Sacramento exhibit explores Black Americans’ historic connection to the Pacific

The Black connection to the Pacific Ocean dates back centuries. Seafaring sailors and whalers, the people who found freedom, and the lives and economies built along the coastline.

Scholar and historian Caroline Collins delves deep into those historic connections in a new multimedia exhibit, “Take Me to the Water: Histories of the Black Pacific,” on view through March 16 at Sacramento Public Library’s Central Library, 828 I St., in Sacramento.

In doing so, Collins expands narratives and challenges assumptions about Black Americans’ historic ties to water and place on the Pacific Coast.

“It’s an important way for us to think about Black folks’ relationships to water and watercraft in ways that often travel against narratives,” Collins said in a Feb. 8 talk with Sacramento Public Library archivist and historian James Scott on the project.

“Generally, when people in America think about Black folks and ships, one type of ship comes to mind and that’s the slave ship,” Collins said. “When they think about Black folks’ relationship to water, that body of water is the Atlantic.”

Collins has long studied the deep, but often overlooked, links between Black and Indigenous people to the water.

“It’s an important history — the transatlantic slave trade — that needs to be told but it doesn’t cover the entire rich complexity that is the Black American experience,” Collins said. “For California, when talking about the Pacific being a route to freedom, Black people took to the water to emancipate themselves.”

Collins — a professor at University of California, San Diego and post-doctoral fellow at UC Irvine — is the exhibit’s curator. She is also a co-founder of Black Like Water, an interdisciplinary research collective at UC San Diego that highlights Black relationships to the natural world. For Collins, the connection to water is also personal.

“I’m from San Diego, so water connectivity has always been a vibrant part of my life,” she said. “I think about these connections in my life to water.”

Celebrating Black Americans in the Pacific

Programming on Black Americans’ connections with the Pacific continue online and at the library’s second floor Sacramento Room through February and March with talks on African Americans’ experiences in the War in the Pacific; and Black Californian mariner, landowner and magnate William Alexander Leidersdorff.

Collins procured artifacts from up and down the Pacific Coast, reassembling the journey of coastal Black Americans, and reminding once again during this Black History Month that Black history is American history.

“I went into archives in California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Hawaii, D.C., the Smithsonian. What was beautiful was how much was out there,” she said.

That included photographs of Black and white sailors working side by side; research that showed African and Hawaiian musical influences on the sea shanties of the British Isles; the tracing back of Black maritime culture to west Africa.

“There was a deep heritage of watercraft construction in west Africa,” Collins said, citing a saying attributed to Guinea: “The blood of kings and the tears of the canoe maker are sacred things which should never touch the ground.”

That heritage would find its way to the Pacific and the prevalence of Black sailors in the whaling industry of the 1800s, a heritage that Collins plans to explore in an upcoming feature of the exhibit: the publicly viewed construction of a 28-foot working whale boat in San Diego supervised by a Black boatwright and built by San Diego-area Black and indigenous students.

One of the discoveries: a compass from British Columbia, from George and Nancy Alexander. The couple had fled overland from Missouri to California in the 1850s seeking freedom before fleeing once again to Canada to evade capture under the Fugitive Slave Act, which required enslaved men and women to be returned to their owners even if they were in free states, like California.

“They carried that compass with them all these thousands of miles over land. When I was holding that in my hand, I was thinking, ‘What does that mean?’ Often people were just traveling off of word of mouth, Black newspaper sharing, letters from other people,” Collins said.

“Artifacts represent to me that coming to the Pacific, or traveling north or coming out West, is a story of connection,” she said. “A lot of times when we talk about Black people and the journeys that we had to make, that they were under duress or during enslavement, it’s a story that must be told because they still have implications today.”

The exhibit, supported by California Humanities and the Endowment for the Humanities, is free to the public.

“Often, there can be this misconception that stories about Black history aren’t told because there’s this dearth of information,” she said. “But, if you go into the archives, the information is there. There’s a record of our presence. That was really exciting to see.”