2019 State Capitol Black History Month Kick-Off Celebration

With great excitement and a renewed focus, the Kick-off Celebration for 2019 California Black History Month is poised to build a bridge from the distant past toward building a bright future. Genesis 15:12-14, #1619-2019.

Dr. Carter G. Woodson established the way in 1926 creating Negro History Week, expanded in 1976 to Black History Month and embraced by President Ford.

Today, we celebrate Black History Month in February and prepare for African Heritage Month in September by including “Voices of our Ancestors” while continuing the difficult journey to include our “Hidden Figures” of excellence into early California Childhood Education
Our California Pioneers of Pan African Ancestry challenged “California Grown” chattel slavery and systemic institutional racism that were firmly established in 1849 values and beliefs that continue today.

170 years ago, the towns Negro Bar, Sacramento and Stockton were established in 1849. The destruction of early promise of Negro Bar/Negro Hill is finally poised to be shared today.

We must identify the diversity of silent voices to speak volumes to share a collective journey towards a greater measure of freedom lost during the “Manifest Destiny” transition from Mexican rule to American rule at the dawn of the California Gold Rush.

Within Negro Bar, Sacramento and Stockton Rural Cemetery we continue to ferret out the authentic legacy with a broader request for equity and equal opportunity.

Block 27, Stockton Rural Cemetery, the historic colored section, is the best preserved and documented burial site of people of Pan African ancestry who migrated to California.

What is freedom to someone not considered a human being?

Chattel slavery reduced human beings to property, not even considered an “enslaved human being” thus a very salient distinction remains the unspoken value and belief often unchallenged.

Today, California elected officials support eliminating the continued mandate of a focused slavery paradigm that mandates historic systemic institutional racism, the basis of “California Grown Apartheid” recorded in the 1849 California State Constitution and early California Legislative Sessions.

1849 was the year Jeremiah King and his wife were given freedom papers, money and passage to migrate from bowels of “chattel slavery in the deep south” from Georgia to New Orleans and on arrive in California in time for the California Gold Rush.

In 1803, Reverend Jeremiah King was reportedly born in the low country of Georgia and his amazing life ended July 1, 1883 and his body was laid to rest within Block 27~Stockton Rural Cemetery.

Young Jeremiah spent his youth enslaved in the back breaking humid fields of the low country along the Atlantic seaboard. He spent nearly half a century enslaved in the State of Georgia, the southern most of the 13 English colonies prior to the America Revolution, the only American Colony to originally expressly prohibit the enslavement of people of African ancestry until American Independence.

Georgia was originally claimed as part of the Spanish Mission System, the costal Port of Savannah, GA aligned with St. Augustine, FL and the southern ports of Mobile, AL and New Orleans, LA with New Spain headquarters in Havana, Cuba.

The economic bonanza of “free labor” “Negroes” “enslaved chattel” from the West Coast of Africa, today’s Gambia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Angola were utilized for specialized agriculture skills to produce the highly profitable commodities of “indigo and rice” along the low county of Georgia and the Carolinas, prior to the invention of the cotton gin and King Cotton.

Unique West African agricultural production methods facilitated retention of ancient African culture within the Gullah/Geeche spiritual traditions transferred within faith based cultural experience throughout our California Pan African Heritage.

Prior to the “Great Compromise” and California Statehood, September 9, 1850, Jeremiah King struck it rich in the southern gold mining district and settled in San Joaquin County purchasing over 100 acres of prime agriculture land near today City of Lathrop and finally settling in the Historic Stockton Waterfront District.

It is recorded that “often” Rev. Jeremiah King and his wife would travel to 40 miles to Old Sacramento to worship GOD in the basement of the Chinese Baptist Church.

Beginning in September 1854, the African Baptist Church of Stockton was organized and established in the Historic Stockton Waterfront District, hosting weekly services for the remainder of his life.

In 1859, Rev. King successfully petitioned the founding father of the City of Stockton, Captain Charles Weber, for church property on W.Washington St. between Commence and Beaver Street to relocate the purchase of a church building from Rev. James Woods of the Presbyterian Church of Stockton.

During the US Civil War, Rev. Jeremiah King successfully petitioned the Trustees of the Stockton Rural Cemetery to establish a Section 27, “a colored section” as the final resting place for people of Pan African ancestry in the county seat of San Joaquin, in the heart of the California Central Valley.

Leadership at the Stockton Rural Cemetery, installed a new grave marker for Rev. Jeremiah King, and 2019 California Black History Month we are tasked with spiritually opening the doors of the original African Baptist Church in both Sacramento and Stockton

Listening to the “Voices of our Ancestors” is essential to build a brighter future throughout the State of California.
By remembering and celebrating the leadership of Rev. Jeremiah King, we can begin to identify, document, preserve and interpret our California Pan African Heritage as an elevated the seat of authority for future generations to build upon.

2019 Kick-off for California Black History Month we must uncover and share our, “Hidden Figures” from our California Gold Rush Era.

Both free and enslaved Black Migration, from 1840-1875, is our special focus on the way to Emancipation and Juneteenth that were possible after the final battles of the bloody US Civil War. We must celebrate our US Colored Troops who helped preserve a nation, while earning a measure of freedom for “Enslaved Prisoners of War, Chattel Property,” freedom is never free.