The California gold rush is a history embedded into the nation’s consciousness. Considered by many historians to be the most significant event of the first half of the nineteenth century, it is a story about incredible wealth, about mass migration to the western coast, and setting the foundation for what would become one of the world’s most powerful economies.
Rarely told are stories like this: Following the 1852 passage of California’s Fugitive Slave Law, three formerly enslaved black men who built a lucrative mining supply business were stripped of their freedom and deported to Mississippi to re-enter enslavement.
The Fugitive Slave Law decreed any person brought to California pre-statehood as a slave would be considered a slave in the eyes of the law, even though the California constitution banned slavery and the state entered the Union as a “free state” under the Compromise of 1850. For the 2,000 enslaved people brought into the state during the Gold Rush and granted freedom in 1850, the law passed two years later put their lives in jeopardy.
The role of slaves in the Gold Rush — and the ways slaves and free black people were systematically excluded from the resulting wealth by laws and court rulings — does not make it into most U.S. history books. But it is a central narrative of Gold Chains: The Hidden History of Slavery in California, a public education campaign launched by the ACLU of Northern California late last year.
“This isn’t a history that is sometimes glossed over, it is always glossed over,” says Candice Francis, the communications director for ACLU NorCal, who led the initiative. “It’s not taught in schools, it is really not known.”
Gold Chains is the result of Francis’ goal to launch once-a-year education campaigns that amplify the legal and policy work of the ACLU. In 2017 ACLU NorCal launched the Muslim Ban Timeline, which outlined the history leading to Trump’s executive order suspending U.S. entry for certain Muslim-majority countries. In 2018, the organization celebrated the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment with #Powerthe14th, a campaign centering the fight for equal citizenship.
In 2019, Francis sought to build a campaign around the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved people from West Africa arriving to North America. An early partnership with the California Historical Society revealed how much of that history lived in California, though it was continually left out of the state’s historical narrative.