two pages essay

The Western History Association

Facing the Urban Frontier: African American History in the Reshaping of the Twentieth- Century American West Author(s): Quintard Taylor Reviewed work(s): Source: The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 1 (SPRING 2012), pp. 4-27 Published by: Western Historical Quarterly, Utah State University on behalf of The Western History Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/westhistquar.43.1.0004 . Accessed: 14/10/2012 17:45

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Quintard Taylor Fiftieth president of the Western History Association.

Western Historical Quarterly 43 (Spring 2012): 5–27. Copyright © 2012, Western History Association.

Facing the Urban Frontier: African American History in

the Reshaping of the Twentieth- Century American West

Quintard Taylor

The arrival of tens of thousands of African American migrants during and after World War II dramatically transformed the Northern California cities of Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond and reshaped the politics of California. This article explores their impact on the political economy of these cities and suggests how their experiences presaged the transformation of urban America.

although the West today constitutes one of the most urbanized regions in the nation, its history remains understudied. I think this comes mainly because far too many people perceive urban and western history as mutually exclusive. I can make that claim with some confidence because I, too, accepted the erroneous idea. When Earl Pomeroy and Richard Maxwell Brown urged me to attend my first Western History Association meeting in 1990, I protested that I did African American urban history. They responded, “What do you write about?” I said, “Seattle,” and they promptly declared me a “western” historian.

Despite my hallway conversion into the western “faith,” I still harbored reserva- tions. Powerful ideas continue to influence the way we define what is properly “west- ern” in our history. Unlike Asian American, Chicano, or much of Native American history, which are automatically perceived as “western” in orientation, black history in this region continues to be viewed by western regional historians and historians of African America as an interesting footnote to a story focused elsewhere. Walter Prescott Webb’s comment in his 1957 article in Harper’s Magazine, describing the West as the region without “water, timber, cities, industry, labor, and Negroes,” seemed to define conventional wisdom.1

Quintard Taylor is the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington, Seattle.

1 Walter Prescott Webb, “The American West: Perpetual Mirage,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1957, 30.

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Despite Webb’s grand pronouncement, the West had “Negroes.” If we define the West as beginning with the states from the 98th meridian and stretching to the Pacific, then as early as 1870, African Americans comprised 12 percent of the region’s popula- tion. Put another way, some 284,000 black people resided in every state and territory in the West. By 1910 slightly less than a million black westerners constituted about 6 per- cent of the regional population. By 2010 that number rose to 7 million, or 6 percent of the regional total.2

Webb’s quotation allows us to pursue the challenge of linking cities and Negroes in determining the region’s character. In short, I want to provide a brief urban history of the West through the prism of the African Americans who lived in the East Bay cities of Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond. Today well over 90 percent of African American women and men in the West reside in its cities. The origins of these contemporary black western urban communities can be found in the rise of late nineteenth-century African American urban populations in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. I specifically mention these states and territories because by 1890 most of their black residents lived in cities.

In 1885, when black cowboys trailed cattle from south central Texas to Dodge City, Kansas, when black homesteaders tried to grow wheat in the stubborn Nebraska soil, and when buffalo soldiers patrolled the desert Southwest, other black women and men entered San Francisco, Oakland, Denver, Seattle, and Los Angeles, eager to assume the jobs available in the urban economy. The contrasting images of black cowboys, homesteaders, buffalo soldiers, and urban workers remind us that “multiple” Wests existed side by side.

These nineteenth-century communities expanded in larger cities and smaller towns such as Salt Lake City; Topeka; Virginia City, Nevada; Helena, Montana; Yankton, South Dakota; and Pocatello, Idaho. Women and men founded the churches, fraternal organi- zations, social clubs, and fledgling civil rights organizations that shaped community life. Black urban populations in places like Helena and Yankton did not survive into our era, but Houston, Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Oakland became the final des- tination for tens of thousands of hopeful migrants.3

2 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Ninth Census of the United States–1870, Volume 1: Statistics of the Population of the United States Embracing the Tables of Race, Nationality and Occupations. . . . (Washington, DC: GPO, 1872), table III, 83, 89–93, 95–6, 107–8, 143–6, 195–9, 204–6, 241–3, 270– 6, 283, 295–6; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910, Volume II: General Report and Analysis (Washington, DC: GPO, 1911), table 1, 77, 157, 211, 423, 669, 1147; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910, Volume III: General Report and Analysis (Washington, DC: GPO, 1911), table 1, 45, 83, 171, 343, 461, 505, 694, 799, 877, 899, 1115; “Black City Population: San Francisco-Oakland, CA,” accessed 12 August 2011, http://www.blackdemographics.com/ sanfrancisco_oaklandblackdemographics.html; and U.S. Census Bureau, “State and County QuickFacts,” last modified 3 June 2011, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html, last modified 3 June 2011.

3 Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York, 1998), 192–3.

Quintard Taylor 7

African American Oakland began with the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. Although a handful of blacks had resided in the city since its found- ing in 1852, the Pullman Palace Car Company’s decision to station a porter on each of its cars to provide service to passengers, and their announcement that the porter would be a black man, made the city the home base for a steadily growing group of workers who paradoxically received low wages but wore white shirts and neckties and were relatively well educated. The porters were as ubiquitous to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century railroad travelers as flight attendants are to today’s airline passen- gers. They created a community in Oakland that by 1900 held one thousand people who supported a half-dozen churches, numerous social and civic clubs, a civil rights organization, one newspaper, and a small business district along Seventh Street. These porters, and the waiters and cooks who followed, had relatively steady railroad jobs and thus created a small, prosperous middle-class community far removed from the national centers of African American population.4

Black Oakland’s population tripled between 1900 and 1910, growing from 1,026 to 3,055. By 1910 Oakland, rather than San Francisco, had the largest black population of the Bay Area communities, and the East Bay, which included Oakland, Berkeley, and smaller cities such as Richmond and Alameda, had become the center of African American cultural and social life in Northern California.5

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire generated this growth, sending thousands of refugees, regardless of race, to safety across the bay. The vast majority of African Americans, however, settled in West Oakland, the area of the city physically closest to San Francisco—attractive because of its semi-rural setting and the absence of powerful labor unions, which in San Francisco hindered black employment. They found work in the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP) roundhouses and repair shops that lined the Oakland waterfront; they could walk to the railroad facilities—a proximity that was no accident. The railroad required Pullman porters, cooks, dining car waiters, and even railroad maintenance laborers to live no more than a few blocks from a station or roundhouse. Black women who avoided private domestic service worked in a similar capacity for the company; in addition to cleaning berths, they provided manicures for both men and women. Other black men found work on the docks, on Pacific Coast steamships, and, after World War I, in the Chevrolet, Durant, and Willys-Overland

4 See Lawrence P. Crouchett, Lonnie G. Bunch III, and Martha Kendall Winnacker, Visions Toward Tomorrow: The History of the East Bay Afro-American Community, 1852–1977 (Oakland, 1989), 9–15 and Delores Nason McBroome, Parallel Communities: African Americans in California’s East Bay, 1850–1963 (New York, 1993), 20–3. According to Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, the Pullman Palace Car Company relocated its manufacturing and repair center from San Francisco to Richmond, but virtually no African Americans worked there before World War I. Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910–1963 (Berkeley, 2001), 14.

