Voices of the Golden Ghost

734 Marin Street,Vallejo CA 94590

27 August, 2022

Description

In the mountains of Northern California, in Shasta and Siskiyou Counties one of the largest gold mining discoveries took place in Northern California during the 19th century. Within a few years, miners arrived from all corners of the globe. By 1852, over 2,000 African Americans were in the California gold fields. Today, little is told about the free and enslaved black men and women who lived in the Northern California wilderness by pick and shovel. Voices of the Golden Ghosts is a book detailing this unknown history. Never before have twenty authors been brought together in one volume to present the many untold realities of early California life of African Americans. Since 2019 Voices of the Golden Ghosts has been telling the unknown history of thousands of African Americans who arrived in California during the Gold Rush. Through artistic presentations we examine how stereotypes and racism continue to leave their mark on California communities. Voices is a multimedia project creating theater, video, installations, photography and a soon to be released book. For over 170 years California and our nation has left out many details about who participated in creating California's statehood. Our project objective is to fill in some of the missing pieces. Voices of the Golden Ghosts is the first creative endeavor in Shasta and Siskiyou Counties that focuses on the history and lives of early African American pioneers during the founding of California’s statehood. We have been the first and only organization to expose the effects of slavery to audiences through our theatrical presentations and to present the facts that slavery was indeed allowed in California for many years. Before Covid 19 we presented our findings to hundreds of community members in Shasta and Siskiyou County. By speaking directly through performances, we exposed the ongoing racism experienced by people of color and native people since Europeans first came to California. All of this information is 99% unknown. We had the pleasure of learning from scholars and our own research and presenting this information for the first time to audiences in Northern California. Our hope is to spread this information throughout California in the future. Our programing provides directs links to understanding the racial issues that we gave today as we expose some of the origins of these issues from the past. Our leadership/director has made an award-winning documentary on African American history in Northern California and from that inspired the African American community of Shasta and Siskiyou counties to come together and work on a historical understanding of the African American participation in the early history of the Golden State. We are very proud of the work we have accomplished before Covid shut us down and we are very inspired to reach out to audiences again with our returning participants and some new members of the community who are joining our collective. We embrace all people but we specifically target the African American Community. We are working with a marginalized, historically and systemically discriminated group which continues to be a racial minority in Shasta and Siskiyou counties, nobody else has taken this on in our area. The group's ages span 17 to 76 years, whose backgrounds include veterans, students, cancer survivors, historians, artists, formerly incarcerated persons, LGBT, and researchers. Appreciating that art is a powerful educational tool this project utilizes elements of Inter-generational Learning to inspire community members to create collaborative artworks. Employing various art forms our activities are focused on educating the public on the heritage of Communities of Color in Northern California. Some of the social issues that currently affecting our communities, especially race and equity, originated in the Gold Rush of 1850's. Many people were displaced and harmed and also many people of color persevered against great odds. Those are the stories we need to hear and the ones our project tells. To borrow a much-used line, you cannot know your future until you understand your past, hence by using the historical past as a comparative window we view our communities today. This project presents a powerful learning experience for participants. After examining available texts and diaries we create dramatic presentations that will be performed at multiple venues around the North State. Community participants will learn skills of how to become researchers, actors and artists. During this process professional training and mentoring will be given to those new performers as they learn the realities of the gold rush. Participants will be able to glean detailed information from the research material and interpret the information from their personal and collective viewpoints. Embodying this historical narrative, the community actors are given a rare voice in presenting “their” history. We encourage participants to reexamine the history previously told of their communities, to acknowledge the imprint of the multi-ethnic peoples who shaped these communities and to become aware of their success and struggles; many of which continue today.