Bay Radical

Hiatus

2008-06-13T19:40:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't noticed, I've been on a bit of a hiatus which I expect will continue at least through the summer. I've gotten busy with some other projects and am - temporarily at least - signing off.

Love,

Bay Radical

Stripped

2008-05-23T22:23:00.000-07:00

My cute little street in the Allendale has recently become a popular dumping spot for stripped cars. I was impressed with the latest dump - someone took stripping to a new level. Note that the car parked behind this one is also a dumped, presumably stolen ride. If you recognize it, please come pick it up!

Spiral Gardens

2008-05-21T11:21:00.000-07:00

The Spiral Gardens produce stand was jumping yesterday!

Yuri Kochiyama

2008-05-19T16:36:00.000-07:00

The Trib profiled Yuri Kochiyama today. Check it out.

Thought Balloons Deployed for Good and Evil

2008-05-19T13:26:00.000-07:00

On Broadway and Grand today, two billboards unintentionally echo each other:

United Negro College Fund: A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste
vs. McDonalds: Eat This Garbage

Community History at the AAMLO

2008-05-16T15:31:00.000-07:00

Recommended: The African American Museum and Library is hosting a lovely exhibit right now called The African American Community in Oakland. Photographs, ephemera, and video presentations of oral histories give a well-rounded picture of the history of Oakland's black neighborhoods and communities.

Chagoya at the BAM

2008-05-12T15:25:00.000-07:00

A friend and I took my five year old to the Enrique Chagoya exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum. She was riveted by the gory reinterpretations of pop-culture imagery. So was I! The dude is a brilliant artist and social critic. Here’s the five year old interpretation:

The exhibit is running for a few more days in the main gallery space.

While you’re there, check out the photo exhibit of Paris 1968, running in their free, downstairs gallery until June 1st.

History Carnival

2008-05-01T07:03:00.000-07:00

Walter Crane's
portrait of May Day's martyrs.

Since 1890, workers around the world have taken May 1st off for parading, celebrating, and demonstrating - first in support of the eight hour day, and still in support of fair conditions for working people. May 1st was chosen to commemorate the conviction of eight men accused of throwing a bomb at a May 1886 Chicago rally for the eight hour workday. (A reasonably good history of the affair can be found here.) This May Day if you're here in the San Francisco Bay Area, you're invited to celebrate with your fellow workers (and students) by joining the International Longshore Workers Union who are shutting down 29 West Coast ports in protest of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or by joining the immigrant rights marches and rallies happening in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and elsewhere. If your boss won't give you the day off, call in sick! And when you get home from all those marches please take a look at the rest of this post:

I'm please to present this month's History Carnival. A blog carnival is a collection of posts aggregated into one and rotated periodically among various blogs. I'm hosting this month and you can check out the next one at Progressive Historians on June 1st.

I'm opening this carnival with the music history posts I've been feeling: Comb and Razor introduces guitarist and producer Jake Sollo, a major figure in 80s Nigerian pop music, crud crud gives a brief history of bootlegs, and Soul Detective seems to have closed the case of Six James Duncan.

Moving on, here are my overall favorite history posts this month:

Axis of Evel Knievel posts about the Civil War era bread riots, when a crowd of women armed with clubs, rocks and guns took to the streets of the Confederate capital and demanded “bread or blood".

Zenobia: Empress of the East presents an eye opening portrait of the 19th Century lesbian sculptor Harriet Hosmer, complete with a cool photo of Hosmer made miniature in contrast to one of her enormous sculptures.

On Military History and Warfare you can read about the bloody incursion of Mongol armies into Europe during the mid-1200s. The key pull quote here is: After the battle, the Mongols cut off an ear from every fallen Christian warrior to make an accurate body count. Nine bags of ears were eventually sent to Batu as tribute.

Edge of the West revisits a horrific massacre of Apaches in 1871 and explores how even contemporary non-Indian historians fail to acknowledge the bloody history of manifest destiny.

Undercover Black Man posts a series of audio and video clips showing period reaction to the Martin Luther King assassination: Robert Kennedy's speech, Walter Cronkite's report, Jesse Jackson's reaction (when interviewed about the murder in 1976), and James Brown's April 5th, 1968 show which purportedly helped cool the rage in Boston's black communities.

Some of this month's other very readable history posts include:

Yonkerman's amazing Tuberculosis cure wasn't amazing nor was it a cure, but it did come with some aggressive and impressive marketing. Read about it on the Virtual Dime Museum.

Abnormal Diversity has begun translating Hans Asperger's 1944 description of autism and finds some of herself in his descriptions.

In his post, The Goddess of Mount Tai, The China Beat explores a transformation in popular Chinese spiritually 1,000 years ago.

Rustbelt Intellectual theorizes that the mostly unrecognized history of working class feminism might explain why working class white women gravitate towards Hillary Clinton. And while you're on the subject, find an illuminating if depressing breakdown of how Bill Clinton's administration ended the Democratic Party as we knew it at Progressive Historians. And don't miss Part II.

