Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. makes a final visit to San Diego in 1964 that Seth Mallios finds particularly fascinating in his work as an archaeologist, anthropologist, and historian. King arrives at Lindbergh Field with plans to speak at San Diego State to speak against a ballot proposition that would overturn the Fair Housing Act, and King himself is being protested against and labeled a communist. He responds by saying it’s time for folks to pick a side.
“This is not the tone that you often hear from Dr. King, in terms of peace and nonviolence and everybody coming to their own decision in due time. He’s given people a sense of urgency. This is the San Diego Dr. King arrives in, that was known as the ‘Mississippi of the West,’” says Mallios, a professor of anthropology and university history curator at San Diego State University. “It was a place where African Americans were turned down for loans from banks, they didn’t live outside of three segregated neighborhoods, they were forbidden from working in places like SDG&E and Woolworth’s, and many couldn’t even try on clothes in department stores.”
Mallios, who wrote “Born a Slave, Died a Pioneer: Nathan Harrison and the Historical Archaeology of Legend” and led the archaeology project on San Diego’s first Black homesteader, will discuss his research on “Historical Racism in San Diego County” at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Fallbrook Library. It’s a history of Confederate sympathy and support, racist policies and legislation, and settlement patterns that can still be seen and felt today. He took some time to talk about how San Diego earned its comparison to the South and why digging up these uncomfortable histories is part of the solution, rather than the problem. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: On Tuesday, you’ll speak at the Fallbrook Library to share your findings on “Historical Racism in San Diego County.” When we last spoke in 2021, you were updating us on your work on the Nathan Harrison project (“Nathan Harrison: Born Enslaved, Died a San Diego Legend,” part of the San Diego History Center’s “Celebrate San Diego: Black History and Heritage”), and the archaeological and historical research you were pursuing on San Diego’s first Black homesteader. What did his life and experiences reveal to you about race relations for Harrison and others in San Diego during the late 19th century?
A: I think this is one of the biggest findings from the Nathan Harrison project, and that is how unsafe it was for him in San Diego County in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. So much so that he had to construct an elaborate, secret identity to hide who he really was. The Nathan Harrison that became a local legend that so many people knew, was someone who was happy and eager to please and a bit of a fool. Just someone who was just happy to have a place to stay. What the archaeology and some of the oral histories revealed was that this was a strategic identity that he put forth, a minstrel act to gain acceptance from those White populations in power, because he had experienced so many horrors as a formerly enslaved individual from Kentucky, and also from very difficult times during the [California] Gold Rush.
I think one of the additional big finds was that California wasn’t the free state that we’re all taught in school. When Nathan Harrison came to California, even though we hear so much about California being accepted to the Union as a free state in 1850, there were numerous discriminatory laws on the books that prevented Blacks from being free. Some of these applied directly to Harrison. One was that if an African American was brought into California by a gold-seeking White during the Gold Rush, then they weren’t free, even after the state was admitted in 1850. In other instances, there were many owners of enslaved individuals who simply refused to liberate the people they held in bondage. Then, the state enacted some of the fiercest bloodhound laws for the extradition of enslaved individuals, so I think that was a big part of just the horrors that he faced on a daily basis. It helped make sense of why he chose to live alone and apart, up on the highest spot in San Diego County. It explains why he kept his ability to read and write hidden, why he kept his gun ownership secret, and that he kept the fact that he had married an Indigenous woman secret, as well.
Q: Before coming to San Diego in the early 2000s, you’d spent five years working on the Jamestown Recovery project in Virginia, exploring the remains of the first permanent English settlement from 1607, and the site of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619. How did that work inform your approach to researching the history of racism in San Diego?
A: Before I was at Jamestown, I dug at a place called Flowerdew Hundred [Plantation]. That was the place that those first Africans were taken from Jamestown. That’s where they ended up living, was Flowerdew Hundred in 1619, so that was always in my mind about the multiethnic life in the Americas. That was something that always inspired me, that archaeology had the power to locate these lost narratives, in terms of what’s traditionally taught in history books.
