see that the Filipinos are suffering from the same kind of racism that they experienced back home in America. And so it doesn't sit well with them that they are, you know, joining the American military to really oppress these people. And so the Philippine Army actually started to point this out and and would say, you know, why would you, why would you want to join, join the American army and fight against us why don't you come over to our side and join us in fighting for freedom. We see how your country treats you come join us and several buffalo soldiers did just that. So some defected and just, you know, didn't want to fight. They, you know, married Filipino wives and some stayed in the Philippines. But there were some who not only left their troops, but they then joined the Philippine Revolutionary Army and fought against the American troops and the most well known of those was David Fagan. So he was originally in the 24th Infantry of the US Army, and then he ended up abandoning his post and he joined the Philippine Revolutionary Army and he fought, and there was a bounty on his head. We don't really know what ended up happening to him which is really, really a difficult thing. You know, we don't know if he was captured and killed we don't know. There's rumors that he escaped into the mountains. And so there's really nobody knows. You know, I do also want to make clear that we don't have documentation of his motivations we don't have letters from him or anything like that so we can only kind of make theories as to what could have, you know, made him abandon his troops and join the other side, but you know we can definitely come up with some theories and we know that he wasn't the only one who did that. So I think that is the end of our slides so if we could stop share. Thank you. So when we look back at the narratives that we discussed today. We can really look back on those roots of resistance that we discussed. So, there was the media. So we saw that was a really important method of broadcasting different perspectives, you know broadcasting the letters of the Buffalo soldiers and different opinions. We also saw legal representation had a major role. And that really gave hope to black Americans that these anti discrimination laws would be upheld and that there was hope for hope for the future basically. There was the business and the financing which really kind of supported all these efforts. There was also the community organizing and that looked like a lot of different things so that could be in organizations like the Afro American League, but that can also be kind of less organized efforts, but it was all about the black community coming together to support each other and to make those acts of resistance have more impact. And so now that we see those kind of early methods of resistance we can kind of think about, you know, the movements today like black lives matter movement and how does resistance play out today. And we see some of those same forms of resistance just kind of an updated, updated methods so you know we see communication through social media, we see the forming of, you know, nationwide organizations that help to bring the black community together, and then also we're seeing solidarity from other groups coming in as well. As far as you know legal representation, we saw, you know, especially last year we saw black law firms coming together to support legal cases. And then we also see individual acts of resistance that you know sometimes they make headlines. So what this all tells us is that, you know, we're still seeing these acts of resistance and the fight for equality is not something that's ever done or ever completed. It's something that continues, and, you know, it evolves over time. And there's new forms of resistance that come to meet up with these, you know, updated continuing threats to equality and threats to justice. So that's all I had I thought did you want to add anything. No, I don't think it'd be better said than that. You know, acknowledging the fact that there is still so much more work that communities are doing here as well is really important. You know in the baby people are fighting for environmental justice people in the West tradition and other places are fighting against gentrification. The struggles look very different but once again like a fight we're fighting is a life worth living for me is that in Black History Month, I think there's a lot of a focus on like the struggle but like, you know, we want to go over some of the fruits of the struggle right like what is, you know, what is at the end of the tunnel. Because Alana picked up like equality is a constant, a constant back and forth, but things move along slowly so it looks like we have some questions coming in Alana. Yeah, yeah, let's see I don't know if there's an order. I answered one of the other ones. I have a question that someone asked that was just, you know, why did the unrest civil acts have civil rights act have to be made. And I kind of answered it with, you know, what was the expansion of that all in the devil civil rights act. When we start to name those sorts of protected classes are very clearly defined of like sexual orientation when we start to name these, these classes that can be discriminated against, then it's easier to interpret that law, and lawyers can't argue over what is all because we have a very clear definition so I answered that in the chat. It's like you have a question. Yeah, so the question is, do we know if the first Buffalo soldier barracks were located on base at the Presidio I have heard that their original barracks is a building near Fillmore and Golden Gate Avenue. And that's from Gary. So I am not sure about the very first barracks. I just know about the ones that were located kind of near the parade ground today, but I don't know where the very first ones were located so that's a great question and one that I will be looking, looking into. I'm curious to know myself. So thank you. Okay, so another one is, are there any sites in GG and RA named for any of the Buffalo soldiers. I don't know if there are any named for the buffalo soldiers and correct me I thought if you think of one. I don't know of any sites. I'm just, you know, just that the National Cemetery has has the buffalo soldiers buried there but there. I don't know of any buffalo soldier named sites that we have here. Okay, did any of the buffalo soldiers wind up helping the Native Americans like they did the Filipinos that's a great question. And there's not a whole lot of documentation that I found about that but I do know that there were a lot of black Americans who did join Native American tribes, and we're fully embrace the Native American tribes and