Book review: 'Black History in the Last Frontier' by Ian C. Hartman provides a broad but personal glimpse at Black history in Alaska, and a roadmap for future scholarship.
By Ian C. Hartman. National Park Service/University of Alaska Anchorage. 210 pages. 2020 Sometime in the 1880s, William Shorey, commanding the whaling vessel Harriman, sailed into the Bering Sea, laying eyes on Alaska, the land America had acquired from Russia two decades previously. This is hardly remarkable for the time, except that Shorey was the son of freed slaves in Barbados.
“African Americans have traveled to Alaska for over 150 years, well before statehood and earlier even than the Klondike gold rush,” Hartman tells us early on. “Black men and women have actively participated in Alaska’s politics, economic development, and culture. They hunted for whales, patrolled the seas, built roads, served in the military, opened businesses, fought injustice, won political office, and forged communities.
Hartman explores this history through the lives of those who lived it, an approach that humanizes the narrative, making it both accessible and enjoyable for casual readers. We learn, for instance, of Melvin Dempsey, a former slave who fled the South. He caught gold fever and began working and prospecting his way west, ultimately arriving in Valdez in 1898.
In his exploration of Black history in Alaska, Hartman uncovers addendums to well known events, where Black Alaskans played key roles since forgotten. For instance, a loophole in the 1945 Anti-Discrimination Act was exposed when Robert and Beatrice Coleman were refused service at a Fairbanks cocktail lounge in 1946. The famous civil rights law, the first of its sort in the nation, barred businesses from engaging in discriminatory practices.
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