Race Through Time
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, September 20, 1998
An anecdotal history of the area's racial evolution.
1790 -- African Americans, who arrived with the earliest Spanish expeditions, comprise 18 percent of the California population, according to Spanish census. That same year, Los Angeles is founded by 44 people, 26 of whom were of African ancestry.
Early 1800s -- An estimated 360,000 Indians live in California.
1812 -- Russian fur traders build Fort Ross in Sonoma County.
1822 -- California becomes part of Mexico.
1830 -- California non-Indian population is 4,256.
1838 -- Smallpox epidemic just north of San Francisco kills more than 60,000 Indians.
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1840s and 1850s -- Chinese laborers are recruited to build railroads, work the gold mines and tend fields in the United States.
1840s-1850s -- Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrate to the United States during Ireland's potato blight and economic depression.
1846 -- United States and Mexico go to war.
1847 -- California non-Indian population grows to 15,000.
1849 -- Gold Rush draws the world to the Bay Area. Gold prospectors from Mexico, Peru, Chile dramatically increase the Spanish- speaking population.
1849 -- State constitution abolishes slavery. But it also bars blacks from voting, holding public office and testifying in court against whites.
1850 -- California becomes 31st state.
1850s -- Chinese American community develops in San Jose, a gateway for Chinese immigrants looking for work in the mines.
1850 and 1860 -- Laws passed allowing the enslavement of Indians in California.
1851 -- Fewer than 100,000 Indians remain in California.
1852 -- Number of Chinese in California is 25,000 -- one-tenth of the state's non-Indian population.
1860s -- Chinese fishing village established on San Pablo Bay in San Rafael. At its peak, in 1880, what is now known as China Camp has 469 inhabitants.
1866 -- The Chico Courant calls for extermination of Indians. "It is a mercy to the red devils," the newspaper says.
1867 -- During anti-Chinese violence in San Francisco, Chinese laborers are driven from work and their homes are destroyed by whites angry over economic conditions.
1870 -- Population of Chinese in California reaches 50,000, growing to 75,000 by end of decade. Largest Chinese community is in San Francisco.
1870s -- With gold in the Motherlode running dry and the economy shaky, anti-Chinese sentiment swells.
1870s -- Indians of Contra Costa County are nearly extinct, due largely to European diseases.
1877 -- Almost one-fourth of the California labor force is unemployed. Anti-Chinese violence fueled by lack of jobs results in several killings in San Francisco.
1879 -- Strongly supported by the far West, a law passes Congress banning ships from bringing more than 15 Chinese passengers to the United States at one time.
1880s -- Japanese begin to emigrate to California in large numbers.
1882 -- Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring "laborers" from China and halting a massive immigration of Cantonese peasants. Law remains in place for 60 years.
1884 -- Federal court forbids wives of Chinese laborers from entering America, perpetuating a Chinese bachelor society during the late 19th century.
1887 -- San Jose Chinatown razed by suspicious fire. Laws preventing Chinese from owning land in California make relocation difficult.
Late 1800s-early 1900s -- San Jose has second-largest Chinese community in California, after San Francisco.
1881-1919 -- About 59 laborers, mostly Chinese immigrants, are killed in explosions at California Powder Works in Hercules. Chinese laborers comprised most of the work force and performed the most dangerous jobs -- on the nitroglycerine lines. Their pay: 12.5 cents an hour.
1890 -- Japantown is founded in San Jose.
1900 -- Approximately 16,000 Indians remain in all of California.
1900 -- More than 25 percent of San Francisco is of Irish descent.
Early 1900s -- Salvadorans, Nicaraguans and other Central Americans are recruited to build the Panama Canal, which opens in 1914. Many join ships operating in the canal, which bring them to San Francisco.
Early 1900s -- Blacks allowed to join trade unions in San Francisco.
1905 -- San Francisco's union leaders help form Asiatic Exclusion League, which lobbies against Japanese immigration and presses for school segregation.
1906 -- After the Great Earthquake, Japanese become the region's main target of anti-Asian prejudice. San Francisco tries to force all Japanese children into the city's segregated Chinese school. Japan regards matter as a national insult. Eventually, Japanese children are readmitted to regular schools. Chinese remain segregated.
1906 -- The earthquake was "a natural disaster . . . that changed the course of Chinese-American history," writes UC Berkeley Professor Ronald Takaki in his book "Strangers From a Different Shore."
Fires from the earthquake destroyed most municipal records in San Francisco. Chinese immigrant laborers could now claim they were born in America and as citizens they could bring their wives to this country. Between 1910 and 1924, about 10,000 Chinese women came to this country -- one in four Chinese immigrants, compared to just one in 20 in the 1800s.
1908-1910 -- Thousands of East Indians come to Northern California to work on the Western Pacific Railroad.
1910 -- Allensworth, an all-black community in Tulare County, founded by Allen Allensworth, a former Lousiana slave.
1910-1940 -- Most of the 175,000 Chinese immigrating to United States enter through detention center on Angel Island. They undergo medical scrutiny and elaborate questioning before being released, a process that could take up to two years. Immigrants carve poetry about their ordeals on barracks walls.
