Born: 10 June 1865, United States
Died: 12 March 1944
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Julia Ann Shelton
The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
According to family memory, Julia Ann Shelton Shorey’s grandfather, Samuel Shelton, was brought west as an enslaved person in the 1840s and ultimately purchased his own freedom and that of his family in the new state of California. His son Frank, Julia Shorey’s father, helped found one of the first Baptist churches for Black Americans in California. Born on June 10, 1865, Julia Ann Shelton was thus part of an influential Black family connected to local and national efforts to expand opportunities for African Americans after the Civil War. These opportunities brought her to the heights of the maritime community connecting San Francisco to the world.
Shorey herself attended boarding school at the Phoenixonian Institute in San Jose, the first school in California where Black Americans could receive a secondary education. While there, she became extremely skilled at French embroidery and eventually had her work selected for display at the Mechanics’ Fair in San Francisco. In the 1880s, she married Captain William T. Shorey, a sea captain from Barbados who was the only Black ship captain on the West Coast. He frequently sailed from San Francisco, which by 1900 was the foremost international trading hub on the North American West Coast, importing and exporting over six million tons of goods. The couple had five children, three of whom survived to adulthood.
Because her husband was often absent at sea, Shorey was responsible for running her household and caring for their children on her own. However, as a sea captain’s wife Shorey was also a citizen of the Pacific Rim, and she accompanied her husband on voyages to Hawai‘i, Mexico, and Russia. She described her experiences abroad to her home community in letters to the editor published in the Black-owned newspaper, The San Francisco Elevator. Occasionally she would bring her children on voyages too. While the Victorian ideal of family life divided the home from the workplace, Shorey combined the two when she brought her children with her husband to sea. In 1902, she commented to a newspaper that her three-year-old Victoria was “a remarkable sailor” and observed wryly: “She knows the ropes and has perfect command of her father.” Unfortunately, one of these voyages ended tragically. Despite major strides in medicine at the turn of the century, early death was still common; when Shorey’s twenty-year-old daughter Zenobia Pearl became ill on a trip to Hawai‘i, she died soon after she returned home.
Like many middle-class, African American women across the United States, Shorey was very active in the Black community in her area. For over sixteen years she served as the president of the Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People of Oakland, obtaining funding and assistance for older Black Americans. She also served in leadership positions for various Black women’s clubs and fraternal orders near San Francisco, such as the Household of Ruth, the Good Samaritans, and the Knaresborough Circle, where she helped organize meetings and charitable events.
After her husband’s death in 1918, Shorey moved with her daughter Victoria and teenaged son William to Oregon. Victoria, who had trained in typing at Oakland Technical School, turned her high school typing awards into a respectable job as a clerk, which enabled her to support the family of three. Eventually, Shorey and her daughter moved back to California where Victoria married and continued clerking for law offices and government departments. Shorey lived the rest of her days with her daughter’s family, eventually dying of heart disease on March 12, 1944 in Alameda, California. She was buried with her husband and daughter Zenobia Pearl in Mountain View Cemetery.