AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL. Lise Pearlman
miles, the city of Emeryville managed to pack in railroad yards, saloons, gambling, dance halls and whore houses. Starting in 1903, Oaklanders could travel on Key System streetcars — the predecessor of today’s AC Transit — for work or play. Their new minor league baseball team, the Oakland Oaks, in the Pacific Coast League, was conveniently located at the Key System’s Emeryville hub, at the site Pixar Studios now occupies.
For the first few decades of the twentieth century, Oakland’s white population kept growing. The 1940 census listed just over 302,000 residents in Oakland, almost all of them whites of European ancestry. Until 1940, the black populations in Berkeley and Oakland remained relatively tiny; even fewer lived in San Francisco. This is not surprising given the historic dearth of good jobs. By 1940, Oakland listed a total of 8,462 blacks, up less than a thousand from 1930. They made up only 2.9 percent of the general population. All other minorities combined added up to only another 5,765 people.
In 1940, most minorities still lived in essentially the same areas they had occupied since the turn of the century, alongside poor white families in the flatlands of industrialized West Oakland, between Emeryville to the north and Oakland’s main business district. The only non-Caucasian racially homogenous neighborhood was Oakland’s Chinatown, one of the oldest in the country, which occupied sixteen blocks between Lake Merritt and the Oakland waterfront.
The historic white monopoly in the Oakland power structure derived from wealth and conservative politics. The well-to-do lived in upscale neighborhoods in the city’s center by Lake Merritt, on the Berkeley border to the north and in the Oakland hills to the east. Many of the most influential businessmen actually lived in Piedmont, an affluent all-white bedroom community completely surrounded by the Oakland hills. In the late 19th century, Piedmont’s white residents had simply refused to have their community absorbed by the larger city as towns like Brooklyn, Montclair Village, Fruitvale and Melrose had done.
Within Oakland itself, a Republican machine held enormous sway in politics — and the engine for that machine was the city’s newspaper of record, the Oakland Tribune. When its publisher, Joseph Knowland, added a twenty-two story tower to the Tribune building in 1923, it became for decades the tallest structure in the city. His detractors began to call Knowland “The Power in the Oakland Tribune Tower.” The anti-union lumber baron was extremely active in both state and federal politics. Knowland served as a Congressman for 11 years along with future Governor and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren, who became a family friend. Joe Knowland’s son Bill served in the state legislature before World War II. After the war ended, Governor Warren appointed veteran Bill Knowland to a vacant Senate seat. Senator Bill Knowland would take over the reins of the Tribune in 1961 and inherit his father’s role as “the central figure in the Oakland ‘power structure’.”2
Through the 1960s, control of Oakland rested in the city council, elected citywide by the white supermajority. Joe Knowland hand-picked most of the council’s members. The councilmen chose a part-time mayor from among their group, but his function was largely ceremonial; under the city’s charter, a professional city manager oversaw all departments and reported directly to the City Council. Those who wanted to get ahead in Oakland had to make their business and political connections through the Chamber of Commerce, which Bill Knowland headed in the late 1960s, or finagle an invitation to join a prestigious service club. The club members gathered regularly for breakfast or lunch, made handshake deals and launched charitable and civic projects like the Shriners’ sponsorship of the “Necklace of Lights” around Lake Merritt strung up in the business boom of the 1920s. For most of the 20th century, practically all of the city’s power brokers met and interacted regularly in those clubs.
Since 1915, the most exclusive social club was the Athenian-Nile Club on Fourteenth Street, not far from the Tribune building. For the next several decades the Athenian-Nile Club earned its reputation as the city’s “shadow power base.”3 It was one of several “old boy” social networks like the Shriners, the Elks and Moose Lodges and Knights of Columbus. Since 1909, Oakland also had an invitation-only Rotary Club for local businessmen — just the third one organized anywhere in the world. Oakland also boasted the first Lions Club west of the Rockies.
In 1933, a group of Oakland businessmen launched the Lake Merritt Breakfast Club (LMBC) and made every mayor thereafter an honorary member. Hundreds of members representing various professions and businesses in the community got together weekly for breakfast to network and socialize at a restaurant overlooking the lake. LMBC members launched Oakland’s Children’s Fairyland theme park in 1950 (the main inspiration for Disneyland) and later spearheaded the restoration of the “Necklace of Lights” that had gone dark during World War II — “Oakland’s jewel,” which has become the city’s iconic image ever since.
For decades, West Oaklanders had no seats at the table. The business and community leaders LMBC welcomed to its roster resembled the membership of other elite men’s clubs in town. As of the late 1960s there were only one or two Jewish members, one pioneering Japanese-American city councilman (a Republican) and no blacks. Steve Hanson, a fourth generation Oaklander and future president of LMBC acknowledges that “the club had its political agenda, which was very conservative,” even in the midst of the turbulent sixties. No women gained membership in any of these old boys’ clubs until the late 1980s — and only after the courts stepped in to outlaw their male-only policies.
In the decades preceding World War II, West Oakland’s Seventh Street was a bustling place. Before completion of the Bay Bridge in 1936, the electric Key Train System carried commuters along Seventh Street to a ferry to San Francisco. Black professionals opened up offices along Seventh Street, but at night, vice predominated. Near the railroad yards bordering Seventh Street were pawn shops, houses of prostitution, blues clubs, bars, barbeque joints and gambling establishments. The renowned Pullman porters, many of whom lived nearby because the railroad had its terminus in Oakland, called their gambling parlor “The Shasta.” Until the 1960s, only black men served as Pullman porters. These were much-coveted jobs. Among their leaders was C. L. Dellums, the uncle of Ron Dellums, longtime East Bay congressman and, from 2007 to 2011, Oakland’s mayor. In 1925, overcoming stiff opposition, C. L. made history, along with A. Philip Randolph, when they established the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation’s first chartered black union. The porters played a pivotal role in launching the black middle class in America and setting the groundwork for the civil rights movement. That history of local political activism would also make West Oakland fertile ground for the Panther Party.
Among the movers and shakers in West Oakland between World War I and World War II, one especially colorful entrepreneur stood out: Charles “Raincoat” Jones, a veteran of both the Spanish-American War (as an infantryman) and World War I (as a cook), who made most of his fortune moneylending and running gambling rooms. By the late ’20s, Jones (who always wore a mackintosh) reputedly owned the entire block of buildings abutting Seventh and Willow, the corner where the October 1967 shooting would occur. Jones and a small group of successful business friends made it a point to support enterprises that the black community needed, such as by providing start-up money for a pharmacy or a timely loan to help save San Francisco Sun Reporter publisher Dr. Carlton Goodlett from having to close his newspaper’s doors.
Before World War II, vice peddlers like Raincoat were able to maintain a “live and let live” relationship with the police. Raincoat was happy to pay protection money, which his attorney, Leonard Richardson, then the most prominent African-American lawyer around, hand-delivered by messenger directly to a police captain in City Hall each Friday.4 Whenever police raided Raincoat’s gambling room, he pulled out his wad of bills and bailed out whoever got arrested. But that peaceful coexistence rested on a relatively stable minority population that did not threaten the status quo.
As Bay Area industries geared up for the war effort in 1941, black-white relations began to change for the worse in a hurry. White unions collaborated with management to freeze black workers out of steady jobs. Discrimination became so pervasive that local black labor organizers joined with white civil rights leaders to plan a march on Washington to compel equal job opportunities. Roosevelt had wooed