Here in Mother Lode country, for a man named Joe Louis Moore, the phrase “black gold” does not mean oil. Moore, a retired Bay Area photographer with an inescapable interest in history, moved to Sacramento three years ago. “I started reading about blacks in the Gold Rush and wanted to find out where all this stuff was taking place,” he says.
What he uncovered was more like a storybook mother lode of the lives of African-American miners and the many communities they established beginning in the 1840s. Moore’s detailed map of black mining sites rapidly grew from seven to 60, nearly 10 times what the history books and museums would have you believe. Soon the State and National Park Services came knocking. “They asked if they could publish my map,” Moore says, smiling. And now the map led to the real treasure in Moore’s vision—groundswell support for a permanent interpretive center focused on African-American history in Negro Bar State Park in Folsom.
The third-annual flagship event that raises awareness, community support and funds is this Saturday, June 15, a day many citizens will gather to celebrate a particularly American event about the demise of “the peculiar institution.” Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration of the ending of slavery in the United States. From its Galveston, Texas, origin on June 19, 1865, the observance of this date as the African-American Emancipation Day has spread in recent years, even beyond U.S. borders…