‘Our dreams were shattered': the Black Californians forced from the city they built

The Guardian

5 days ago

In the early 1940s, Gloria Moore's parents migrated west from Arkansas, seeking – as many Black southerners did at the time – work, and a reprieve from poverty and Jim Crow.
They first found jobs working in the wartime shipbuilding industry in Portland, Oregon, before ultimately settling in Russell City – a small, unincorporated community in the San Francisco East Bay, and a bastion of Black and Latino culture and life. There, the Moores bought several acres of land, built a house and raised Gloria and her three siblings.
Now 82, Moore remembers life in Russell City as rich, pastoral and communal. The local school, where her mother worked as a cook, had dedicated teachers and an impressive orchestra; the dirt roads that cut through town led to vast oak fields that exploded with wildflowers every spring; and residents always looked out for one another. 'We really were a village,' Moore said, recalling reading National Geographic magazines over milk and cookies at the home of the local librarian.
But in 1963, that village was razed to the ground. Citing eminent domain, the predominantly white city of Hayward forcibly removed residents of Russell City from their land, paying homeowners paltry sums for their property before incinerating every building in the community to make way for an industrial park.
For the surviving members of the 205 families that were displaced, that trauma is haunting. 'We lost everything. Our community was erased. My parents, they lost their dignity,' said Moore, who now lives in Los Angeles. 'Our dreams were shattered and we were forced to scatter.'
From West Oakland to San Francisco's Bayview-Hunter's Point neighborhood, the Bay Area has a long history of displacement that has largely been forgotten by those not directly impacted. But thanks to the work of a state-wide reparations taskforce, as well as local reparations efforts – including in Hayward, where city and county officials last week committed to allocating $1m to a fund for former residents of Russell City – these little-known stories are coming to light.
For the next seven months, these histories are also on display at the Oakland Museum of California (Omca). Through the lenses of history, art, and architecture, Black Spaces: Reclaim and Remain explores patterns of displacement in the San Francisco East Bay as well as the resilience Black communities have shown despite being repeatedly pushed out of the homes and neighborhoods they have built – first from the racist deployment of policies like eminent domain and today through a housing affordability crisis that disproportionally affects communities of color.
For museum director Lori Fogarty, it's a narrative with reverberations far beyond the Bay Area: 'This is a very local story, but it's also a national story.'
With close proximity to the Bay Area's numerous shipyards and its own railroad stop, Russell City became a hub for Black southerners resettling in California during and immediately after the second world war. Although it was an unincorporated community, and therefore cut off from many of the services provided by the nearby municipality of Hayward, the town developed many of its own institutions, including a school, a fire brigade and a blues club that attracted the likes of Ray Charles and Etta James.
Despite this, the city of Hayward, which refused to deliver sewage and garbage services to Russell City despite residents' repeated requests, labelled the city a 'blight' – a term used repeatedly by local governments in the 1950s and 1960s seeking to remove communities of color from certain areas. In so doing, Hayward authorities gained grounds to lay claim over Russell City and force residents, like the grandparents of Marian Johnson, to sell their land for egregiously small sums.
Johnson explains that her grandparents bought the land for $7,500, but only received $2,200 from the city in return. For years, she couldn't understand why her grandparents sold the six lots they had purchased for their extended family in Russell City and moved to East Oakland. But once she learned about eminent domain, she realized they had been forced out.
'They bought plots of land so that their children wouldn't have to pay mortgages, so their children could generate generational wealth by not having to pay rent,' Johnson said. 'All of this was stripped from our family.'
Today, all that is left of Johnson's family plot is a willow tree planted by her grandfather. 'We would still be there,' she said, thinking of the present that could have been had Hayward not prioritized the development of an industrial park over the homes and livelihoods of more than two hundred families.
Johnson's family story is one of those on display at Omca, where visitors are guided through three core elements that have defined the histories of Black displacement in the East Bay: homes and domestic spaces, cultural and communal institutions, and destructive policies. Objects like the suitcase Otis Williams carried with him from Louisiana to the Marin City shipyards and Ernest Bean's 1940 home videos showing women pruning roses in a flourishing West Oakland garden transport viewers to a time of hope and prosperity; documents like a transcript of public hearings held regarding the Russell City redevelopment project and the paltry cheque made out to Johnson's grandfather, Bernice Patterson, for his land serve as stark reminders of the destruction that soon followed.
'It's important to understand that these are lived experiences,' said associate curator of history Dania Talley, who curated the exhibition.
In the adjacent hall are three pieces from community collaborators that tell the story of continued displacement in the Bay Area, as well as resistance and hope for the community's future.
Particularly striking is the full-scale replica of the East Oakland house that activists with the housing justice organization Moms 4 Housing occupied for nearly two months in 2019.
For Carolle Fife, an Oakland councilmember who participated in the 2019 occupation, there is a clear through-line between the forced displacement of Russell City residents in the 1960s and the inaccessibility of housing — especially for people of color — nationwide today.
'This is something historically Black folks have been going through in every urban center, and now even rural spaces throughout this country, because of systemic racism,' Fife said on opening night of the exhibition.
Brandi Summers, an Oakland-born sociologist and associate professor at Columbia University, said the severity of the cost-of-living crisis in Oakland has once again forced displacement upon the city's Black residents, who are today moving to more distant suburbs and exurbs, or out of the state entirely. 'A lot of Black people actually don't feel comfortable in Oakland any more, regardless of whether we can actually live here,' said Summers, who also leads the scholar and artist collective Archive of Urban Futures, one of the groups that collaborated on the exhibition.
Against the backdrop of that crisis, California has in recent years emerged as a national leader when it comes to acknowledging past harms perpetrated against Black communities. In 2020, the state legislature established a nine-person reparations taskforce. And in 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom allocated $12m to racial justice initiatives and issued a formal apology for California's role in slavery.
Individual localities have also engaged with the issue. San Francisco established its own advisory committee, which recommended in 2023 that the city issue individual reparations payments of $5m to qualifying individuals.
And last week, Alameda county approved $750,000 in redress funds for former residents of Russell City. Hayward, which in 2021 issued a formal apology for its role in the community's destruction, earmarked an additional $250,000 for the fund.
But many activists and community members have expressed disappointment at what they see as insufficient progress, especially after bills that would have issued direct cash payments and enabled those displaced through eminent domain to reclaim lost land failed to pass through the legislature last summer. And for former residents of Russell City, the $1m redress fund is woefully inadequate.
'It is pennies on the dollar for the value of the land that you took,' said Johnson. 'That's just a slap in the face.'
AUP's Summers worries that public interest and political favor are turning away from issues of Black equity – especially as the current federal administration targets institutions, such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture, that study and elevate the often-sidelined histories of Black Americans.
It is for these reasons, Summers says, that shedding light on the legacies of Black Americans' past experiences of displacement, while still possible, is so critical. 'As funding for the arts and humanities goes, stories that are less known will disappear,' she said.
For museum director Fogarty, the fact that Omca is telling histories of Black displacement at this moment is in itself a form of resistance. 'Look at what's happening. There is an overt governmental attack on these kinds of stories,' she said.
'There are many places in this country that this show could not be presented right now.'