The Jamestown project was a little different for me in that the focus of that project was so much on those first 104 English men and boys that came to the Americas. So much of the story that was told there was about the birth of English America, the start of English democracy in the New World, English government and so forth. It was so pronounced that when I took the job at San Diego State, I knew I wanted to move away from that. I didn’t want to focus on an early White settlement. People often ask me, ‘Why didn’t you dig at the mission? Why didn’t you dig the Presidio? Why weren’t you focused on those earliest, first European settlements?’ My answer was simple: I think those settlements have gotten enough attention. I was much more excited to hear about those stories of people that are often lost in history, especially different ethnic groups that were navigating very difficult environments. So, for me, that Jamestown experience was fascinating because it almost pushed me in the other direction. I knew that when I started my own projects in San Diego, that that push would be on stories that hadn’t been told before, or stories that had been co-opted by others. That’s where the Harrison project checked both of those boxes in terms of either his story wasn’t told, or when it was told it was told in a way that was very disempowering to him, that he was just an “eager-to-please fool.”
Q: In our previous conversation, you mentioned learning that San Diego had been previously known as the “Mississippi of the West,” which is striking considering the virulently racist history of that southern state and the typically opposite way we think of Southern California. How did San Diego come to be known in this way, in a way comparable to Mississippi?
A: This is a great question that looks at settlement patterns. The fact is that, when people were moving westward, northerners moved to Northern California and southerners moved to Southern California, so you had a lot of instances where people affiliated with the South just follow that line of latitude moving west and ended up in Southern California. It’s part of the reason today that Southern California is far more conservative than Northern California, and you see it on the local landscape.
The question could also be, how could there be a Robert E. Lee public school in San Diego County up until a decade ago? How could there be Confederate monuments in the Mount Hope city cemetery? All of these speak to the same lineage of a southern presence continuing on in Southern California. I think that is part of a big issue and it has to do with a lot of elected officials, as well. There’s an individual I spend a lot of time talking about in the Nathan Harrison book, his name is James Utt. He served eight terms in Congress, from Orange, California, and he had a terrible record on civil rights. He voted against every single civil rights act during the ‘60s, and it was his family that co-opted the story of Nathan Harrison. Nathan Harrison was brought West, originally, by a man by the name of Mr. Harrison. The Utt family would later claim, in the 1950s, that they were the ones that brought Harrison west. In fact, the initial platform that Utt ran on for election was that he was so “old-time San Diego” that his family owned Nathan Harrison. When you look at Utt’s record, it was so creepy. In the ‘60s, he was making national headlines declaring that there were a bunch of “barefoot Africans” training in Georgia who were going to take over the U.S. He also said that African Americans were training in Cuba and were planning to invade the U.S. He was racist, he was promoting hate and fearmongering, and he was highly successful. Eight successive terms in the ‘60s, and that’s where I think these things gain momentum. Some of it is settlement patterns, some of it’s politics, some of it’s economics, but you see the lasting effects. You see this continuity between Harrison’s world and the San Diego that [SDSU’s first Black administrator Harold] Hal Brown was dealing with in the 1950s, that Dr. King was dealing with in the 1960s. That’s what I’m trying to get across in this talk.
When talking about historical racism, I want to get away from just pointing at individual moments and saying, ‘This is successful’ or ‘This is unsuccessful.’ We have this very famous court case in San Diego County, Anderson v. Fisher in 1897 was the first racial discrimination case in the state and it was a Black man who sued the opera house for being prevented from getting a seat. He wanted to sit near the orchestra, and he won the case, so that’s often held up as, ‘Hey, this is such a successful precedent.’ What gets lost in the discussion was that he may have won the case in San Diego, but it was overturned by the state Supreme Court. So, I want to get away from those moments of success or failure and say, ‘Why was he prevented from having a seat in the first place?’ Even though I was working in Virginia, I did grow up in California and I was taught that California was a free state. The teaching, for me, was all about acceptance, but then you read about what happens and it’s not just to African Americans, it’s to the Native American population, it’s to the Mexican population. You see this rampant discrimination that continued. The laws that were on the books in terms of Asian exclusion and Asian discrimination, there’s nothing subtle about any of that. This notion where you would wonder why Harrison would go to such lengths to hide the fact that he was allied with non-Whites? And then you see that there were ramifications for being part of those communities.