5 Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ, 2003), 48–9; Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco (Philadelphia, 1980), 20, 164; and Moore, Our Deeds, 16.

8 SPRING 2012 Western Historical Quarterly

auto factories. Nonetheless, by 1930 over 60 percent of local black paychecks still came from either SP or Pullman.6

In this scenario, where work determined residence, pre-World War II black Oakland emerged as a compact neighborhood of tree-lined streets, Victorian two-story flats, rail- road-worker rooming houses, and a few scattered cottages and bungalows bordered by the warehouses, rail yards, and factories along the waterfront to the west and the down- town business district east of the area. Former Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums remembers West Oakland as a “port of entry” for blacks who arrived in Northern California prior to World War II. Many of the newcomers disembarked at the train station at Sixteenth and Wood and settled within blocks of that location. He recalls the West Oakland of that period as a racially mixed working-class area where Italian, Portuguese, Greek, and Mexican immigrants mixed easily with their black neighbors.7

Geography measured social mobility as well. A smaller number of Pullman porters and a few university-educated African Americans settled in Berkeley partly because of its more liberal atmosphere and the greater possibility of owning a home there. Ever since the first black student graduated from the University of California in 1909, upwardly mobile African American professionals and business owners moved nearby, often hoping that their own children would attend the university. As one observer remarked, they were proud homeowners who kept their neighborhoods free of rowdy behavior. By 1940, in fact, Berkeley had 3,395 black residents, the largest percent- age (3.9 percent) of African American residents in the Bay Area and second only to Los Angeles (4.2 percent) in the entire state. “Berkeley was always the first step up,” recalled Norvel Smith. “You came into West Oakland, and then North Oakland, and if you really made it with a civil service job or something [like that], you moved into South Berkeley.”8

Oakland’s tiny population lived on the geographical and cultural edge of an overwhelmingly white city of small business owners and skilled tradesmen who politi- cally dominated the city. Most Asian, European, and Mexican immigrants and the small black population resided in West Oakland’s “flatlands.” An area in the foot- hills of East Oakland, known locally as “The Bible Belt,” housed a primarily white Protestant middle-class population. The city’s most affluent white residents lived further east in the Oakland Hills. Bible Belt residents outnumbered the white elite

6 Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill, 2010); McBroome, Parallel Communities, 43, 67–73; and Self, American Babylon, 48–9.

7 Ronald V. Dellums, Lying Down With the Lions: A Public Life from the Streets of Oakland to the Halls of Power (Boston, 2000), 11.

8 Norvel Smith quoted in Self, American Babylon, 50. For percentage totals, see U.S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Volume II: Characteristics of the Population, Part 1, California (Washington, DC: GPO, 1942), table 31, 599 and table B-36, 630. For information on pre-World War II Berkeley, see W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, The 1960s (New York, 1989), 49–51; Crouchett, Visions, 22; and McBroome, Parallel Communities, 69.

Quintard Taylor 9

in the Oakland Hills as well as the blacks, Asians, and European immigrants in the flatlands of West Oakland.

As strange as it may seem to us today, Oakland’s Bible Belt supported the Ku Klux Klan, which dominated the city politically and culturally in the early 1920s. The Oakland Klan identified a number of enemies, including political machines and “down- town interests” as well as the tiny black and Asian populations. For them, the great- est danger, however, lay with the foreign-born Catholics. As the local Klan-supported monthly newspaper, The Crusader, reported in a November 1921 editorial calling for immigration restrictions, “[T]he more we get of Southern Ireland and Southern Europe the quicker the control of the United States will pass into their hands.” If the nation “restricts immigration,” the article continued, “our crime sheets will be reduced by half, there will be little foreign agitation in our midst, and the political power of the Roman Catholic Church will wane to zero.” 9

Restrictive covenants proved to be the major challenge for pre-World War II black residents in Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond. A black San Francisco news- paper editorial said in 1927, “Residential segregation is as real in California as it is in Mississippi. A mob is unnecessary. All that’s needed is a neighbor[hood] meeting and agreement in writing not to rent, lease, or sell to blacks, and the Courts will do the rest.”10

By the 1920s, such covenants defined the spatial boundaries for black Oakland. Real estate developers in the Maxwell Park district of East Oakland proudly announced that “the property is restricted as to Orientals, Asiatics, and Africans.” The develop- ers of Sheffield Village, constructed with Federal Housing Administration funds, said bluntly that their homes were “[f]or use only by persons whose blood is entirely of the Caucasian race, except [those] strictly in the capacity of domestic servants.” Elbert A. Daly, owner of the weekly California Voice, recalled how in 1923 he and other black men became armed defenders protecting the Burt Powell family, who had moved into a previously all-white district. The men guarded the family’s home for weeks while white neighbors stood in Powell’s front yard threatening to “kill him.”11 The campaign to end residential segregation would consume much of the time, energy, and resources of black East Bay residents for much of the rest of the twentieth century.

World War II forever changed the West and certainly had a profound impact on the East Bay. The combined black population for Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond grew from 12,178 to 74,586 as African Americans from across the nation chose Northern

9 "Oakland" Crusader quoted in Chris Rhomberg, No There There: Race, Class, and the Political Community in Oakland (Berkeley, 2004), 53. For the rise and fall of the Klan in Oakland politics, see “The Making of a White Middle Class: The Ku Klux Klan and Urban Reform,” in ibid., 50–72. For a more detailed discussion of Oakland’s Bible Belt, see ibid., 127.

10 Editorial in San Francisco Spokesman quoted in Albert S. Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954 (Lawrence, 1993), 33.

11 Maxwell Park developers and Elbert A. Daly quoted in Rhomberg, No There, 52–3 and Sheffield Village developers quoted in McBroome, Parallel Communities, 80.

