Before Sun Village

Although Sun Village was the first established Black community in the Antelope Valley, it wasn’t the first time Black families lived in the region. Newspaper and community records suggest that Charles Graves and his family were among the first Black families to settle in the valley in the late 1880s. Graves had been born into slavery in Kentucky in 1856. After his father was killed during the Civil War, Graves decided to move west. He traveled mostly by rail until stopping in the Antelope Valley. Graves settled down in one of the northern cities of the valley, Rosamond, in 1882, a few decades after Peter Burnett’s legislative and gubernatorial campaigns to ban Black residency in the state and a few decades before Colonel Allen Allensworth established the eponymous all-Black colony 120 miles to the north. At first, times were tough due to the major drought that struck the state in the 1870s. But Graves stuck it out, building a cattle ranch, becoming the city’s postmaster, and striking gold in two of the region’s many small mines. His success allowed him to build Rosamond’s first school, which he did with his wife Cordia Anita Roberts in 1908 – not twenty years after the landmark Wysinger v. Crookshank ruling that barred California cities from explicitly segregating public schools. Graves died in Lancaster thirty years later, but sites across Rosamond – including a public school in the same location as his first one-room attempt – still bear his name.