Thomas C. Fleming (1907-2006) was the West
Coast's oldest and longest-running black
journalist. The co-founder in 1944 of the
Sun-Reporter, Northern California's largest
weekly African-American newspaper, he
continues to write two articles a week for the
paper from his home. In addition, Fleming
recently produced more than 80 columns titled
"Reflections on Black History," which were
distributed by the National Newspaper Publishers
Association and sent to more than 200
African-American newspapers nationwide.
Enrolling In College
From 1926 to 1932, I held a series of jobs on the ships and railroads on the West Coast. First I worked as a bellhop for an intercoastal passenger shipping company that stopped at ports from Victoria, British Columbia, to Ensenada, Mexico. Then I was a waiter on a train ferry in the upper part of San Francisco Bay. In 1927 I was hired as a cook by the Southern Pacific Railroad, and worked there until the Depression came along. That's when I got a chance to go back to school... more l top
Getting An Education
While attending Chico High School in California's Sacramento Valley, I thought about going into law. But when I graduated in 1926, I discovered it cost more money than I had, to even go to college. So I spent the next six years working on the ships and railroads. There I became well acquainted with the college crowd, and learned a lot about black student life in California... more l top
Black Boxing Champions
Jack Johnson was the world heavyweight boxing champion from 1908 to 1915, the first black to hold that title. When he was champion, he did a lot of training in San Francisco, and in Alameda on the beach. They had championship fights in San Francisco in those days, in clubs. But in 1914, boxing was banned in California. When I began watching it in the 1920s, it was limited to four rounds. Any fight here was sort of an exhibition... more l top
"Raincoat" Jones, Black Businessman Extraordinaire
From 1926 until 1945, I was based in the East Bay cities of Berkeley and Oakland, across from San Francisco. Before World War II, West Oakland had the biggest black community in the Bay Area. The yards of both the Southern Pacific and the Western Pacific were in the area, as well as 7th Street, where many black professionals had their offices... more l top
Langston Hughes
Around 1934, I attended a dance at Sweet's Ballroom in downtown Oakland, California. It was one of the nights that was allocated to blacks; the two races never attended the dances on the same night. I came to hear the Jimmie Lunceford band, which had replaced Cab Calloway as the house band at the Cotton Club in New York City. At the dance I encountered Mason Robeson. He worked for the Spokesman, an ultraliberal black weekly in San Francisco, and later worked for the People's World, a Communist daily... more l top
Duke Ellington
In 1930, when my job as a cook for the Southern Pacific first brought me into Chicago, I bought a newspaper in the depot as usual, and discovered that Duke Ellington was appearing on the stage of the Oriental Theater downtown. The Oriental was one of a chain of movie and stage show houses that one found through the Middle West... more l top
Surviving The Depression
The decade of the 1930s was one of the most memorable in my life. The Great Depression had the entire industrialized world bogged down in a
state of economic doubt, so that many questioned just what the world would be like in the near future... more l top
Working For The WPA
The election of 1932, when Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency in the depth of the Depression, was a turning point for black
voters. Up until Roosevelt's election, the majority of blacks voted Republican. But Herbert Hoover, who was running for re-election, had a
platform to make his party lily-white. Blacks who could think for themselves understood that he wanted to uphold all Jim Crow practices... more l top