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California as their new home. In travel modes reminiscent of the gold rush ninety years earlier, but more akin to the Dust Bowl migrations of the early 1930s, many black migrants followed hot, dusty stretches of overland trails that had now become high- ways, such as U.S. 80 and the more famous Route 66. They came, as one writer said, with their “mementos, histories and hope all tied to the top of a car.”12 Some of them, like Maya Angelou, Bill Russell, and Huey P. Newton, became famous. Most others remained obscure as they sought their version of El Dorado, opportunity, and freedom on a western shore. (See Table 1.)

Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond saw enormous increases in both the num- bers and percentages of African Americans. Oakland, for example, saw a 462 percent increase while Richmond and Berkeley grew by 4,853 percent and 291 percent, respec- tively. As Marilynn S. Johnson remarked in her study of the East Bay in World War II, the migration made the region “younger, more southern, more female, and noticeably more black” than ever before. It was impossible for anyone in the area to avoid notice of the change.13

For new and old black westerners, the major obstacle to getting war work was the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers. The high demand for Liberty ships made the Boilermakers, for a time, one of the most powerful labor unions in the nation. Their

12 Lynell George, No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (London, 1992), 1. 13 Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II

(Berkeley, 1993), 58.

Data by: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Volume II: Characteristics of the Population, Part 1, California (Washington, DC: GPO, 1942), tables 31, C-35, F-36 and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth Census of Population:1950, Volume II: Characteristics of the Population, Part 5, California (Washington, DC: GPO, 1952), table 34. Table by Quintard Taylor.

Table 1: San Francisco Bay Area Black Population Growth, 1940–1950

City 1940 % of Total Population

1950 % of Total Population

% Increase (1940–1950)

Alameda 249 0.7 5,312 9.0 2,033

Albany 4 0.04 1,778 10.2 44,100

Berkeley 3,395 3.9 13,289 11.9 291

Marin City 0 n.a. 235 1.6 n.a.

Oakland 8,462 2.8 47,562 12.4 462

Richmond 270 1.1 13,374 15.6 4,853

San Francisco 4,846 0.8 43,502 5.6 798

Vallejo 438 2.2 1,542 2.1 245

Quintard Taylor 11

opposition to black worker equality loomed large in the Bay Area as they controlled an arc of shipyards stretching north and west from Oakland to Marin County that employed more than 150,000 workers. Black women and men comprised 25 percent of that number. Over 90 percent of the black workers in Richmond in 1944, for example, worked in the Kaiser Shipyards.14 (See Figure 1.)

In 1941 the Boilermakers negotiated a closed shop agreement with West Coast ship- builders that by 1944 forced 32,000 black workers into auxiliary unions from Portland to San Diego. Membership in an auxiliary entailed restrictions not faced by white union members. Once hired, black workers had to obtain approval of white locals before they could be promoted. They paid dues but could not vote in regular union elections. The regular local could abolish an auxiliary at any time. “We pay our dues but what do we get?” declared Joyce Washington, a Los Angeles shipyard worker in 1943. “Nothing but to be discriminated against and segregated.”15

African American workers and some white union members, however, matched their determination to abolish segregation in the workplace to the Boilermakers’ will to maintain it. In the summer of 1943 nearly a thousand black shipyard workers in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Portland refused to pay their dues to protest the auxiliary union scheme. One of those fired workers, Joseph James, presided over the San Francisco NAACP. James filed suit against his employer, Marinship, and the Boilermakers. That case went to the California Supreme Court in 1944, which ruled in his favor. The pro- tests and legal challenges affirmed sociologist Katherine Archibald’s wartime assess- ment that “the white worker . . . may still come to the table first and take the best seat, but now the negro sits there too.”16

After employment, housing proved to be the next difficult challenge. The war- time influx of African Americans, coupled with decades-old restrictive covenants, added the Fillmore District in San Francisco, West Oakland, and South Berkeley to the disreputable roll of crowded western black urban ghettos such as Los Angeles’s Central Avenue, Denver’s Five Points, Omaha’s Near North Side, and Houston’s Fourth Ward. Most Richmond African Americans resided in the “Black Crescent,” a complex of mostly World War II-era housing projects located on the edge of the city but separated by the SP and Santa Fe Railroads. One city official justified this

14 Taylor, In Search, 258–60. 15 Joyce Washington quoted in Taylor, In Search, 259. 16 Katherine Archibald, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity (Berkeley, 1947), 99.

Often black workers created local organizations to challenge shipyard segregation. According to Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, workers in Richmond formed the Shipyard Workers Against Discrimination that evolved into the Richmond NAACP. Moore also argued that while black workers challenged Boilermaker discrimination, their struggle also destroyed antiunion senti- ment among most African American workers. See Moore, Our Deeds, 60–2. For a discussion of white Boilermakers who supported the black workers, see McBroome, Parallel Communities, 113. For a discussion of black workers’ campaign to integrate unions across the West Coast, see Taylor, In Search, 258–60.

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Quintard Taylor 13

policy of residential segregation by claiming that it “promote[d] closer harmony in the community.”17

West Oakland represented the worst of this ghettoization process, growing from 16 percent black in 1940 to 62 percent black in 1950 and expanding into North Oakland and South Berkeley. In a pattern duplicated throughout the urban West, the Oakland Housing Authority built all-black housing projects—literally shipyard-worker ghet- toes—on the periphery of West Oakland. The increased population brought residen- tial overcrowding for the first time and more blatant displays of racial hostility. A 1944 editorial in The Oakland Observer lamented the arrival in the city of “socially-liberated or uninhibited Negroes who are not bound by the old and peaceful understanding between Negro and white in Oakland. . . . Right there is where the Negro is making his big mistake. He is butting into white civilization instead of keeping in the perfectly orderly and convenient Negro civilization of [West] Oakland.”18

West Oakland lost its multiethnic character during the war as white ethnics departed for other areas of the city and new black migrants moved in. The homes were much more crowded since far more people arrived than departed. Ron Dellums’s house, like others in the neighborhood, now had three generations and multiple families under one roof. “Throughout my youth I could hear the sounds of family life floating out of curtained garage windows and savor the scent of ‘down home’ cooking oozing through cracked garage doors.”19

Despite growing racial tension during World War II, the thousands of new black residents of West Oakland thrived during the war years. Flush with shipyard wages, these workers spent much of it along the Seventh Street commercial district, which by now had dozens of black-owned businesses and professional offices. The street also devel- oped a legendary nightclub scene anchored by Slim Jenkins’s jazz club at Seventh and Wood, which drew major entertainers from across the nation. One of its most unlikely patrons was William F. Knowland, the future U.S. senator from California and owner of The Oakland Tribune. Seventh Street, which migrant Maya Angelou described as the place where “bars and smoke shops sat in the lap of storefront churches,” was the center of black nightlife in Northern California.20

In mid-August 1944 the Kaiser Shipyards instituted their first round of layoffs. Worker populations at the Kaiser yards in Richmond alone had peaked at 100,000 in

17 Richmond city official quoted in Moore, Our Deeds, 98. For a discussion of the Black Crescent, see ibid., 111 and Rorabaugh, Berkeley, 54–5. For a discussion of the emerging ghettos throughout the West, see Taylor, In Search, 252.

