AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL. Lise Pearlman
embarrassment of a major civil rights protest by issuing Executive Order 8802 in 1941, an unprecedented presidential decree that forbade discrimination on grounds of race, color or national origin in hiring workers for the national defense program. Kaiser Shipyards then recruited heavily in the South, encouraging a mass migration of blacks.
Some hailed Roosevelt’s order as “the breakthrough of the century in the Negro’s battle for civil rights”; others recognized it as but one of many hard-fought milestones over the prior several decades.5 Unequal pay and other discriminatory employment practices in the defense industries continued despite the executive order. Yet conditions in Oakland were far better than in the South. In the first three years of the war, over 320,000 blacks migrated to the Bay Area. Berkeley created an Emergency Housing Committee to help find lodging for the new arrivals. Civil rights advocates like African-American pharmacist William Byron Rumford went further. They formed an inter-racial welcoming committee to help families from the South adjust to their new environment.
Many came from the rural south by the trainload and, for the most part, found housing only in the most undesirable locations. In Berkeley, that meant the flatlands below Shattuck Avenue. In Oakland, they poured into similarly neglected neighborhoods, mostly in West Oakland. Low-rent housing complexes first opened in West Oakland in 1941 as a wartime redevelopment project, but they were woefully inadequate. West Oakland “began to overflow.” One Oakland resident remembered: “We’d go down to the 16th street station after school to watch the people get off the trains, and it was like a parade. You just couldn’t believe that that many people would come in, and some didn’t even have luggage; they would come with boxes, with 3 or 4 children with no place to stay . . . and they would ask everyone if they had any place to stay or could they make some space into rooms.”6
A race riot broke out on a Key System train in downtown Oakland in 1943. It was inspired by the “Zoot Suit” riot in Los Angeles, where white servicemen had attacked Mexican-American immigrants wearing the showy, wide-lapelled Zoot suits with padded shoulders that first became popular with African-American and Italian men. The amount of cloth that went into Zoot suits was considered extravagant during wartime and criticized as unpatriotic. Similar “Zoot Suit” riots occurred in other cities, involving white soldiers attacking blacks. The Oakland riot grew to a mixed race mob of 2,000. A local newspaper, The Observer, commented:
That riot on Twelfth Street the other day may be the forerunner of more and larger riots because we now have (a) a semi-mining camp civilization and (b) a new race problem, brought about by the influx of what might be called socially-liberated or uninhibited Negroes who are not bound by the old and peaceful understanding between the Negro and the white in Oakland, which has lasted for so many decades, but who insist upon barging into the white man and becoming an integral part of the white man’s society.7
By 1945, four times as many blacks were counted in the official Oakland census as in 1940. Shortly after the war’s end, a professor at the University of California’s School of Social Work observed that “Negroes are rapidly becoming the most significant minority group in California.”8 The Oakland establishment not only feared the mass of new black residents; it had for decades waged a running battle with white labor unions. There had been major bloody strikes during the Depression, but a moratorium on strikes during World War II. Then in early December 1946 several hundred women retail clerks picketed two downtown Oakland department stores for equal pay and a union contract. The Alameda County Central Labor Council followed up with a call for a walkout by all of its members until union demands were met. Over the next two days, strike supporters went on a self-declared “work holiday” mushrooming to over 100,000 people enjoying a respite from work — more than a quarter of the city’s population. Within 24 hours, the walkouts shut down most businesses in downtown Oakland, leading the City Council to declare a state of emergency and put tough-minded Mayor Herbert Beach in direct charge of the police and fire departments.
The heavy-handed treatment of these hordes of protesters would be mirrored in the 1960s, for similar reasons — Mayor Beach saw this general strike as an attempted revolution. He quickly hired beefy strikebreakers to supplement the police. “[S]ome 200 Oakland and Berkeley police, many in riot gear, swept down the street. They roughly pushed aside pickets and pedestrians alike as they cleared that block and the surrounding eight square blocks. They set up machine guns across from the stores, while tow trucks moved in to snatch away any cars parked in the area.” Standing protected on the sidelines, nodding their approval, were the key local men in power, bent on crushing this populist uprising: the police chief, city council members, representatives of picketed department stores and, of course, the anti-union group’s acknowledged leader, Joseph Knowland of the Oakland Tribune.9
It would be Oakland’s last general strike. Yet Mayor Beach’s temporary dictatorship caused a backlash. It ushered in a change to Oakland’s charter to have the mayor elected directly by Oakland’s citizens, independent of the city council. Even so, the mayor’s role remained largely ceremonial. West Oakland still lacked any influence as businessman Clifford Rishell won the 1949 election and became known as “Ambassador of Goodwill for Oakland” and “Oakland’s Super Salesman” — the man who brought in the Oakland Raiders football team. Meanwhile, Mayor Rishell and the city council ignored the growing slums of West Oakland.
During World War II the government constructed temporary housing for black shipyard workers and their families near the Navy Yard in the island city of Alameda, a nearly all-white town separated from Oakland by the Oakland Estuary. Shortly after the war ended, that government housing was bulldozed, forcing most of the suddenly unemployed black workers to relocate to West Oakland, which was already overcrowded. The project was billed as “urban renewal” but West Oaklanders knew it as “Negro removal,” intended to reestablish the city of Alameda’s nearly all-white status.10
The situation only got worse in the 1950s when ground broke for the double-decker Cypress Freeway, designed to connect the San Francisco Bay Bridge to the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland. The new connector bisected West Oakland and separated it from the city center. City Hall had no compunction about razing homes and displacing West Oakland residents to accommodate this progress. Nor, over most of the next two decades, did the City Council concern itself with addressing that broken community’s chronic unemployment, dilapidated housing and overcrowded, underachieving schools. The problem required too much money for locals to address on their own in any meaningful way, and the officeholders did not consider government the answer.
In the 1940s, members of Oakland’s growing black middle class opened their own branch of the NAACP to address community concerns. By the 1950s, the NAACP was inviting black youths to the West Oakland community center to plan their own activities. The adult council focused on gradual empowerment. They taught the teenagers Robert’s Rules of Order to conduct their own meetings and reminded them that Oakland’s Juvenile Hall was just across the street. Kids could either learn how to work within the system to make change or wind up in Juvenile Hall.
The Oakland branch of the NAACP did not just challenge discrimination in the courts. It also organized picketing of City Hall to call attention to blatant exclusionary practices by white businesses and homeowners in their own backyard. Much as in the South, blacks could not eat in most restaurants in downtown Oakland or shop at a dime store or sit at a lunch counter, much less buy or rent a home in a white neighborhood — their movements were almost completely circumscribed. Bill Patterson, who later became President of the Oakland NAACP, moved to West Oakland from Arkansas in the early 1950s, a teen-aged athlete who took the long train ride to join relatives in Oakland to fulfill his ambition to go to college. Now in his eighties, he vividly recalls what it was like back then: “The police department . . . if you traveled outside of your sector, you got stopped. Today they have a new name for that — they call it profiling — but it happened back then as a regular thing, because in neighborhoods that were all white, there was fear, you know, of black people. . . . Many of them just didn’t know black folk.”
Essentially, blacks needed a passport to get into white enclaves. In the early 1960s, the Oakland NAACP president was a rare black who still lived in the adjacent City of Alameda. Whenever he invited visiting civil rights leaders to his home — including the Reverend Martin Luther