Many white supremacy defenders have gone out of their way to deny any racist intent being a factor in this Napa Valley incident. One of the key strategies to maintaining the system of white supremacy,is by denying it’s existence,no matter how much proof or evidence is available.

One thing that is impossible to deny is the long,well documented history of blatant racism in the Napa Valley area. When you understand the history of white supremacy in Napa Valley, the alleged racial discrimination that these innocent Black women suffered on the Napa Valley Wine Train will not seem like a stretch of the imagination.

According to prominent white historian James Loewen, author of the book Sundown Towns-a book about cities and towns all across America that barred Black people from living in or visiting certain areas after sundown- Napa Valley allegedly had a policy of excluding Black citizens.

This exclusionary policy is evident today because the current population of Napa is 74,966 people and only 436 of those residents are Black. There is a saying among many of the residents of Napa Valley today that NAPA stands for “No African People Allowed.”

In the 1920’s, Napa Valley hosted a huge Ku Klux Klan rally that brought in around 10,000 people. There is a mural in downtown Napa today that commemorates the KKK history in Napa. (photo below)

In 1989 many Neo-Nazi and Skinhead organizations around the country felt comfortable enough with the city of Napa they tried  to hold a white supremacist “Woodstock” styled concert event there. After pressure from the Jewish Defense League and other organizations the event was shelved.

There have been several articles from the local news outlets in Napa that document the history of racism in that area.

Going back to the early history of Napa,a Melanoid woman named Mary Ellen Pleasant-who is known as “the mother of civil rights in California”- is buried in Napa Valley.

Ironically,Mary Ellen Pleasant gained much of her notoriety for establishing lawsuits against a couple of railroad companies in the Bay area for ejecting her and other Black women from their trains because of race. And here we are over 100 years later,and the system of white supremacy is still in place and we have gone full circle.  Black women are still getting ejected from trains in the same area of the Bay, and race is still the suspected factor.