18 Editorial in Oakland Observer quoted in Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill, 1996), 72. See also Murch, Living, 24–7.

19 Dellums, Lying Down, 11–2. 20 Maya Angelou quoted in Murch, Living, 28. On William Knowland at Slim Jenkins’s

club, see ibid., 27. See also Dellums, Lying Down, 11–2; Johnson, Second Gold Rush, 138–9; and Self, American Babylon, 54.

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July 1943 then slowly edged downward as many workers voluntarily left. After August 1944 the reductions were no longer voluntary. By December of that year only 47,000 workers remained at the Richmond yards, and by May 1945 Kaiser was laying off workers at the rate of 1,000 per month. By spring 1946 the yards supported only 9,000 workers.21

The World War II boom extended into the 1950s and 1960s for white East Bay resi- dents, but it ended abruptly for blacks in 1945. By 1947 thousands of African Americans who had once been “essential workers” were now unemployed. In that year, black Oaklanders comprised 50 percent of the people applying for unemployment benefits, although they were 12 percent of the population. In 1950, when the Richmond unem- ployment rate was 13.4 percent, black unemployment stood at 29 percent.22

The story of Willie Stokes personalizes these sobering statistics. In June 1941 Stokes made $1.25 a day as a 27-year-old farm laborer on an Arkansas cotton plantation. Two years later he worked as a welder at the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond for $10 a day. By June 1946 Stokes labored in a small chemical plant on the edge of the city making $6.40 per day. By June 1947 Stokes had been unemployed for seven months. At first he made do on unemployment checks, and when they ran out he sold his car, cashed in his war bonds, and used his remaining savings to support his unemployed wife and three children. Unemployment for Stokes and his family, and for many others in the Bay Area, meant poverty, relegation to neighborhoods with rampant crime and juvenile delinquency, and eventually homelessness. These problems would continue to plague black western urban communities well into the twenty-first century. For Oakland, Richmond, and Berkeley, these “social pathologies” that many Americans have come to identify with ghetto “culture” were in fact initiated by a series of structural disloca- tions that evolved at the end of World War II.23

On 25 April 1947 the Pacific Coast Board of Intergovernmental Relations, a body of leading federal and state officials in California, Washington, and Oregon, issued a report on conditions already familiar to Stokes. It said, “The short and immediate term outlook for Negro employment is not . . . good. If . . . we were to experience a significant recession, the lot of the West Coast Negro, already serious, may become little short of desperate. As long as Negroes are commonly regarded as marginal labor, they will suf- fer very heavy unemployment when sufficient white labor is available.”24

Despite the ongoing challenge of unemployment, African Americans like Stokes decided to stay in the Bay Area. Discharged servicemen who wanted to remain on the

21 Moore, Our Deeds, 94. 22 On postwar Oakland unemployment, see Taylor, In Search, 273–4. For Richmond unem-

ployment, see Moore, Our Deeds, 95–6. 23 Cy W. Record, “Willie Stokes at the Golden Gate,” Crisis 56 (June 1949): 175–9. See also

Moore, Our Deeds, 96–7 and Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, “Deindustrialization, Urban Poverty and African American Community Mobilization in Oakland, 1945 through the 1990s,” in Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California, ed. Lawrence B. de Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor (Seattle, 2001), 369.

24 Pacific Coast Board quoted in Record, “Willie Stokes at the Golden Gate,” 179.

Quintard Taylor 15

West Coast joined them. Many realized that for all the problems they faced in Oakland, Berkeley, or Richmond, the continuing violence, discrimination, and segregation in the South, and increasingly in the North, meant there was no better place to go. California Voice newspaper owner Elbert A. Daly, himself a 1920s Alabama migrant to the Bay Area, succinctly summarized the view of many World War II newcomers when he said, “If you were in prison and the doors were suddenly opened for you to go out, you wouldn’t volunteer to go back in it, would you?”25

Settling in, the migrants changed the cultural, social, and political landscape. Their dramatic impact on the latter continues to this day. Numerous black West Coast resi- dents, employing the skills they acquired in their struggles with the Boilermakers and other segregated unions, became community organizers. Richmond resident Margaret Starks described this militancy: “It was about survival. They weren’t leaving and they didn’t want to be pushed around by white folks anymore. So they had to get together and fight back.”26

Fighting back took a variety of forms, including organizing against school and housing segregation, job discrimination, public accommodations exclusion, and police brutality. By the late 1960s, the Black Panther Party made police brutality the linchpin of its appeal to African American Oakland and other black communities across the nation. Yet as early as 1950 the pattern of discriminatory police violence in Oakland drew the attention of the California State Assembly’s Interim Committee on Crime and Corrections. The committee held investigative hearings on charges of racial harass- ment, including beatings and, on some occasions, the killing of black citizens. In one of dozens of reported cases, Stanley Wilson, a black musician, entered an Oakland police station to pay a traffic fine and was beaten because his spouse was white. The com- mittee also discovered that the city’s police department refused to hire well-qualified black or white candidates who scored well on their entrance exams and instead selected white men with less education because they were easier to control. C. L. Dellums, then chair of the Alameda County NAACP, told the committee that the police department ignored black citizen complaints and added, “Generally Negroes regard the police as their natural enemies.”27

African Americans had plenty of grievances but found support from a growing array of allies. By l947 the Bay Area had achieved national prominence for an interra- cial progressive coalition that challenged the problems facing people of color. The San Francisco-based Bay Area Council Against Discrimination formed in 1942 and was soon followed by the Council for Civic Unity (CCU), which became a major voice for racial

25 Elbert A. Daly quoted in McBroome, Parallel Communities, 129. 26 Margaret Starks quoted in Moore, Our Deeds, 102. 27 C. L. Dellums quoted in Rhomberg, No There, 122. Dellums’s nephew, Ron Dellums,

remembers the years of the wartime influx as the time the white police force of Oakland became more alienated from the people they were supposed to serve. Dellums, Lying Down, 12. See also Murch, Living, 39.