Peripherally connected, Tenured Radical reviews WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, an exhibit of visual art borne from the women's movement and on exhibit in Long Island City until May 12th.

The execution of Alexander Arbuthnot and Richard Ambrister as ordered by general and future president Andrew Jackson is recounted at executed today. Arbuthnot and Ambrister, a Scotsman and an Englishman, were accused of collaborating with Creek and Seminole fighters and were executed without much of a trial. Sounds familiar.

History is Elementary discovers some history beneath the Augusta National Golf Tournament: and to think this ground has been lying here all these years waiting for someone to come along and lay a golf course upon it.

The Picket Line presents a history of Quaker war tax resistance, excerpting from Isaac Sharpless’s 1898 book A Quaker Experiment in Government. But April 15th is not just for taxes: trivial, yet historical events also transpired on this day as you can see at Our Great Southern Land.

If you thought the Great Exhibition of 1851 (housed in London's incomparable Crystal Palace) was cool, you should check out the competition at the Victorian Peeper. A much more recent bit of the English experience is described at Scandalous Women where you can read about a notorious British sex scandal.

Rwarrr!! Lycanthropy on Providentia.

View a pictoral history of computer data storage from pingdom. (I liked the enormous 10 kb drum memory machine!) And metafilter links to a history of recording technologies.

Also geeky in the best sense, Language Log introduces us to Dr. Syntax and in a totally different vein, Appalachian History has a short and sweet post about Hobo Nickels.

So what? you ask? Easily Distracted suggests some historians' answers.

Thanks for all your submissions folks and also thanks to Sharon Howard for keeping this project together. Submit your history posts for next month's carnival here.

The 1858 Black Exodus

2008-04-19T23:47:00.000-07:00

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs: founded the first black newspaper in California, joined hundreds of his peers in leaving San Francisco to find his fortune in Canada, became the first black man to join the Victoria city council and eventually returned to the US where he served as the first elected African American municipal judge in the country.

This week, San Franciscans will observe the 150th anniversary of an exodus of hundreds of free black Californians to Canada in order to escape an increasingly racist state government and fugitive slave laws that endangered their lives and to join a more welcoming community in Victoria, British Columbia. A list of commemorative events is available here. Learn more about African American civil rights struggles during the gold rush era at sfmuseum.org.

A brief history of yuppies. And Berkeley.

2008-04-18T15:35:00.001-07:00

A little bit of Berkeley history in last week's East Bay Express. Best revelation: the word "yuppie" was originally coined to describe Berkeley's affluent baby boomer class.

Video of the Day

2008-04-14T16:59:00.000-07:00

Tonight, in an invitation-only ceremony in San Francisco, two Ecuadorian activists will be receiving the Goldman Environmental Prize for their work fighting ChevronTexico, a company that has caused enormous environmental damage in the Amazon. Here is a little about the prizewinners - Pablo Fajardo Mendoza and Luis Yanza. Chevron (a Bay Area-based company) went to into attack mode and publicly criticized the winners. Here’s Amazon Watch’s public rebuttal:

Thanks Betho for the link!

Back to the Bay - Old News Reviews

2008-04-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

From the Earth Sciences Library at UC Berkeley.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation folks are like rangers of our post-urban and industrial world. Their website offers pointers for modern explorers looking to find the arteries and veins, some still in use, some abandoned, where our fuel, waste, and basic resources have traveled in and out of our communities. Their book, Back to the Bay Exploring the Margins of the San Francisco Bay Region maps the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suison Bays, using short descriptions and ground level and aerial photos to follow the line where the water meets the land. As you read you'll learn quickly that our coastal area is dominated by a surprising number of sewage treatment plants, salt harvesting ponds, oil refineries, pit mines, and more sewage treatment plants. I found myself a little heartbroken by the amount of shit (and more toxic chemicals) that we pour into our bay from every direction. But the book also suggests the transformation possible in the many places where former toxic industries like explosive and pesticide production have disappeared and the land is turning back into marshes and wilds. (Of course that transformation is bittersweet as well – the jobs that went with those industries have disappeared too, leaving a huge community of underemployed poor people here in the Bay Area. And those toxic industries haven't disappeared – they've simply moved to places in the world with less environmental regulation.)

In any case, this book (which was apparently created to accompany an exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center) is an excellent guide to the parts of the Bay Area that hide in plain view. Keep it in your glove compartment or carry it in your panniers.

Emory Douglas - Old News Reviews

2008-04-10T07:12:00.000-07:00

Emory Douglas' perspective on Gerald Ford

It's day 4 of the Week of Book Reviews, and today I'm talking about Black Panther : The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas. The essays are good reading for someone new to Black Panther Party history and the interview with Douglas near the end provides insight into his personal story. Mostly this book provides beautiful, large, full-color reproductions of the artwork Douglas produced for the Black Panther Party newspaper. To get a sense of his stlye, you can view a bunch of the posters on the website associated with the MOCA exhibit of his work.

