Nick Welsh’s recent article commemorating Juneteenth provides a fascinating brief history of African Americans in Santa Barbara. As elsewhere in the United States, black Americans were among the first non-native people to visit and live in Santa Barbara and have played a more significant role in local history than is often considered to have been the case.
The article does not, though, really continue to the present. Having grown up here, there was a much larger African-American community in Santa Barbara through the 1960s and 1970s than there is now. When I was a student, several schools — including Lincoln Elementary — had African-American proportions of as high as about 15 percent. Now, no school in the Santa Barbara Unified School District has an African-American proportion of 1.5 percent.
The growing movement led by Alice Post to re-open Lincoln School at the site of the School District’s administrative offices merits significant consideration. This would be both historically appropriate and provide a neighborhood school in the downtown area, where there is rapidly increasing residential development. A diverse group of Lincoln alumni and others support this plan.