16 SPRING 2012 Western Historical Quarterly

understanding by 1945. Beginning in 1952 the CCU produced “Dateline Freedom,” a series of weekly fifteen-minute radio broadcasts that achieved enormous popularity and represented what historian Albert S. Broussard called the African American commu- nity’s version of “fireside chats.”28

Racially integrated unions became a powerful component of this coalition. Pre-World War II Bay Area African Americans had a long-standing respect for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation’s first black-led trade union, and its long- time leader, C. L. Dellums. With offices located in West Oakland, the Brotherhood could be counted on to support every major effort for racial justice, both locally and nationally. By the end of World War II, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, led by Harry Bridges, which was 25 percent African American, and the National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards, which was 33 percent black, became two of the coalition’s most reliable allies, despite red-baiting elements both within and beyond the black community. They created what historian Robert O. Self described as a “cos- mopolitan laborite culture that blended politics, trade unionism, and human rights.”29

The growth of the African American population on the West Coast in the 1940s almost immediately led to significant black political participation, which by the end of the decade included a small but steadily growing number of African American elected officials. California Voice columnist Louis Campbell announced that the “influx of gobs of new sepia citizens [created] a new complexion on things political around the Bay Area.” Black votes could no longer be “sought (and bought) by the ancient method of ‘greas- ing’ a few white-haired ‘Uncle Thomas’ types who held lowly jobs around city hall.”30

These new voters and officials—virtually all of them Democrats—did change the complexion of politics in the region. Nowhere was this more evident than in the East Bay. A number of black political leaders emerged from the East Bay Democratic Club (EBDC), under the leadership of D. G. Gibson, a former railway dining car waiter. Gibson established the EBDC in the early 1940s, around the time of peak migration, after he correctly surmised that the newcomers would be permanent rather than tempo- rary residents. The EBDC remained a force in Bay Area politics until the 1980s. Willie Brown, a future Speaker of the California State Assembly and mayor of San Francisco, declared in the 1970s, “D. G. Gibson may very well be the [political] father of all of us who are now active in the black political arena.”31

The EBDC helped forge a political coalition that included progressive unions, Berkeley liberals, working-class blacks in West and North Oakland, and middle-class blacks in South Berkeley. Together they wrested power away from then-dominant con- servative Republicans and, in doing so, created the region’s liberal political culture,

28 For a discussion of these remarkable organizations, see Broussard, Black San Francisco, 193–204.

29 Self, American Babylon, 50. 30 Louis Campbell quoted in Moore, Our Deeds, 111. 31 Willie Brown quoted in Self, American Babylon, 79.

Quintard Taylor 17

which endures to this day. Their activities would also help fashion a far more liberal Democratic Party at the state level that in 1958 culminated in the election of Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, father of the current governor of California, Jerry Brown. The EBDC’s first significant victory came in 1948 when Byron Rumford, a black Berkeley pharma- cist, won election to the California State Assembly. Although Rumford represented a predominately white district, his election was the first in a series of victories that by the 1970s would lead to black elected officials in every major city in the Bay Area and continuous African American political representation for the 7th U.S. Congressional District (Berkeley and North and West Oakland) since 1970.32

The Bay Area offers a spectacular vantage point for reexamining the civil rights era because the movement had its longest history there. Black residents simultaneously fought to end slavery in California and for their civil rights in the 1850s. Activists such as Mary Ellen Pleasant, Peter Lester, and Mifflin Gibbs led organized, disciplined pro- tests against racial discrimination and exclusion in the decade before the Civil War.33

By the early 1960s, civil rights activists—blacks, whites, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos—across the region employed sit-ins, economic boycotts, pro- test marches, and other forms of nonviolent demonstration to confront the three major grievances of the black community: job discrimination, housing bias, and de facto school segregation. They saw their efforts as integral to the national campaign to eradicate racism, empower black communities, and achieve the full and final democratization of the United States.

Although civil rights protests took place in a variety of cities across the West, the Bay Area became the epicenter of such regional protests due to its long tradition of left labor activism, which provided tactics, support, and participants. San Francisco’s chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), formed in 1948, also supplied early models of protest when it conducted successful campaigns in the early 1950s against housing discrimination in the Fillmore District. By the early 1960s, area African Americans also had an array of issues and grievances that drove protests, including continuing job discrimination. For example, West Oakland sat on the doorstep of the city’s down- town business district, yet as late as 1963 no African Americans worked in even the most menial capacity as janitors or cleaning women in downtown stores. By 1961 black Oakland had an unemployment rate of 25 percent.34

Berkeley followed a similar pattern. In 1960 the citywide unemployment rate was 3.7 percent, with the rate for African Americans at 11 percent. Unions shut out most black

32 On Byron Rumford, see Lawrence P. Crouchett, William Byron Rumford: The Life and Public Service of a California Legislator: A Biography (El Cerrito, CA, 1984). On the growth of black political influence in Northern California, see Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage, 162–5. On the particular role of Berkeley liberals in this coalition-building process, see Rorabaugh, Berkeley, 52–4. See also Self, American Babylon, 76–86 and Moore, Our Deeds, 111–4. The grow- ing political activity throughout the West is described in Taylor, In Search, 275–6.

33 For a discussion of this early struggle, see Taylor, In Search, 78–9, 90–4. 34 Ibid., 289.

18 SPRING 2012 Western Historical Quarterly

workers, which prevented them from working in a variety of occupations. Contractors refused to hire them for residential construction jobs fearing white homeowners would object, and grocery store chains had no black employees because of union exclusion. As late as 1961 downtown merchants refused to hire African Americans, and only one black waitress worked in the entire city. One Berkeley employer summarized this attitude when he said, “I’m not prejudiced; I just prefer to have an all-white staff.”35

A geography of race and class also divided the East Bay. African Americans in Oakland and Berkeley described a “Maginot line” that confined the vast majority of working-class black residents to the flatlands while middle-income whites moved to racially exclusive suburbs such as San Leandro and affluent whites occupied the Oakland and Berkeley Hills.36

Beginning in 1961, Bay Area activists challenged discrimination in its myriad forms. Protest targets shifted between places in San Francisco to Oakland, Richmond, and Berkeley. Activists also alternated between issues of employment discrimination, housing segregation, and public accommodations exclusion. Employing organizing and protest tactics similar to those used in the South, they chose targets ranging from Mel’s Diner (later made famous in the film American Graffiti) to Montgomery Ward. They took on the Lucky grocery store chain and over two hundred businesses in downtown Berkeley and Oakland. They even took on the discriminatory hiring practices of William Knowland’s powerful Oakland Tribune.37

Protests reached their apex in 1964 with the Sheraton Palace demonstrations led by eighteen-year-old Tracy Simms, a Berkeley native and former San Francisco State University freshman who dropped out of school to work in the local civil rights movement. When asked why she engaged in civil rights protests, Simms told the San Francisco Chronicle, “I inherited this fight as part of my Negro birthright.” Simms and other activists organized the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination (AHCED), which led the controversial but successful “shop-in” protests in Berkeley against Lucky. Encouraged by their victory, the group set its sights on the most prominent hotel in the Bay Area, the Sheraton Palace, which had a whites-only hiring policy. Ironically, the hotel employed a black staff when it first opened in 1875 but fired them when white hotel workers organized the workforce in 1890.38

In February 1964 the AHCED began demonstrating against the hotel. Picketing began on a small scale but escalated, ending in the arrest of 123 demonstrators. On 6

35 Berkeley employer quoted in Rorabaugh, Berkeley, 63. For more information on employ- ment discrimination in Berkeley, see ibid., 70–1.