there were also some buffalo soldiers who were descended from both black Americans and from Native American tribes. And while there's not. There's not the documentation because the letters that we read that are available. Those are mainly dating from around the Philippine American War the Spanish American War. So we don't really have any from you know the 1860s and 1870s, but I would, you know, love to hear if there are any, you know documented stories of buffalo soldiers joining the Native Americans. It's a very, it's a very hard question to as well because we need to understand that, you know, buffalo soldiers were not immune to the discrimination that was systemic at the time so we have like the ways that you know some of the facts that a lot of didn't include were the ways that buffalo soldiers perceived of the Filipinos as being sort of this foreign enemy and, you know, having prejudice beliefs against them as well. And I know that I've read some material that points that you know buffalo soldiers did have prejudice attitudes towards Native people in Filipino. So it really depends on who you're talking about right so a lot of brought up some of these ideas of like, when we've been in the community but there were a lot of different buffalo soldiers there were a lot of different people in our history and there's always examples of that disunity as well so. Absolutely. It's really important. Thanks for bringing it up. Yeah. Oh, hey. Yeah, I see a lot of these folks in here. And Elaine is here. Yay. Great. And Mike. Yeah. Thanks for joining everybody. So bring them in y'all and ask some questions. We're always willing to respond. I'm trying to look through to make sure we didn't miss any other one. Yeah, thanks for sharing all these comments. This is great. I'm from New Orleans so it's great to learn about SF history. I want to learn about New Orleans history. I'm trying to work over there. It's really like interesting. Thank you everyone very much for joining us today and for participating and. It looks like we have one question from Michael Evans that hasn't made it over to our zoom chat. I guess we do have a little bit of a delay maybe. Here it is Michael is asking, is it safe to assume that after the Harris v sutro baths decision the sutro baths change their discriminatory practices. I believe that there was a case that came out. If I can look at really quickly here in my emails that actually there was Chinese people who were getting discriminated against at sutro baths as well. And that was sent out from Elaine Ellison so. You know, not everybody that would get discriminated against would necessarily sue in a court of law and that's kind of the one of the best ways that we that we get evidence of things. So let me see here. So Elaine had sent us an article a little while ago. It says Chinese awarded damages or exclusion from public bath. And so this was in 1938. So, you know, we're going forward sutro baths was active until the middle of the 20th century, like 1950 something like that. In 1938, there were still, you know, Chinese people or other people of color who were being turned away from the baths and they actually were able to use the devil civil rights act according to this newspaper article from the time. There's a Boy Scout group group that was able to receive an award for damages from exclusion for the bath so discrimination still happened. Again, that kind of points to the importance of expanding that all just because a law exists doesn't mean that it is going to be defended. It doesn't mean that it's always going to be to be used so yeah. Let's see, given the documentation practices of the US military why are there no records of what happened to John Fagan or David Fagan. So, the reason there's not a documentation of it is because he wasn't actually, he wasn't captured. There was a bounty on his head and at some point, somebody came in with a severed head and said this is David Fagan, but that was never confirmed and that could have just been somebody trying to collect, collect the money so that you know that was never documented. And so it's, you know, it's kind of it's hard to know what what did happen to him but there was never a record of saying we definitely have David Fagan. So it's it's really kind of anybody's guess and I would love to know what ended up happening you know this is such a big mystery. Yeah. That's a really good question. Thanks. Okay, Mary Ellen Pleasant is very interesting woman. So I tried not to talk about her for too long so we could kind of focus on the core of the program but for sure look her up. I would corroborate some of the sources with other sources generally, you know we try to teach people to be historians so sometimes that means you have to check in a couple of places to see if something comes up over and over again. Mary Ellen Pleasant so such a fascinating woman that there's a lot of different accounts of her life. So, yeah, a lot of the articles that I have mentioned her. And for some of the things that sound like a little bit more mystical a little bit more like, maybe this might not happen. I would just corroborate a little bit as well so, but truly a fascinating. Let's see. Any questions coming in. Anybody in YouTube land have any questions left. I have a few minutes, happy to answer. I'm checking this little chat. I love you encouraging folks to be historians you see why we love the NPS partnership. You are our soul mates. Thank you so much for being here and sharing that information so informative, educational, and just so important all year round. Thank you for having us. Absolutely. All right friends and YouTube, please join us for the rest of more than a month and all of the rest of our program that we have all year round about important topics like this, and our continued partnerships with the parks. And we'll see you next time. I have a question for you, and he said the honeycomb asked will there be more presentations on black history this month. Of course there's so many more, so many more, and it's only have two weeks left to February and it's still packed with programs, including author talks, artists talks. We are spotlighting Rodney Ewing who does this amazing beautiful art which he uses photos from our archive. We have a program called shades of Bayview. A long time ago we had shades of everything San Francisco. So community archiving people come in bring their photos. We scan them and then make them available to our community. So he has developed a whole beautiful art using this these photos. So there's so much more. Check out our page where you can Google SFPL more than a month and you'll find out. All right friends. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day. Bye.