California has a demorgraphic of a little over 6% African American. It is higher in places like Oakland (28%), Los Angeles (10%), and Sacramento (16%). After the abolition of slavery what were some motives for them to settle 3000 miles away from the south instead of just heading north like most others? Or was it a few decades down the line that the African American population grew in the west?
California was not the only destination that African Americans fled to in the wake of Jim Crow Laws in the south. See: Great Migration: African Americans If you want to know more. In short It was not the end of Slavery but the rise of Jim Crow Laws, and increased racial tension after failed reconstruction.
“The negro’s status in southern politics is as dark as Hell and smells like cheese. There is an unwritten law in the state of Mississippi that not enough Negroes shall be allowed to register to jeopardize white supremacy.... On one occasion, a Negro applicant went up to register. Said the registrar: “get the hell out of here nigger, before I take something and knowck you in the head. You niggers are looking for trouble. What you want to vote in a white man’s election or? you think you are equal to a white man, don’t you” -Sidney D. Redmond, 1930's
Quote taken from Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the age of Jim Crow
Most African-American migration to California was during World War II, lured by employment opportunities in the shipyards and related defense plants. It's sometimes called The Second Great Migration, by comparison with The Great Migration to northern industrial cities that began during the First World War. Some details regarding migration to LA.
A large number of Black Americans went west at the end of the Civil War. Hollywood Westerns have given people the misconception that everybody in the old west was white or indian, but the frontier was actually very diverse. Up to a quarter of all cowboys were black. Black men and women came out for the same reasons everybody else did; they wanted more freedom, more opportunity, to start over, to leave behind the traumas they had experienced. They came out to punch cows, to homestead land, to mine for gold, to fight the indians for the military. There were a number of all-black townships started in the late 19th century: Dearfield, Colorado; Langston City and Boley, Oklahoma; and Allensworth, California to name a few.
This brought black settlers to all sorts of places in the midwest and west, not just California cities. The Great Migrations of the 20th century were separate events precipitated by Jim Crow laws and job opportunities, and those migrations did fill up entire neighborhoods in LA and Oakland. I frankly only have a superficial knowledge of those events, but I wanted to explain that plenty of black people came out before then, to all sorts of areas, and for mostly the same reasons everybody else headed west when the war ended.