Publisher's Synopsis
The American West is mistakenly known as a region with few African Americans and virtually no black history. This book challenges that view in a complex chronicle that begins in 1528 with the Spanish-speaking blacks. In 1848 the first English speaking blacks arrived - as slaves - creating a nucleus of post-American Civil War communities. Thousands of African-Americans thereafter migrated to the high plains while others drove cattle up the Chisholm trail or served on remote army outposts. The book moves on to examine the first black church in 1872, the West's black civil rights movement which began during the Civil War and 20th-century changes such as migration after World War II, the civil rights movement during the 1960s and the interest in multiculturalism.
