Dates: January 1890 - December 1892 | Locations: West Adams, downtown Los Angeles, train station, FAME Church | Sam's Age: 6 years old to 8 years old
The train arrived on a Tuesday morning in March 1890, and it brought with it the weight of history that Sam's compartmentalized consciousness recognized immediately.
He didn't know this at first. He was simply a six-year-old playing in the yard when his mother called him inside, her voice carrying something different—attention, focus, the sense that something was happening. Through the window, he watched as his father left the house earlier than usual, walking toward downtown with purposeful strides.
By evening, Thomas returned with a visitor—a man named Robert Hayes, who had arrived on that morning train from Texas with a wife, three children, and everything they owned wrapped in cloth bundles.
"They'll need introductions," Thomas told Evelyn. "To the bank, to merchants, to people who might help them settle."
Robert Hayes stood in their parlor with the particular exhaustion of someone who had traveled a thousand miles carrying hope and fear in equal measure. He was darker-skinned than Thomas, with eyes that held the specific wariness of someone who had lived in places where safety was never guaranteed. When he shook Thomas's hand, his grip was firm—the handshake of a man who understood that trust had to be deliberately established, that it couldn't be assumed.
"Texas?" Thomas asked.
"Louisiana before that," Hayes said. "Shreveport. The work dried up. The... the situation deteriorated."
He didn't need to specify what situation. Thomas understood. Everyone in the growing Los Angeles Black community understood. The word had been traveling for years along informal networks: Come West. It's different there. It's not perfect, but it's not the South.
After 1890, the word spread.
The exodus began as a trickle and became a stream. Black families arrived on the transcontinental railroad, stepping onto the Los Angeles platform with the particular mixture of exhaustion and fragile hope that comes from fleeing. They came from Texas—from Dallas, Houston, San Antonio. They came from Shreveport. From New Orleans. From Memphis. From Atlanta. Each carried stories that were variations on a theme: the lynching they'd witnessed or heard about, the violence becoming not occasional but systematic, the understanding that staying meant accepting a life where your death could be claimed as justice.
The Black population of Los Angeles, which had been roughly 1,200 in 1880, swelled. By 1890, it had nearly doubled to over 2,000. By 1895, it would continue climbing. West Adams transformed from a quiet neighborhood where Thomas's family had stood somewhat alone in their prosperity to a community where similar families were establishing themselves—other businessmen, teachers, artisans, people fleeing the South with skills and capital and desperation.
Thomas became, almost without planning it, a kind of guide. People came to the bank asking his advice. He began introducing them to merchants who would extend credit to Black families, to real estate agents who would sell to them, to the network of mutual aid that was the infrastructure of survival.
"You're building something," Evelyn observed one evening, watching her husband return home later each night, exhausted from the work of helping others position themselves.
"I'm not building," Thomas corrected. "I'm channeling. The people are building. I'm just helping them find the channels."
Sam experienced the arrival of all these new people the way children do—through school.
The FAME Church school, which had been a relatively small affair with perhaps twenty students when Sam first attended, suddenly had forty, then fifty. Children appeared who spoke with different accents, who had different references, who carried the subtle marks of having come from somewhere else. Some were frightened. Others had the aggressive energy of children overcompensating for displacement. Most were simply trying to learn in a space that was suddenly overcrowded.
Miss Catherine, their teacher, adapted with the practical grace of someone who had likely anticipated this. She divided the students into smaller groups, had the older children help the younger ones, created a system of peer learning that meant knowledge could flow from those who had it to those who needed it.
There was a boy named Jefferson, two years older than Sam, who had come from Texas with his family six months earlier. He was watchful in a way that Sam recognized—not the casual watchfulness of a child, but the systematic awareness of someone who had learned to track exits, to read threat levels in adults' voices, to understand that the world contained danger that might arrive at any moment.
They didn't speak to each other directly for months. But Sam noticed how Jefferson moved. Noticed how his eyes tracked the teacher's position in the room. Noticed how he never sat with his back to the door.
He's been running, Sam's 42-year-old consciousness understood with automatic clarity. Or his family has. And he learned to prepare for the next running.
One afternoon in May, Jefferson approached Sam during the brief period when Miss Catherine released the children to play outside. He didn't ask permission or exchange pleasantries. He simply sat beside him on the step.