36 Taylor, In Search, 289. Berkeley’s particular pattern of residential segregation is described in Rorabaugh, Berkeley, 55–61.

37 Paul T. Miller, The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights: African Americans in San Francisco, 1945–1975 (New York, 2010), 75–7. See also Rorabaugh, Berkeley, 72–3; Self, American Babylon, 56–7; and Taylor, In Search, 290.

38 Tracy Simms quoted in Miller, Postwar Struggle, 77. For a discussion of the replacement of nineteenth-century black workers by white employees, see Broussard, Black San Francisco, 39–40.

Quintard Taylor 19

March approximately 1,500 demonstrators, ranging from working-class black youth to UC Berkeley professors, walked the picket lines while hundreds of others filled the hotel lobby and sat down. Another 167 demonstrators went to jail, including Mario Savio, a future leader of Berkeley’s free speech movement. Ultimately, San Francisco Mayor John G. Shelly mediated negotiations between Simms and the Sheraton Palace that became binding on all of the city’s major hotels, ending their racially exclusionary hiring policies.39

Four months after the activists’ stunning victory, on 2 July, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That day much of the nation believed that the century-long struggle for racial justice had ceased. But they were wrong, particularly concerning Oakland. In thirteen months Watts would explode in Los Angeles, and within two years the entire national discourse would shift from “Freedom Now” to “Black Power.” For Oakland and the East Bay, the long struggle for jobs and housing continued as new leaders realized that heroic marches and multiracial demonstrations ultimately proved no match for the structural changes that broadly and silently undermined the very gains promised by the civil rights movement.

Oakland in the 1960s became both blacker and poorer. Urban renewal, which began slowly in the 1950s, systematically removed much of the housing stock of West Oakland. Local residents had long called for city government to go after “slum landlords” whose properties brought down the value of surrounding homes proudly maintained by working-class families. What they got instead was urban renewal, which effectively designated all of West Oakland as blighted.

Lola Bell Sims, writing to President Harry Truman in 1949, anticipated the twenty- year struggle against redevelopment. “Just now here in Oakland the colored people are much confused and very unhappy thinking that they are going to lose their all and all by the U.S. government taking their property by force. . . . I ask you please let the good homes that are suitable remain. The colored people especially here in Oakland . . . have their life earnings put in a home.” 40

Compounding the impact of urban renewal was the decision to build the Cypress Freeway through West Oakland and the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, which ran aboveground along Seventh Street, the commercial heart of black Oakland. To be sure, urban renewal schemes and transportation projects like the freeway and BART disrupted neighborhoods in cities around the nation. White residents, however, usually had the means to start anew somewhere else in the city or the suburbs, areas that through the 1970s were off-limits to African Americans. To make matters worse, Oakland refused to build public housing to accommodate most of the displaced rent- ers. Between 1960 and 1966 alone, urban renewal, BART, and freeway construction destroyed more than 7,000 housing units in Oakland, 73 percent in West Oakland.

39 See Miller, Postwar Struggle, 78–83 and Taylor, In Search, 290–2. Willie Brown helped Mayor Shelly broker the agreement. See James Richardson, Willie Brown: A Biography (Berkeley, 1996), 86–7.

40 Lola Bell Sims quoted in Self, American Babylon, 137–8.

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Yet the city built only 500 new public housing units during the same period. In all, 14,000 people in West Oakland were forced to search for housing in other parts of the city while their former homes became part of the regional transportation complex.41

The declining job base proved equally difficult for East Bay blacks. The geogra- phy of Oakland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had placed African Americans in proximity to their work. By the 1960s, the Pullman Company no longer existed, and automation reduced the need for maintenance and repair workers for the SP. Many of the small factories and warehouses had closed, and the land they occu- pied was slated for redevelopment. Moreover, the Port of Oakland was transformed by a huge redevelopment project that created the nation’s first automated terminal. By 1968, when the first of its facilities opened, the port could handle 80 percent more cargo using only a fraction of workers.42

Oakland blacks, however, faced a challenge that proved much more daunting than automation or the loss of railroad jobs: deindustrialization. Once great urban-industrial powerhouses such as Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, as well as smaller eastern and midwestern cities from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Decatur, Illinois, lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. As Thomas J. Sugrue has argued for Detroit, the process that everyone noticed by the 1980s began almost imperceptibly before World War II.43

Oakland’s economic decline began earlier and continued far longer than any other major city in the West. In the mid-1930s, the Oakland Chamber of Commerce cre- ated the Metropolitan Oakland Area Program with the idea of encouraging industry in what was then the countryside south and east of the city. They placed the plan on hold during the booming World War II years then revived it in the late 1940s when the city became the first in the state to deindustrialize. The plan’s origins remind us that the disinvestment of West Oakland began long before the mass influx of African Americans in World War II.44

The chamber and other economic and political interests envisioned downtown Oakland as the new center of a vast metropolitan region. The first factories relocated outside the city in 1947, drawn by lower taxes, cheaper land for plant expansion, and the absence of government-imposed environmental regulations. Between 1958 and 1966 Oakland lost over 9,000 industrial jobs. The largest factory to go, General Motors, relocated in 1964 to the newly incorporated town of Fremont, thirty miles south. Two years later GM employed 5,400 workers at that plant.45

41 Rhomberg, No There, 124–6 and Self, American Babylon, 141–55. 42 Rhomberg, No There, 125 and Self, American Babylon, 154–5. 43 Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

(Princeton, NJ, 1996). See especially Sugrue, “‘The Damning Mark of False Prosperities’: The Deindustrialization of Detroit,” in ibid., 125–52.

44 Rhomberg, No There, 182. 45 Lemke-Santangelo, “Deindustrialization,” 348–9; Self, American Babylon, 125–7; and

Rhomberg, No There, 146.