1910 -- English and Celtics, "including Irish, Scotch or Welsh," make up 29 percent of the "foreign white stock" of San Francisco, a local newspaper reports. Other whites include Germans at 18 percent; Italians, 8 percent; French, 3.4 percent; Swedish, 3 percent; and Danish, Spanish and Norwegian, each 1.4 percent.
1917 -- Special rules permit temporary Mexican farmworkers, railroad laborers and miners to enter the United States because of an expanding economy.
1924 -- Immigration Act passes Congress, limiting Asian immigration.
1927 -- California Legislature authorizes state attorney general to act on behalf of Indians and sue federal government for losses. It takes 16 years to reach a settlement.
1930s -- Japantown growing in Western Addition. (Area later becomes virtually deserted during World War II because of internment camps.)
1940 -- Black population of San Francisco is 4,846. The number grows tenfold to 43,502 in 1950 and doubles again to 86,190 in 1980. Black population of Bay Area grows from 21,000 in 1940 to 150,000 in 1950.
1941 -- World War II, like the Gold Rush, brings dramatic multi- ethnic growth. Blacks from the South and Latinos from Nicaragua and El Salvador are recruited to work in Bay Area shipyards.
1942 -- A U.S. senator asks that resident Italians be removed from the "invidious and misleading" category of "enemy aliens" and be reclassified as "loyal aliens." The declaration of war against the United States by Italy was not the wish of the "peace-loving Italian people," the senator says.
1942 -- The first of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent are moved from their West Coast homes because of World War II, first to places like racetracks, where they lived in stables, and later to relocation camps. Manzanar, four hours north of Los Angeles in the Owens Valley, was the first such camp.
1942 -- Thousands of Mexicans arrive in Bay Area to work on agricultural and railroad jobs under the Bracero Program.
1942 -- "Former Jap YWCA Secretary Guilty," headlines The Chronicle on a story about a former San Francisco secretary who fled to Milwaukee. The secretary was sentenced to six months in jail for "leaving a prohibited district" and failing to report to an internment camp.
1943 -- Three African Americans join the first San Francisco Police Department class to include blacks. By 1960, only five more black officers have been sworn in.
1943 -- Chinese Exclusion Act repealed.
1944 -- California Indians awarded $17 million for reservations promised in treaties nearly a century earlier. However, $12 million is deducted for goods and services given to the Indians.
1944 -- Blast aboard two munitions ships at Port Chicago kills 320 servicemen, two-thirds of them blacks assigned to load and unload explosives.
1948 -- Cesar Chavez, future head of United Farm Workers Union, settles in the barrio of Sal Si Puedes (Get Out If You Can) in San Jose.
1950-1960 -- East Indian population in California doubles, to nearly 40,000.
1951 -- Bracero Program is formalized, allowing about 350,000 Mexican workers into United States each year until 1964. The program allows harvest workers to enter the country temporarily.
1952 -- Discrimination on the basis of race stricken from federal statutes.
1960-1970 -- Number of Hispanics in San Francisco doubles, to 14 percent of the population. Number of whites dips significantly, from 82 percent to 57 percent of the population.
1960-1970 -- Bay Area Filipino population doubles to about 54,000. By 1997, the number of Filipinos in the Bay Area reaches about 308,000. Many are middle-class, educated Filipinos, looking for good jobs and fleeing the corrupt Marcos regime.
1963 -- Chinese Historical Society of America opens in San Francisco, the first of its kind in the country.
1965 -- Federal Immigration Act abolishes quotas by national origin and allows nearly 300,000 immigrants each year, opening the way for a new wave of Asian immigration.
1966 -- Black Panther Party founded in Oakland.
1966 -- "Wetback Arrests Double," reads a headline in The Chronicle. The derogatory word is used over a story stating that the number of illegal Mexican immigrants arrested has doubled since the end of the Bracero Program.
1966 -- San Francisco's first Cinco de Mayo parade.
1968 -- Japan Center opens in San Francisco's Japantown, dominated by the Peace Plaza and a five- tiered pagoda.
1969 -- Indians seize and occupy Alcatraz Island, which they hold for two years. They are acting on an 1868 U.S. treaty with the Sioux nation allowing Indians off the reservation to claim "unoccupied government land."
1970 -- Bay Area's fastest-growing ethnic groups are Asian and Hispanic. Between 1970 and 1996, the Latino population doubles, from 590,000 to about 1.2 million. The Asian/Pacific Islander population multiplies from 242,000 to 1.1 million.
1970 -- Eight arrested in San Francisco protest demanding freedom for Los Siete -- six Latino youths on trial for killing a police officer.
1970 -- Nearly half the population of San Francisco has grown up speaking a language other than English. Most common foreign languages, in descending order: Spanish, Italian, German, French, Russian, Yiddish, Swedish, Polish and Hungarian. (Chinese are the largest immigrant group, but the language is not counted by the Census Bureau.)
1970 -- Shootout between prison guards and three inmates armed by Jonathan Jackson kills four at Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael. The dead include Superior Court Judge Harold Haley and Jackson, a 17-year-old black revolutionary.
