ABSTRACT
World War II brought with it tens of thousands of migrants to West Coast cities such as Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Many migrants were escaping grinding poverty in states like Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas and came looking for employment in the aircraft industry or Naval shipyards from Seattle down to San Diego. This war-time boom precipitated the largest westward movement of African Americans in US history and nowhere was this migratory movement more evident than in San Francisco, a city whose pre-war African American population was 4,846 or less than 1% of the City’s total population (Taylor; 1998, 254).
