About this item

Here for the first time in a book for young readers is the story of the African American forty-niners who went west to seek fortunes and freedom in the California Gold Rush.Among the thousands drawn west by the California Gold Rush were many African Americans. Some were free men and women in search of opportunity others were slaves brought from the slave states of the South. Some found freedom and wealth in the gold fields and growing cities of California, but all faced the deeply entrenched prejudices of the era.To tell this story Hurry Freedom! focuses on the life of Mifflin Gibbs, who arrived in San Francisco in and established a successful boot and shoe business. But Gibbss story is more than one of business and personal success With other African American San Franciscans, he led a campaign to obtain equal legal and civil rights for Blacks in California.



About the Author

Jerry Stanley

"I've learned there's no such thing as wasted writing or bad writing. All writing leads to better writing. "Jerry Stanley is the author of several highly praised books for young readers, including Children of the Dust Bowl, winner of the Orbis Pictus Award; I Am an American, an ALA Notable Book; and Hurry Freedom, a National Book Award nominee and winner of the Orbis Pictus Award. He is a former professor of history at California State University. Being a writer is one of the great achievements of my life. As a teenager growing up in Detroit, Michigan, I hated school, all my teachers, and learning in general. When I was expelled from high school at the age of seventeen for fighting, I had passed two units - one in woodshop and one in gym. In bidding me farewell, my counselor fired his last shot at my self'-esteem: "Stanley," he said, "you're so dumb you couldn't finish school even if you tried. "It has taken a lot to prove him wrong. I joined the Air Force to get away from home and after a few years started taking correspondence courses through the mail. During the day I drove bulldozers and forklifts, and at night I learned how to write a complete sentence. I was twenty-one when I finally received my diploma from high school, which was somewhere near the base but which I never saw or visited. I was playing drums in a rock-'n'-roll band when I left the service and enrolled in junior college. This was the turning point in my life: not what I learned there, but getting the nerve to enroll. I was the model insecure student, as hardly a day passed without my remembering, "Stanley, you're so dumb. . . ." I can look back now with amusement and laughter at some of the things I did. For example, when I was registering on the first day, standing in a long line to get past this one station, a woman asked, "What do you think your major will be?" I had no idea of what she meant by "major," but the girl in front of me said "English" and that got her through, so I said "English" (whatever that was) too. A month or so later, while talking about the upcoming midterm (my first) , the teacher said, "Blue books are required. You can't take the midterm without a blue book." I spent nearly an hour in the library looking for the blue books - in the card catalog under blue, in the periodicals - until a kind reference librarian told me, without snickering, that they were in the bookstore. Though amusing now, when these things happened to me, they were proof that I would be found out: I don't belong here.Fearing failure, I became an overachiever. I overstudied every subject, and wrote and rewrote each term paper before finally relinquishing it. But I still lived in doubt from one grade report to the next. Making the dean's list, graduating from junior college with honors, and being invited to join an honor society all gave me



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