"You're from here," Jefferson said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes," Sam said.
"You ever seen them come?" Jefferson asked.
Sam understood what "them" meant without needing clarification. The mobs. The violence. The organized terror.
"No," Sam said. "My father says it's different here."
Jefferson was quiet for a moment. "Different how?"
"Slower," Sam said, and immediately regretted it because it sounded both ridiculous and cruel—as though slower violence was something to be grateful for.
"I'd rather it be faster," Jefferson said finally. "Faster means you know where you stand. This slow thing, not knowing when it's coming, when someone might decide today's the day—that's worse."
He stood and walked away, and Sam didn't see him speak to anyone else for the rest of the week. But the conversation had established something: a recognition between them that they were both people living with a particular kind of knowledge that other children their age didn't have.
In 1891, Biddy Mason died.
She had been less visible in the community in her final years—her body failing in ways that even her formidable will couldn't overcome. But her death created a rupture in West Adams' Black community. The tributes came from everywhere: from the women who had worked in her stores, from the families she'd housed, from the churches she'd supported, from the schools she'd helped establish.
Thomas attended the funeral. Evelyn attended. Sam, at seven years old, was left with a neighbor, but he understood that something significant had passed out of the world.
That evening, Thomas brought out the book that Biddy Mason had given Sam years earlier—Frederick Douglass's autobiography. He opened it and read aloud a passage:
"I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the North, to find persons who could speak of the singing among slaves as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake."
He read it slowly, letting each word settle. Then he closed the book and looked at Sam.
"She knew what it meant to live in a system designed to break you," Thomas said. "And she didn't break. She built. You understand that?"
Sam nodded, though he wasn't sure he fully understood. But his 42-year-old consciousness grasped the significance: Biddy Mason represented a particular kind of survival—not hiding, not accommodating, but building something new in the face of the system's design to destroy you.
Between 1890 and 1892, the violence in the South intensified visibly.
News arrived through the California Eagle—the newspaper that had been Neimore's legacy and was now in the hands of a young woman named Charlotta Bass who had taken over with fierce determination to make it a voice for the community.
The California Eagle reported the lynchings with the grim factuality of someone documenting a plague:
"March 1891: Three men lynched in Kentucky."
"June 1891: A woman in Louisiana, accused of 'impropriety,' removed from jail and burned."
"August 1891: Eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans, victims of mob violence, but the pattern is clear—the mob seeks any excuse."
But 1892 was the worst. The year of the Memphis lynching, of three businessmen—Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, Henry Stewart—who were successful enough to threaten white economic interests and therefore were removed from existence through mob violence. The California Eagle reported it with particular intensity because these were men like Thomas—businessmen, property owners, symbols of Black economic advancement that the South could not tolerate.
Thomas read this account sitting in his study, and Sam, positioned invisibly as he often was in the hallway, heard the intake of breath that suggested something had broken inside his father.
"They killed them for being successful," Thomas said quietly to Evelyn. "Not for any crime. For being successful. For showing it was possible."
"Does this change our position?" Evelyn asked, her voice carefully neutral but containing real fear underneath.
"It clarifies it," Thomas said. "We're not as visible as Moss was. We're not as radical in our wealth. But yes—this clarifies that success, if visible, becomes a target."
He was quiet for a long time. Then: "We need to ensure Sam understands what's coming. Not to frighten him. To prepare him."
By 1892, as Sam approached his ninth birthday, the city was transforming.
The arrivals had stabilized into a growing community. West Adams was becoming noticeably Black—the houses, the businesses, the churches, the schools all reflecting a community that was building infrastructure for itself because the white city would not build it. There was something both beautiful and desperate about this—the determination to create institutions of care and learning and commerce in the face of a society that would prefer you didn't exist.
But underneath the building was always the knowledge: the South was violent, and while Los Angeles was not the South, it was watching the South, learning from it. The informal racism of the 1880s was becoming more organized. The casual exclusion was becoming policy.
Thomas, watching this, was making plans. Not panicked plans, but strategic ones. Ways to position the family that would protect them as the climate worsened. Ways to ensure that whatever came, they would have options.
And Sam, at eight years old, was beginning to understand that survival wasn't guaranteed—that preparation was the only thing that might change the odds.