Black and Asian populations are excluded from historians’ accounts of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire

The past is full of surprises. Monday marks the 116th anniversary of the great San Francisco earthquake and fire, the epic disaster that nearly destroyed the city.

The 1906 earthquake is so much a piece of San Francisco legend that it is still celebrated before dawn on April 18 each year with a gathering at Lotta Fountain on Market, Kearney, and Jerry Streets. It’s one of those only moments in San Francisco, celebrating the city being destroyed and rising from the ashes, better than ever. It’s the story of San Francisco.

But not quite. To further review, as they say in football, it turns out that thousands of people have been left out of the biggest story in town. The huge Chinese population is hardly mentioned in the earthquake histories except for mentioning the destruction of the city’s Chinatown and the resettlement of Asian refugees from the disaster in separate tented camps. San Francisco’s small but significant black population is not mentioned in many books and articles about the earthquake.

Historians simply left the blacks out, as if they didn’t count. I’m guilty too. I wrote dozens of pieces around 1906 and it agreed with the standard narrative. You can call it the sin of omission.

But as the earthquake anniversary approaches, I catch a glimpse of “Among the Rubble: Arnold Genthe’s Photographs of the San Francisco Earthquake and Storm of 1906,” a fascinating modern book of photographs taken during and after the Great Fire by San Francisco resident Arnold Genthy. It was published by the San Francisco Museums of Fine Arts and Cameron+.

The images are sharp and clear, and it’s a great slice of the past, but there’s also a surprise, something not found in most history books: a historic black enclave in the heart of the old town.

Jant Ginty has been in San Francisco for several days, burning. It was the story of a lifetime for the photographer. The 3A Kodak Special carried a brand new camera, the best of those days.

Late in the morning of the earthquake, Genthe was on Clay and Sacramento Streets between Stockton and Powell Streets, on the eastern edge of Nob Hill. Homes are either flat or log buildings in the Victorian style, the kind that is highly valued in San Francisco today. There are cable car tracks in the middle of the two streets. The scene couldn’t be older than San Francisco.

Couple standing in the street. Both wear today’s fashion: women wore large hats and long coats, and men wore jackets, ties, and derby hats. They are African Americans, and as the fire approaches them, they are about to lose everything they own and become refugees. Everyone in those photos lost their homes later that day.

Nob Hill in those days had the mansions of the wealthy at the top and the homes of the common people on the sides. Along the lower edge was a Chinese and black neighborhood, some apartments, some low rent places, and even the first Japanese restaurant in town. It was kind of a variation on San Francisco 116 years ago.

Ginty portrayed the fire and its aftermath, and the photographs subsequently appeared in books and magazines. But the copies were not always of the best quality.

Over the years, Genthe negatives, designed on cellulose nitrate film and stored in San Francisco’s Fine Art Museums, “are disappearing before our very eyes,” said James Ganz, curator of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Art. , in 2017. Jans and Barrett Oliver, a Southern California photographer and printer, came together to perform high-resolution scanning and printing of negatives. The results were amazing. Now you can see what Genthi saw. It was now clear who was standing on that street watching their city burn.

But it was more than that: “These photographs are of particular interest because they maintain a tangible black presence in this important work,” Roger C. Burt wrote in an essay on African Americans in “Among the Ruins.”

Burt, a historian and expert in photography, notes that blacks have a long history here. “The existence of people of African descent in California is as old as the idea of ​​California itself,” he wrote in “Among the Ruins.” He noted that a quarter of the members of the Spanish Anza Party who traveled from Mexico in 1776 to found what became San Francisco are listed as “Negro, mulatto, or mestizo.”

The black community here was not large, but had an important role in the life of the city – Bert mentions William Leidsdorf, who opened the first hotel in San Francisco and operated the first steamship; Archie Lee, a former slave who figured in an important early civil rights case; And many more. There were many black newspapers. Two African American churches, the Third Baptist Church and the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Zion, were founded in 1852. They are among the oldest Protestant congregations in the city.

The First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Zion had a building on Stockton Street near Broadway in 1906—”one of the most beautiful places in San Francisco,” according to descriptions of that day. “There was no one in the country who excelled at it.”

However, like everything else in the neighborhood, it was destroyed in the great firestorm that followed the earthquake. Church said, “There was nothing that could be saved from the ashes, not even a single log.”

Like the rest of the city’s citizens, the congregation’s members had a hard time after 1906. It took years to rebuild their church and move to the western addition. After 168 years, the church has continued to thrive, now on Golden Gate Street.

But Black’s experience in 1906 does not appear in the stories people tell about those days. I asked Cheryl Davis, executive director of the city’s Human Rights Commission, about the omission. She said, “There are a lot of hidden stories, unknown stories. But it depends on who is telling the story.”

Carl Nolte’s columns appear in the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected]

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