African American history in Palo Alto

African Americans have been part of Palo Alto since its first years. The community was never large. The city's Black population counted 239 people in 1940 and has hovered around 2 percent for much of the last century, according to PaloAltoHistory.org. Its story is still essential to understanding the city. It runs through a church on Ramona Street, a student in Stanford's first class, a civic leader who stood up to the Chamber of Commerce and a neighboring city that became the heart of the Midpeninsula's Black community.

This page gathers that history from documented sources, including the Palo Alto Historical Association, Palo Alto Online, Stanford and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It pairs with our page on covenants and the fair housing fight, which explains the housing rules that shaped where Black families could live.

Ernest Houston Johnson, Class of 1895

Stanford's first African American student entered with the Pioneer Class in 1891. Ernest Houston Johnson was born in 1871 near Roseville, California. His father, Beverly Johnson, ran a catering business and knew the Stanfords through it and through earlier work for the Central Pacific Railroad. According to Stanford Magazine, Berkeley accepted Ernest but Stanford did not reply. Accounts differ on how Jane Stanford learned of it. She contacted President David Starr Jordan and Johnson was admitted soon after.

Johnson played on Stanford's first football team and worked as a printer's apprentice to pay his way. He graduated in 1895 with a degree in economics and attended law school. He died of tuberculosis in 1898 at 27 and was buried in Sacramento's Old City Cemetery. His story was largely forgotten until a Stanford student researcher found him in an old team photograph in the 1990s. The Black Community Services Center now runs a mentorship program in his name.

The early town and the 1920 fight

In Palo Alto's first decades a small Black community lived and worked in town, often in service jobs tied to Stanford, the hotels and private homes. PaloAltoHistory.org says the most prominent Black neighborhood grew up on Ramona Street near University AME Zion Church. There were also clusters on Fife Street near downtown and on El Capitan Road south of Colorado Avenue.

In 1920 the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce passed a resolution calling for a "segregated district for the Oriental and colored people of the city." The newspaper and several civic groups backed it. Henry Dodson, president of the Colored Citizens Club of Palo Alto, answered in public. "We believe the best people of this city are in unison with the great majority of the people of this state who dissent from such an undemocratic doctrine," he said. The plan died. Our page on Palo Alto's Japanese American community covers the same episode from that community's side.

Families found ways around the barriers. Palo Alto Online told the story of Jerry Harrison, who arrived from North Carolina in 1922, worked as a railroad porter and shined shoes at the Hotel President. He and his wife Ruth saved enough to buy a house in Crescent Park through a Jewish friend, because the property could not be sold to a Black buyer directly. Their grandson still lives nearby.

University AME Zion Church

The center of Black Palo Alto for decades was University AME Zion Church. The National Trust for Historic Preservation describes it as founded in 1918 and as the oldest continuously operating historically Black church in Silicon Valley. Isaac M. Hinson was among its founders.

1. 1925: The congregation builds a small stucco church at 819 Ramona Street, near Homer Avenue.
2. 1935 to 1939: Members pay down a $3,500 debt and clear the mortgage by 1939, according to news reports of the time.
3. 1965: The congregation moves to a new campus on Middlefield Road and sells the Ramona Street building to the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.
4. Late 1980s: Ruth Anne Gray, Hinson's granddaughter, leads a fight to save the old church from demolition.
5. 2009: The developer Menlo Equities restores the building as office space within a larger project. Members return for a homecoming service.
6. 2026: The National Trust names the church a grant recipient in its Preserving Black Churches program, for work on its 1965 mid-century modern campus and a 1920s era building known as the Little House.

The church has served generations of African American faculty, staff and students at Stanford. When vandals spray-painted anti-religious messages in its courtyard in December 2019, faith leaders from across Palo Alto joined a Solidarity Sunday service there.

Postwar growth and closed doors

World War II drew Black workers to the Bay Area. In Palo Alto the Black population rose from 239 in 1940 to 467 seven years later, according to PaloAltoHistory.org. Most new arrivals found the city's newer neighborhoods closed to them by covenants and lending rules. A few found a way in. In 1950 nine Black families were among the first owners in the Lawrence Tract, an interracial subdivision built by the Palo Alto Fair Play Council. Paul Lawrence, a Black former Stanford student and Howard University professor, helped make it happen.

Later, some families settled in south Palo Alto. Lakiba Pittman told Palo Alto Online that when her parents bought in Ventura in the 1960s there were about seven African American families on the block. Many more families were steered to East Palo Alto.

Stanford in the 1960s

Stanford's Black students organized in the 1960s. In April 1968, days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the university held a symposium on white racism with a panel of white men. About 70 members of the Black Student Union and community members walked onto the stage, took the microphone and presented 10 demands. The university agreed to nine of them, according to the Black Community Services Center.

Two lasting institutions followed. The Black Community Services Center, known as the Black House, opened in 1969 as Stanford's first community center. The demands also led to the Program in African and African American Studies. Our Stanford history page places these changes in the wider story of the university. In town, the plaza in front of City Hall is named for Dr. King. Our King Plaza page covers it.

East Palo Alto

Across San Francisquito Creek, East Palo Alto became the center of the Midpeninsula's Black community after World War II. Blockbusting in the 1950s turned neighborhoods there from white to Black within a few years. By the 1960s the area was a hub of civil rights organizing, independent schools and cultural pride. In 1968 some residents proposed renaming the community Nairobi. Ravenswood High School served the area from 1958 until it closed in 1976.

Education became a legal fight. Parents in the Ravenswood City School District, led by Margaret Tinsley, sued surrounding districts in the 1970s. The case was settled after almost ten years. Palo Alto Unified dates its Voluntary Transfer Program, known as the Tinsley Program, to 1986. Each year it assigns 60 new Ravenswood students, entering transitional kindergarten through second grade, to Palo Alto schools.

Residents won self-government in 1983, when East Palo Alto incorporated with Barbara A. Mouton as its first mayor. The city's population later became largely Latino and Pacific Islander, alongside long-established Black families. Our East Palo Alto page tells the city's story in full and links to the East Palo Alto Community Archive.

Researching this history

Much of this history lives in newspapers and family papers rather than books. The Palo Alto Historical Association holds clippings from the Palo Alto Times. The East Palo Alto Community Archive collects photographs and documents from residents. Stanford's Special Collections and the Black Community Services Center hold university records. City librarians can help with newspaper research. See our libraries guide. For dates across the whole city, use the Palo Alto timeline.

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