1971 -- George Jackson, Jonathan's brother and author of the best-selling prison classic "Soledad Brother," is killed in an alleged escape attempt from San Quentin prison.
1971 -- San Francisco ordered to begin busing to achieve school desegregation.
1971 -- U.S. marshals remove Indians from Alcatraz.
1972 -- "S.F. Is Very Foreign," says Chronicle headline over a story reporting that 44.3 percent of the city's population are either immigrants or children of immigrants.
1972 -- Jury of 11 whites and one Latino in San Jose acquits Angela Davis of murder and other charges in connection with Marin County Civic Center shootout.
1974 -- Oakland holds first annual Black Cowboys Parade, the only parade of its kind in the country.
1974 -- Koreans and Filipinos are the fastest-growing minority groups in San Francisco, a City Hall study finds. Korean population more than doubled, to 2,900, between 1970 and 1973. Filipinos increase by 53.9 percent, to 38,000 in 1973.
1975 -- Communists victorious in Vietnam War. More than 140,000 Vietnamese refugees leave, many headed for the United States.
1976 -- State appropriates $250,000 to preserve old Chinese detention center on Angel Island.
1977 -- Early morning evictions of about 50 elderly tenants of the International Hotel in San Francisco, mostly Filipino and Chinese seniors, and their supporters, draw national attention as police drag people from their rooms.
1979 -- San Francisco renames several streets South of Market that honored Irish settlers, to honor Filipino patriots. Among the names: Lapu Lapu and Mabini Street.
1979 -- San Francisco health services are strained beyond capacity by influx of Indochinese refugees after President Carter doubles the number allowed into the country to 14,000 each month.
1979 -- First annual Brazilian festival of Carnaval in the Mission, with a San Francisco twist. The city's multi-ethnic Mardi Gras mixes Bolivian, Mexican, Polynesian and Caribbean cultures, among others, into one big dancefest.
1980 -- Nearly half of Oakland's population is black. City has a black mayor, city manager, community college chancellor, school superintendent and daily newspaper editor. In no other large western city have blacks gained so much power so quickly.
1980 -- At least 67 races and nationalities reside in the Bay Area.
1980s -- Hispanics increase by 46 percent and nearly triple in East Palo Alto.
1980s -- Asian American population of Alameda County increases by 120 percent, from 83,760 to 184,813.
1980 -- National Japanese American Historical Society founded in San Francisco.
1980 -- Percentage of foreign- born or children of foreign-born in San Francisco is comparable to that of 1880, when it was about 60 percent.
1980 -- Census shows that San Francisco's black, Hispanic and Chinese communities are equal in size, each about 12 percent of the population. Filipinos are 5.6 percent of the population, with one of the country's largest Filipino communities located in the southern Mission District and Daly City.
1983 -- More than 12,000 Indochinese refugees live in the Tenderloin.
1985 -- 5,157 Cambodians arrive in the United States because of political turmoil.
1989 -- City of Fremont starts a language bank, with interpreters to help foreign-speaking residents.
1990 -- Japantown in San Jose celebrates 100th anniversary.
1990s -- Schoolchildren in Alameda County speak more than 80 languages.
1991 -- About 53,000 East Indians live in the Bay Area, one of the nation's largest and fastest-growing East Indian communities.
1992 -- Boalt Law School at the University of California at Berkeley found to violate federal civil rights laws when it is discovered that minority applicants to the school receive preferential treatment. School admission policies revised.
1993 -- Fremont leaders decide to rename Hillside Avenue, home of the largest Sikh temple in California, Gurdwara Road. The temple, Gurdwara Sahib, has 7,000 members.
1997 -- About 370,000 Chinese people live in the Bay Area, up more than six times from 55,700 in 1960. Number of Russians has nearly tripled, from 36,300 in 1960 to 95,000 in 1997.
1998 -- The Vietnamese New Year Tet Festival, held annually in San Jose, holds its first annual "Great Vietnamese Smoke-Out Day."
1998 -- UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law fails to enroll a single black student accepted for admission in 1997. The current first-year class includes only one black student, who was admitted a year earlier but deferred. African American applications also drop by 20 percent.
"Alameda County: Profile of Ethnic and Immigrant Populations," by the Newcomer Information Clearinghouse, 1993.
"Golden Gate Metropolis," by Charles Wollenberg.
Dave Fowler, Museum of the City of San Francisco Web Page.
San Francisco Chronicle.
World Book Encyclopedia.
"Neighborhoods in Transition," by Brian Godfrey.
"California: An Interpretive History," by James Rawls, Walton Bean.
"A Companion to California," by James Hart.
"Old Times in Contra Costa : A Journey to the Past," by Robert Daras Tatam.
"Minority Groups and Intergroup Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area," by Wilson Record.
"California Almanac," by James and Stephanie Fay.
"California Indians," by George Emanuels.
"California: The Irish Dream," by Patrick Dowling.
'San Francisco Almanac," by Gladys Hansen.
-- Timeline design by John Blanchard