Quintard Taylor 21

Soon white workers followed industry to suburbs such as San Leandro, Newark, Union City, and Fremont. Black workers could not. Lenders, real estate agents, and brokers refused to work with black (or Latino or Asian) home buyers. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Southern Alameda County Real Estate Board, which covered the area south of Oakland, would not share listings with Oakland realtors, white or black. Moreover, only a few blacks with automobiles were willing to work in areas of the county latently if not openly hostile to them. San Leandro, Oakland’s nearest southern suburb, had 68,698 people in 1970, including only 84 African Americans, and was statistically 99.9 percent white. By 1970 white suburbanites who drove into the city monopolized the city’s remaining high-paying factory jobs. As numerous (often ignored) reports pointed out, regional apartheid, rather than a lack of qualified black factory operatives, was the real culprit in the growing levels of unemployment in black Oakland.46 (See Figure 2.)

One of the city’s black leaders, Donald McCullum, summarized the situation in stark testimony before the United States Commission on Civil Rights in 1967: “Here in Oakland [are] all of the Negroes in Alameda County, save 1 or 2 percent. . . . We are ringed by a white noose of suburbia. The parasitical cities around Oakland . . . draw on all of the resources and at the same time do not put anything in the central city, and we have the problems of health and welfare and crime in the central city while we have the highest type of social irresponsibility by the inhabitants of San Leandro, Piedmont, Orinda, [and] Lafayette.” 47

It is in this context of the loss of jobs, the growing physical isolation of black Oakland (and black communities across the nation), and the failure of liberal reform as represented by the civil rights movement that the Black Panther Party is best understood. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center on 15 October 1966. The two men, like so many other children of World War II migrants, had been unable to find a place in the postindustrial economy of Oakland. At the time, Newton had given up the idea of becoming a minister like his father; he was twenty-five, margin- ally employed, and a parolee. Seale, twenty-nine, cycled between day jobs while trying to earn a living as a nightclub comedian. The two men met in 1961 at Oakland City College, drawn together by their mutual admiration of Malcolm X, “street brothers,” and socialist theories.48

The party’s founding document, a Ten Point Program titled “What We Want, What We Believe,” has often been dismissed as the overblown rhetoric of young

46 Lemke-Santangelo, “Deindustrialization,” 351. 47 Donald McCullum quoted in United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearing Before

the United States Commission on Civil Rights: Hearings Held in San Francisco, California, May 1–3 1967, and in Oakland, California, May 4–6 1967 (Washington, DC: 1967), 443. The roots of this process have little to do with race. In 1909 Oakland reached its current city limits and was unable to annex more land. See Rhomberg, No There, 42–4, 181.

48 Murch, Living, 119–20 and Taylor, In Search, 304–9.

Figure 2. Oakland Suburbs, 1970. Map by Edward Charles Jr.

Quintard Taylor 23

militants seeking attention in the increasingly crowded world of Black Power advo- cates. Yet, in their demands for “full employment for our people,” “decent housing,” and “an end to the robbery by the white man of our black community,” they chan- neled virtually every Bay Area activist campaign over the last four decades—every eviction, every plant closure or relocation that intensified the poverty of local resi- dents. Underlying the crude Marxist rhetoric, the brandished guns, and the black leather jackets lay their response to the ongoing isolation and alienation of black Oakland and black urban America.49

Using the seven-mile-long corridor from West Oakland through North Oakland and South Berkeley to the University of California campus, the Panthers placed them- selves in an intellectual and social milieu that brought together aging left labor activ- ists, union veterans of the dock wars of the 1930s and 1940s, and the rapidly evolving student and antiwar movements of the 1960s. Their hundreds and eventually thousands of supporters included the sons and daughters of longshoremen and Pullman porters, migrant workers, and university professors.50

The Panthers initially advocated a radical transformation of black Oakland. Deeming it an internal colony of the United States, they demanded autonomy and called for the removal of the police as an occupying army. Eventually they began an array of “survival programs,” including free health clinics, free distribution of food and shoes, free screenings for sickle cell anemia, and after-school activities for children. Their free breakfasts eventually evolved into today’s national school lunch program for impoverished children. Ironically, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s fear of the impact of these programs on black community organizing, rather than the more famous Panther- police confrontations, led him to declare in November 1968 that the party was the single “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” 51

Whatever their claims to speak for “the people,” the Panthers drew the opposition of a significant segment of middle-class black Oakland. They supported their work through revenues from book publishing, lecture fees, and donations from wealthy patrons. They also extracted payment from drug dealers, pimps, and others who engaged in illegal activities. They sought contributions from small black businesses as well. In 1971, when liquor store owner Bill Boyette, president of the California State Package Store and Tavern Owners Association, refused to contribute, Newton ordered what evolved into a six-month boycott of his store. Boyette rallied support from over two hundred black professionals and small business owners as well as black ministers and the NAACP. In January 1972 Congressman Dellums mediated a settlement whereby Boyette and other businesses would contribute to an independent charitable founda- tion that donated to a range of organizations, including the Panthers. Nonetheless,

49 “What We Want, What We Believe” quoted in Murch, Living, 127–31. See also Self, American Babylon, 226–7.

50 Self, American Babylon, 223. 51 J. Edgar Hoover quoted in Murch, Living, 184. See also Rhomberg, No There, 168.

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strong support of Boyette marked the repudiation of the Panthers’ effort to speak for the entire community.52

The party’s greatest success came in 1973, when they mobilized thousands of here- tofore unmotivated voters, making them realize the relationship between the ballot and the improvement of their lives. That year they registered nearly 35,000 voters as they put forward Seale for mayor of Oakland and Elaine Brown for city council. The Panther platform called for a 5 percent capital gains tax on all transfers of income property in the city, including the property of corporations; a 1 percent tax on stocks and bonds; and increased rental fees and charges at the Oakland Coliseum and city golf courses. One of their most popular planks called for a residency requirement for police and firefighters, at a time when 75 percent of them lived outside the city. These revenues, the Panthers argued, would pay for increased health care, child care, and senior citizen services. Seale and Brown ran spirited but unsuccessful campaigns as Oakland voters, in the highest turnout in the city’s history, rejected their “radical” agenda. Seale received 43,000 votes to 77,000 for incumbent Mayor John Reading while Brown got 38,000 votes against the African American Republican incumbent Josh Rose, who won 55,000 votes. Reading’s victory in 1973 proved to be the last by a white mayoral candidate in Oakland until former (and current) California Governor Jerry Brown won the post in 1999.53

