Academic Journal ( History)

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.

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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