Q: What’s your response to the argument that talking about racism — about the forms of violence enacted against Black, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous, and people of color — is “divisive” and that those of us who continue to discuss this history are “the real racists”?
A: I’m not a fan of that kind of thinking. One of the moments that brought me such joy was when a local high school student by the name of Shakur Jackson. He was a senior at Hoover last year, and he wrote a play about Nathan Harrison. The theme of his play was, “Who has a right to tell my story?” Or, in essence, “Do you have a right to tell my story?” Let me tell you, it was absolutely brilliant, and I’m his biggest fan, but I was also squirming in my seat. The first time I saw it, I thought, ‘Is he going to hold me accountable? Is he going to put me on trial for being a White archaeologist telling Nathan Harrison’s story?’ That discomfort I felt is good, that is necessary. Everybody needs to be made to feel uncomfortable and to appreciate the struggles of other people and what they’re going through. I learned from that play, and it has made me a better archaeologist, to be careful about looking at all the lines of evidence and making sure I touch bases with our African American advisory board at the [San Diego] History Center. When we’re putting together the exhibit, to make sure that I’m aware that I have a diverse crew and that our archaeological story is another story that’s speaking for somebody else.
So, my answer to that is I don’t think that bringing up difficult history makes you part of the problem. In fact, I think it’s the only enlightened way to address the issues at hand. I think we’re at this point now where we’re all tough enough to endure a little discomfort, especially if it means we can gain some true empathy for what others have gone through and what they’re still dealing with.
Q: There are a few things that come to mind as we’re talking about this and one is this bigger question about history and the way that we tell it. Or, how for a lot of groups of people, how it’s told about us. And, for how long Harrison and other people were believed to be illiterate, or to behave in a way that people in power would be comfortable with, and that continues to be retold and passed along to younger generations. It shapes the way that they see those same groups, and shapes policy and legislation based on those kinds of false ideas about entire groups of people.
A: The history of anthropology is not a good one. It went from telling other people’s stories without their consent, to, even in more recent times, telling other people’s stories and asking them to sign off on it. That’s not real collaboration and that’s what I’m hoping that we’re moving toward, especially with young people these days, is having them doing the digging, having them writing the plays. Shakur Jackson’s play is far better than any play I could write about Nathan Harrison. As a young, Black man in urban San Diego going to Hoover High School, he has a perspective on the hoops that he has to jump through in society, and he knows a whole lot more about that than I do. For me, for young people to be grabbing the reins of this project and talking about these issues, that gets me excited. I’ll be honest with you, when I hear people say things like, ‘If you’re stirring up that history, you’re part of the problem,’ that is usually older people that say that. I don’t hear a lot of young people say that to me. It’s an older perspective and it’s joined in with the different people who like to tell me that, ‘Harrison was fine with his enslaved past and he didn’t hold any grudges.’ They’ll say that stuff and my jaw drops at moments like that. So, I’m strangely optimistic with all this material, even though the times right now are incredibly divisive and the news can be very depressing, but the young people that I talk to, they seem to get this work and they’re willing to step on the gas in a way that is especially impressive.
Q: Also, hearing you talk about the history archaeology has around telling people’s stories, and interrogating that history and that process as archaeology continues to evolve; for so long it’s been told from a position of authority that’s just kind of arrogant. It’s about groups of people without really knowing for sure how they felt, or what they felt, or what their experience was, but instead it’s layering on perceptions of what that was.
A: I think that notion of arrogance is incredibly important and that’s where there’s individual arrogance and then it gets passed on through the generations. In a way, the academic training, your teachers are the authorities, and they teach you to be the authority, and you teach your students to be the authority, and there’s a danger of just living in a vacuum there. That’s where, part of me loves the fact that many of the projects that I do are later in time, so that people get to argue with me about it. Tell me I’m wrong. When I was writing about Jamestown stuff, because that stuff was 400 years old, there weren’t a lot of people who were going to argue with me in terms of contemporary time having that personal experience. The Harrison story isn’t that old, and the Martin Luther King story is especially recent and that’s where you bring together contested histories and try to find a way where they can all exist. I think we’re aware of the power of multiple perspectives, both in terms of it creating richer narratives, but also knowing that you can have a single event that is experienced in two very different ways by different groups.
