Events

  In On the Move, Martin traces his family’s movement west, beginning with his great-grandparent’s marriage and settlement in East Texas not long after Emancipation.  From that foothold, and driven by some of the same forces that moved other Americans, white and black — misfortune, wanderlust, economic necessity and world wars, and by some quite unique ones like racial injustice and fundamentalist evangelical religion — Martin’s later ancestors and nuclear family continued moving westward until they reached the shining sea.  In his lifetime, Martin’s family detoured by way of a Wyoming dude ranch and a Shoshone River bottom log cabin, a Montana railroad nexus, a Kansas war boom town and the Heart Mountain “relocation center.” They fell into a San Francisco Bay Area melting pot bubbling over with the excitement and activity of World War II and landed for good on the Monterey Peninsula at the height of its wartime productivity and fluidity.  In the process, his family became western African Americans — changed people.  “We and other black folk who had similar experiences tended to end up more like the people we settled among than those from whom we sprang.  We’re still Africans and we still bear the marks of our birth, but we’re different from our kinfolk who stayed ‘back home.’”  S. R. MARTIN JR. was born in Fort Worth, Texas. He is a retired teacher, scholar, and administrator of Evergreen State College in Olympia.