University of Washington professor Quintard Taylor is a leading scholar of black history in the American West. He also manages the Web site BlackPast.org, which gathers and disseminates information about black history and has attracted some 4 million visitors since its launch in 2007. Last year alone the site drew more than 1.8 million visitors from more than 100 nations, who, Taylor says, "by voting with their keystrokes, ratify the global interest in black history." The site is popular with students from middle school to the graduate level, as well as with professional historians. Taylor has also written several books, including In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990. In 2008 he co-edited with Shirley Ann Wilson Moore African-American Women Confront the West, 1600–2000 (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman).

Taylor will serve as president of the Western History Association from October 2010 to October 2011 in that organization's 50th year. Representing more than 1,200 professional and amateur historians, the WHA is the third largest historical organization in the United States and one of the few to research, present and promote the history of the North American West. "Like many of its counterparts, the WHA is constantly evolving to meet the needs of scholars, researchers and the general public," said Taylor. "Our 50th anniversary meeting in Oakland in 2011 will provide an opportunity to look back at the remarkable accomplishments of the organization…. Despite our differing backgrounds, we all share a deep affection for the region we call home. We also carry the awesome responsibility of helping to interpret that region and its history to the wider world." Taylor recently took time to speak with Wild West.

'I would love to see more histories that discuss the interactions—the cooperation, conflict and accommodation—between groups of color in the West'

What was life like for black women in the 19th-century West.
In most respects, the lives of African-American women in the West were similar to those of white women and probably Latino women, since all were "settlers" on the frontier in some regard. Native American women, of course, had occupied the region far longer than other groups, and they had a lifestyle wholly different. Nineteenth-century black women differed from most white or Latino women in most of the West in one regard—they were overwhelmingly urban in every state and territory except Texas, Indian/Oklahoma Territory and Kansas. Black women were also particularly concerned about civil rights and especially voting rights. Since Wyoming Territory was the first Western state or territory to grant women the right to vote in the post–Civil war period, black women in Wyoming were actually ahead of black women elsewhere in the region and the nation.

Black women had a breakthrough in the workforce during World War II, correct?
Yes, primarily in the workplace, when for the first time in Western history they had access to industrial jobs and were no longer relegated almost entirely to domestic service. One Los Angeles woman who worked in one of the city's aircraft plants in 1945 said it best, "It was Hitler who got us out of white folks' kitchens." This work opportunity would have intended and unintended consequences. This work would provide far more household income, which in turn led to far more independence from domineering black husbands or white employers.

What accounted for the continued segregation in the workplace?
The entire United States remained a segregated society in World War II. The armed forces were segregated, the schools were segregated, people lived in segregated communities, and even the churches were segregated. It is not surprising that there were calls for segregated workplaces. What is surprising is the level of resistance to that segregation on the part of all workers. Part of this came from the national unity calls orchestrated by the federal government during World War II, but a larger part stemmed from changing attitudes, particularly on the part of white workers. By the end of World War II, a substantial minority of white workers for the first time joined with black workers and other workers of color to condemn workplace (and labor union) segregation. Their calls in this period, I believe, led directly to the eventually successful challenge of segregation throughout the nation and particularly in the South in the 1960s.

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