Household Gods on the Altar of Freedom: Religion, Race, and Citizenship in California, 1850–1900

In the nineteenth century, the American West was imagined as a place brimming with opportunity and prosperity. While many found material success in places like Gold Rush era California, the relationship that Black Americans had to the region and to what they hoped would be afforded to them in the West was marked by racial exclusion. Drawing upon primary sources that include newspaper clippings and Colored California Convention reports, this article considers the various strategies of resistance that Black western arrivants waged to not only attain material wealth but also agitate for their civil rights. “Household Gods” argues that Black western arrivants used religion and religious rhetoric as an adaptive and subversive strategy to shape conceptions of citizenship discourse, which contributed to how Black westerners sought to make space for themselves within a multiethnic society. This article is part of a special issue of Pacific Historical Review, “Religion in the Nineteenth-Century American West.”