My Home Town

 

There is a suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area that is a paragon of diversity.  According to the 2010 census, the town is 23.3% White, 10.7% Black, 27.3% Hispanic/Latinx, 34.5% Asian and 6.6% multi-racial. I suspect that it will be even more mixed when the 2020 census is tallied up.  The name of the town is San Leandro; it is just south of Oakland in the East Bay.

It was once a paragon of racism.  I know, because I grew up there during that phase of San Leandro’s existence.

Historians estimate that the first humans arrived in the San Leandro area about 5,000 years ago.  It was a hospitable environment, on the eastern shore of the San Francisco Bay.  There were lots of food sources – the bay was full of seafood and marine mammals; the mild climate was friendly to edible plants and edible wildlife.  The Ohlone people lived in the East Bay Area – peaceful hunter-gatherers.  They were oppressed when the Spanish colonists arrived and were slaughtered by state government authorities when California entered the Union in 1850.  This was another chapter in the genocide of Native peoples in North America.  Prior to the arrival of the Spanish colonizers in the late 18^th  Century, there were about 300,000 Native people in California.  By 1900, the number had dropped to 16,000.

I grew up in San Leandro from the mid-50’s to the early ‘70’s.  During that timeframe, only White people lived there (with a smattering of Asians and Hispanics).  It was about 99% White.  Of course, this wasn’t an accident.  The city to the north, Oakland, was about 50% Black and the city of San Leandro did everything possible to keep the Black folks out.  The city had restrictive covenants for decades, which made it illegal to sell or rent housing to Black people.  When those restrictions were declared unconstitutional, the system became informal – red-lining/steering by realtors, “gentlemen’s agreements,” collusion on the part of the 10 homeowner associations in the town, etc.  There was one Black person at Pacific High School when I was there from 1969 through 1972.  I felt sorry for that girl.

In the Bay Area, San Leandro was well-known for its in-your-face racism.  The Black folks in Oakland called it “Klan Leandro,” and they were afraid to go there.  When a Black family moved to the town in 1980, someone actually burned a cross on their front lawn. San Leandro was the Alabama of the liberal Bay Area.  Brian Copeland wrote an excellent one-man play and a book about being one of the few Black kids in San Leandro in the early 1970’s – he arrived as I was leaving.

Not surprisingly, San Leandro attracted a certain type of resident when I was a kid.  Most folks were lower middle class.  There were many transplants from the American South.  One of these folks was my father, a Tennessee native who worked as a payroll clerk at a food warehouse.  My dad was a stone-cold bigot.  He was quiet about it, but it was part of his heart and soul.  He was raised to see Black people as inferior and he never let go of that twisted worldview.  There were many things I disliked about my father, but his racism was at the top of the list. He has been dead for almost 30 years, and I understand now that he did the best he could given his upbringing and mental health issues.

I was a 1960’s hippie kid, a “peace and love” knucklehead.  I didn’t know any Black people, but I loved their music.  I figured they must be superior people if they could produce jazz and R&B. I moved to Berkeley to attend college and ultimately ended up in Evanston IL. Evanston has also struggled with racism but has a history of diversity. Black people have lived in the town since the early 19^th century.

So what’s my point?  I look at San Leandro today and realize that the old system of oppression has broken down, but aspects of it are alive and well.  The police killed a Black man in the town recently – six weeks before the murder of George Floyd, San Leandro police shot and killed Steven Taylor, a Black man in the middle of a mental health crisis at a Walmart.  There is more -  San Leandro also had some of the worst looting in the nation during the unrest over the George Floyd murder.   San Leandro has its problems, but red-lining isn’t one of them anymore. 

There is still tons of work to do all over our country, but remembering some of this local history can be a source of hope.  It is bad now, but it has been worse.  Things can get better. Someday we might even recognize that we are all human beings and make amends for past injustices.