1903 California Tour by Booker T. Washington & 160th Anniversary of the Buffalo Soldiers

In 1903, Booker T. Washington traveled to Los Angeles for a 4 week, California Tour expanding the Tuskegee Institute and the National Negro Business League. During his San Francisco Bay Area leg of the journey he was and greeted by Captain William T. Shorey, T.B. Morton, T.A. Brown, and William F. Ford of the Afro-American Alliance when he arrived at Palo Alto on Thursday, January 8th.

The gentlemen accompanied him to his hotel, the Russ House located on Montgomery Street between Bush and Pine Streets. Washington's arrival and details are illustrated and covered in full on the front page of The San Francisco Call from the next day (January 9, 1903, Vol. XCIII No. 40).

Booker T. Washington and his delegation, Buffalo Soldiers led by US Army Captain Charles Young, boarded a steam ferry from San Francisco to Oakland where the esteemed educator met with 20 representative Black men from Oakland and San Francisco at the home of Captain William T. Shorey (1859-1919), one of the most prominent and wealthy Black citizens in the Bay Area.

Originally from Barbados, he was a skilled whaler who emigrated to California. He became one of a few Black ship captains on the West Coast and was renowned for his leadership of his multiracial crews.

Douglas Henry Daniels reports in Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco that, "The West Indian sea captain, William Shorey, and his family resided at
1782 8th Street in West Oakland, a home now recognized as an Oakland Historic Landmark.

Booker T. Washington, encouraged the famed "Buffalo Soldiers" to become "Cultural Ambassadors" or the race as the special assignment with President Theodore Roosevelt was announced.

Max Bennett Thrasher reports on the visit in an account of Booker T. Washington's California Tour: "In speaking informally at the dinner, Mr. Washington repeated what I had already heard him say, the surprise and pleasure which he had felt to find colored people of the Pacific coast, as a general thing, so prosperous, so intelligent, and so well informed not only as to matters pertaining to the race in the country as a whole, but particularly as regarding the history and work of Tuskegee.” (published in Kraft, Barbara S., ed. Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol. 7 "1903-1904", p.24)