Ironically, the Panther defeat marked a turning point in the city’s political land- scape. Four years later Judge Lionel Wilson, fashioning a broad coalition that included the Panthers, white liberals, and labor unions, easily defeated conservative white busi- nessman David Tucker to become the first black mayor of Oakland. While many credited (or blamed) the Panthers for his victory, the roots of the changing political landscape in Oakland, as well as in Berkeley and Richmond, go back to before the founding of the party. Oakland alone lost more than 56,000 white residents between 1960 and 1970, representing more than 20 percent of the white population. As early as 1963 the con- servative newspaper Berkeley Citizens United Bulletin suggested to its readers that they leave the city. “If you don’t want to know the Negro mind,” it wrote after failing in its attempt to recall four Berkeley school board members who supported a citywide school desegregation plan, “then it is time for you to move over the hill.” Many residents did, and their departure opened housing for middle-class African Americans and growing numbers of Asian American and Chicano newcomers. Their exodus came at a time when black communities continued to expand, ensuring that African Americans now had unprecedented political influence in Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond.54

Oakland’s black middle class also expanded dramatically from the 1960s through the 1990s as antidiscrimination policies at the federal, state, and local levels provided

52 Murch, Living, 208–11 and Rhomberg, No There, 168. 53 Murch, Living, 214–5, 227 and Self, American Babylon, 307–8. 54 Berkeley Citizens United Bulletin quoted in Rorabaugh, Berkeley, 66–7. See also Moore,

Our Deeds, 147 and Rhomberg, No There, 153.

Quintard Taylor 25

work opportunities closed in the private sector. The Alameda Naval Air Station, the Oakland Army Base, Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, and smaller military facilities, for example, provided thousands of relatively good paying jobs until those bases closed in the 1990s. By 1975 various government employers provided 30 percent of the jobs for black Oaklanders.55

Middle-class blacks in all three cities also began to move into previously white neighborhoods in Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, and, after 1980, the suburbs. Census totals for these cities reflect this dramatic turn of events. (See Table 2.) The black popu- lations of Berkeley and Richmond peaked in the 1980s. For Oakland the peak came in the early 1990s. The new migrants to Oakland from Asia and Latin America now confronted their own urban frontier. Thus, at the very moment African Americans had come to politically dominate their cities, relentless demographic change began to undermine that domination.56

55 Lemke-Santangelo, “Deindustrialization,” 352. 56 Rhomberg, No There, 187.

Data by: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Eighteenth Census of the United States: Census of Population: 1960, Volume 1: Characteristics of the Population, Part 6, California (Washington, DC: GPO, 1963), table 21; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census of Population, Volume 1: Characteristics of the Population, Part 6, California (Washington, DC: GPO, 1973), table 23; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1980 Census of Population, Volume 1: Characteristics of the Population, Part 6, California (Washington, DC: GPO, 1982), table 27. Table by Quintard Taylor.

Table 2: Oakland and Selected Suburbs, 1960–1980

1960 1970 1980

Total Black Total Black Total Black

Oakland 367,575 83,616 361,607 124,710 339,337 159,351

San Leandro 65,962 17 68,698 84 63,952 907

Hayward 72,700 86 93,165 1,668 94,167 5,270

Fremont 43,790 18 100,875 397 131,945 3,384

Union City 6,618 16 14,724 152 39,406 3,331

Newark 9,884 1 27,125 185 32,167 1,147

Orinda 4,712 13 6,790 26 16,825 99

Lafayette 7,114 7 20,484 37 20,879 87

Moraga * 14,205 35 15,014 135

Walnut Creek 9,903 31 39,844 100 53,643 400

26 SPRING 2012 Western Historical Quarterly

Nonetheless, for twenty-two years, two black Oakland mayors, Lionel Wilson (1977– 1991) and Elihu M. Harris (1991–1999), led the city and determined its political priorities. Wilson began his term by appointing African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans to the port, planning, and civil service commissions. He was helped politically by a 1980 charter amendment that replaced at-large voting for city council positions with district elections. Within three years, black candidates had won five of the nine council seats.

Wilson instituted a citizens’ review board for the Oakland police force, finally responding to four decades of public demand for this oversight group. He also acceler- ated affirmative action in police department hiring. As late as 1970 only 36 of the city’s 711 police officers (5 percent) were African American. By 1986 people of color repre- sented 39 percent of police officers, 23 percent of whom were black. By 1993 African Americans composed roughly 40 percent of city employees, an amount proportionate to their population in the city.57

The black middle class primarily benefited from these changes. From 1970 to 1990, the number of African American managers and professionals doubled from 11 percent to 23 percent of employed blacks. By 1983 Wilson operated with a black majority on the city council and the school board, and black professionals served as city manager, city attorney, city clerk, city planning director, and director of economic development. Oakland now compared itself to Atlanta as a mecca for African American profession- als. The most symbolic of these changes occurred when Robert Maynard purchased the Oakland Tribune in 1983 to become the first (and so far only) African American to own a major newspaper. Even more significant, the Tribune under the Knowland family had, from the 1920s to the 1970s, been one of the most conservative newspapers in the nation.58

While such changes encouraged African Americans and other people of color, they also intensified the flight of capital and white residents from Oakland. Between 1970 and 1990, the city lost another 90,000 white residents. Factories continued to close or move, although now their destinations included the U.S. South, Mexico, and Asia. Oakland’s central business district became the poster child for economic decline. In 1977 shoppers could choose among seven major department stores downtown. Ten years later only four remained in the entire city. Perhaps the greatest symbol of Oakland’s declining fortunes occurred in 1982 when Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis decided to move his team to Los Angeles.59

These demographic and economic changes forced Wilson and Harris to abandon plans for industrial redevelopment. They turned their attention toward luring investment in the city through tourism, retail trade, and corporate administration. The Oakland Convention Center complex hosting our 2011 WHA meeting, the Jack London Square redevelopment, and nearby Victorian Row, constitute efforts to create service sector jobs. While some in the city have prospered, the economic dislocations that began long

57 Ibid., 183 and Murch, Living, 39. 58 Rhomberg, No There, 185–6. 59 Ibid., 184–5.

Quintard Taylor 27

before World War II still mark the streets of the city. Most of black Oakland continues to face the challenge of being a working class without work.60

I have shared this Oakland-East Bay story for a number of reasons. First, this com- munity represents a golden opportunity to link directly to the theme of our meeting, “Modern Histories in Ancient Places,” and our host city, Oakland. Secondly, through this story we remind ourselves of the compelling but still under-researched historical experiences of the twentieth-century urban West. Finally, this brief history calls on western historians to examine the region’s past in order to better understand its pres- ent and future, and indeed the future of the entire nation.

60 Ibid., 185.