This dissertation is a longitudinal, comparative, and mixed methods study of the early development of community organizations in the first four metropolitan areas of the West Coast, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. As the places grew from small towns into large cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the cities developed distinct political, economic, social, and cultural institutions all undergirded by their unique civil societies. The cities were also unique in the U.S. for their populations’ diversity across race, religion, and country of origin. As I show, immigrant, racial, and ethnic organizations were prominent among West Coast cities’ civil societies and played central roles in the cities’ early developments. Further, the number of organizations a community built, which community organizations had power, and what kinds of power they wielded varied across cities and racial and ethnic groups. Race and place played formative roles in the development of civil society and, as a result, in the young cities’ developing institutions. I document racism and the development of settler colonial racial scripts in each place as the cities and their communities sought to make sense of their newfound location in the U.S. and global orders. These racial scripts played a central role in not just determining who was White or non-White, but also in creating new and locally contingent understandings of what it meant to be “White,” “American,” “Chinese,” “Catholic,” etc. The resulting racism, or lack thereof, further structured community organization growth and development among both Whites and non-Whites. I obtain these results through quantitative and network analyses of novel datasets that I built from city directories and county incorporation documents, and qualitative analysis of archives from government, private, and community collections. In this dissertation I argue that race and place are critical and underappreciated elements in the history of urban civil society, the history of these four cities, and in the political and organizational development of the U.S.