Nigger Nate

Lots of folks are up in arms over presidential candidate Rick Perry's family hunting at an old lodge with the unfortunate name of Niggerhead. Although I have no truck with the man, I think he should get a break on this. If I can remember right, they wanted to ban Tom Sawyer because of the word nigger, should we throw Mark Twain out of the library too? Like it or not, such cruel epithets are a part of our history and culture. Rick Perry didn't name the rock that gives the lodge its sobriquet and our country is full of place names that allude to our racist past. In fact there is a town in Texas called Nigton, you can guess what it was shortened from, that was founded by former slaves in 1873. This type of place name was long a part of our cultural vernacular, and more recently than you might assume.

San Diego County has a very similar situation up on Palomar Mountain. Back as long as I can remember, people, without any intended malice, have called the dirt back road up the mountain, Nigger Nate Grade. This is the steep (10%) western route up the mountain and was the only way up until the 1940's when the more easterly "Road to the Stars" was built. It is the logical and unmarked extension of County Rd. S7.

The Nigger Nate was Nate Harrison, a runaway slave who was born sometime in the early 1800's and passed on in 1920. He was said to be 101 when he died but the figure is in some dispute. In any case he sought refuge and solace on the mountain in the 1860's. The diminutive Nate was much loved and a friend to all. He helped many travelers by giving them water from his fresh, cool spring. Read a nice story about the man in this link to the Journal of San Diego History, January 1958. Or here. This is a link to an interesting pdf by archaeologists who have discerned that Harrison was from Virginia, not Mississippi or Kentucky as he sometimes claimed and he once was the property of a Virginian named Lysander Utt.

Palomar was once known as Smith Mountain and Harrison was on the posse that tracked and strung up badmen, even finding the desperadoes that killed Smith himself. Everybody back then called Nate nigger, hell, that is what he called himself. Until the fifties the grade was marked Nigger Nate Grade or Nigger Grade on all the local maps. The NAACP made a stink in the 1950's and the name was finally cleaned up in 1955. Later, in 1967, the United States Board on Geographic Names changed the names of 143 places throughout the country from “nigger” to “negro.”

San Diego County, even way out here in the liberal west, was certainly not immune from racism. I can remember seeing old pictures of the interior of the Del Dios Store in the 1950's with a sign that clearly said "white trade only." Blacks and jews were forbidden to live in the covenant of Rancho Santa Fe and in La Jolla until the early 1960's.

From A Brief History of the San Diego NAACP, 1917-2007:

In February 1924, San Diego NAACP president Elijah J. Gentry, a “shoe shiner” by trade and leader of the five year old branch sent a frank assessment of the racial climate in San Diego to NAACP field secretary James Weldon Johnson in New York.  “Colored people [in San Diego] are not allowed in restaurants, nor to drink soda water in drugstores, nor can they rent bathing suits at any bathing house or beach in this city,” Gentry revealed.  Despite the small number of blacks in the area and the perception of racial tolerance, San Diego was nonetheless “a very prejudice[d] city.” Moreover American-style racism had crept south of the border.  In 1926 when branch officials looked across the border in Tijuana, Mexico they saw signs in shops that proclaimed “colored not wanted.”  

(The NAACP) would be led by Jack Johnson Kimbrough, a gentlemanly, refined dentist from Lexington, Mississippi who arrived in San Diego from UC-Berkeley in 1935 and who held the branch presidency in 1947-1948.  


Humiliated and angered at having been refused a snack at a downtown “greasy spoon,” Kimbrough methodically devised a plan for redress that made him a pioneer in anti-discrimination protest tactics at the dawn of the civil rights revolution.  He recruited a group of black and white students at San Diego State College, carefully rehearsed them to act as customers and witnesses and then targeted white-owned restaurants that discriminated.  As the black students were denied service, the already seated white students would observe what transpired and be prepared to testify in court as to what they had witnessed.    
Using Kimbrough’s innovative scheme, the NAACP filed and won 31 of its 32 lawsuits against San Diego restaurants in little over a year, usually with court awards to plaintiffs of $300 per case which was split between the students and their attorney.  Kimbrough followed up this triumph with the desegregation of the Grant Grill at the prestigious U.S. Grant Hotel in downtown San Diego in 1948.  


From Wikipedia regarding La Jolla and antisemitism:

From its beginnings to the early 1960s, La Jolla was marketed by developers as a bastion of isolation and exclusivity. Antisemitic housing practices began in 1926 with the development of La Jolla Shores, and continued from the 1920s through about 1970.[27] In La Jolla Shores and La Jolla Hermosa, only people with pure European ancestry could own property (this excludes Jews, who were not considered "white"), and housing notices included racist comments against Jews and other minority groups. Housing restrictions were thought to be enough to keep "undesirable" ethnic groups from living in La Jolla, until the 1948 Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer prohibited such restrictive covenants. After the ruling, real estate companies used less obvious tactics to keep Jewish people out of La Jolla. Real estate agents would be fired if they sold a house to Jewish clients. There were no for-sale signs put up on properties, requiring the prospective buyer to go to a real estate office to find out what was available. If an agent suspected that a potential home buyer was a Jew, they would demand higher down payments and display green cards on their dashboards marked with the Star of David to warn the seller. The sellers would also send codes to their real estate agents; if their porch lights were on during the day, they did not want Jewish buyers.[28]

My family was one of the first openly jewish families when we moved into Rancho Santa Fe in the early 1970's. I can remember my little sisters bringing dreidle's to school, the small spinning tops that are synonymous with Chanukah. Other kids sheepishly admitted that they had similar objects at home but never felt comfortable disclosing their heritage in public. When the Protective Covenant of Rancho Santa Fe was first written back in the 1920s, there were restrictions or “Gentlemen’s Agreements” as to who could live in the Covenent, which excluded “Negroes, Asians and Jews.” Here is a pdf regarding the racial backstory to Rancho Santa Fe's Protective Covenant and the way it kept hispanics as a workforce yet denied them the right to live in the area, sending them instead to the balkanized community of Eden Gardens in nearby Solana Beach. 

I don't see a need to whitewash our racist heritage. Niggerhead in Texas or Nigger Nate right here in good old San Diego County, our crude and base language serves as an excellent legacy and grim reminder of a not too distant past.

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postscript - A San Diego County historian took me to task for not mentioning UCSD founder Roger Revelle's pressure on La Jolla to rescind the anti-semitic deed restrictions or risk not having professors and for not requiring Scripps researchers to sign loyalty oaths. His nemesis was a prominent attorney from the prestigious Gray, Cary, Ames and Frye law firm named Jim Archer.

In the early 1950s, Revelle had criticized the La Jolla Real Estate Brokers Association’s restrictive property deeds. “You can’t have a university without having Jewish professors,” he warned. “You’ll have to make up your minds whether you want a university or an anti-Semitic covenant. You can’t have both.” Neither Archer nor the property owners of La Jolla were happy with his stance and as UC President Kerr later said: “Archer was a terror when his sense of patriotism was aroused.”

Thanks and duly noted.