More Lyle

2008-04-09T17:15:00.001-07:00

And on the subject of Erick Lyle, he's written an overview of utopian and dystopian literature about San Francisco for this week's Bay Guardian.

Thanks Leah for the heads up!

Scam #5 - Old News Reviews

2008-04-09T07:17:00.000-07:00

Five years have passed since our country started its latest war on Iraq. This issue of Erick Lyle's ongoing zine focuses mostly on his adventures in the time around the early bombings and I couldn't help reading it as a historical piece. Total shutdown of San Francisco's financial district seems like a distant memory if not fantasy now. As distant as they felt to staid old me, I love reading Lyle's stories of breaking locks, starting squats, graffiting, and generally fucking shit up. (My favorite old Scam was when he handed out fake Starbucks coupons providing free lattes to the people of San Francisco.) This issue also includes interviews with local mural and graffiti artists and with the founder of the Coalition on Homelessness. Lyle has a "real" book coming out from Soft Skull Press called On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City. Until then, I'm not sure where to recommend you look for back issues of Scam. I found mine at the Piedmont branch of the Oakland Library.

Photo of Erick Lyle's Reagan memorial from Gordonzola

The Movement and the Moment – Old News Reviews

2008-04-08T07:17:00.000-07:00

I got an email a couple months ago from Mary Uyematsu Kao, the Publications Coordinator at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press. She wasn't writing me in any professional capacity, but instead to share her admiration for Ericka Huggins who I'd written about last summer. We got to talking and she mentioned she'd designed a book she thought I'd be interested in, and then she was nice enough to send me a copy. I was interested. Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment, Edited by Steve Louie and Glenn Omatsu is packed with ephemera of the sixties and seventies Asian American activist scenes: a Yuri Kochiyama quote, Nancy Hom posters, Corky Lee photos, poems, song lyrics, movement newspapers. In between the pictures and quotes are reflective essays on the Third World Strike, the I-Hotel struggle, the Queer Asian movement, and lots, lots more. You can flip through for a quick look or you can settle in for a good long read. Thanks Mary! I love it!

Crash!

2008-04-07T20:20:00.000-07:00

I love Oakland Geology blog.

Arcadia Publishing Photo Books - Old News Reviews

2008-04-07T07:07:00.000-07:00

Today through Friday I'm going to post a book review a day. That's only 5 book reviews so I think I can handle it. Instead of thick academic stuff I'm only reviewing photo books, zines, and coffee table books because sometimes that kind of thing is more fun. And for the hell of it I'm starting by reviewing a whole series: the Arcadia Publishing photo books. They're a sort of brilliant, hyper-local niche marketing concept: one photo book for each community, sub-culture, and era within a particular town or region. The photo reproduction is low-quality and the writing varies depending on the editor of each book, but they tend to pick solid, local historian/authors and the photos are priceless even if they're a little grainy.

Some likeable Bay Area centric titles include Oakland's Chinatown by local sweetheart Bill Wong, San Francisco State University by State's own archivist Meredith Eliassen, and The Pullman Porters and West Oakland by a roving pair of black history researchers. But there are dozens of other titles focused on the history of our towns' fire departments, movie theaters, sports teams and neighborhoods.

Folkstreams

2008-04-06T15:52:00.000-07:00

Thanks to WFMU I just discovered a great site called folkstreams. It houses short documentaries about American folk life - mostly the music but also the dances, rituals and work of the cultural groups, villages, and neighborhoods of North America. The films mostly have an anthropology department flavor with square and white, middle-class voiceovers, but I tend to think they're worth it. Here are some of their California focused offerings:

Pizza Pizza Daddy-O about Black girl playground chants.

Two Homes, One Heart about Sikh women living in Sacramento - mostly focusing on Punjabi traditional dance.

Cowboy Poets (OK, not California, but still Western and awesome).

Enjoy folks.

The Clash of '68

2008-04-04T11:15:00.000-07:00

Demonstrator at Tlatelolco, Mexico City, October 2, 1968
from the El Universal archives

The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley is hosting a little festival called The Clash of 68. Classic revolutionary films from the era as well as contemporary pieces reflecting on that radical time. The program includes the beautiful and inspiring Battle of Algiers and the depressing but pivotal Queimada! which is usually only available in its butchered North American cut.

MY MOM ALWAYS HATED YOU CAPITALISM

2008-04-03T09:01:00.001-07:00

At the corner of Sacramento and Ashby today.

Bay Area billboard observers will also be interested in the Billboard Liberation Front, the California Department of Corrections and Freeway Blogger.

More Suffling

2008-04-02T15:15:00.001-07:00

Here's a mini follow up to that book review of Suffled How it Gush: It looks like Shon has a blog that elaborates on his Balkan ruminations. (Shon is so anti-self promoting that even when I emailed to tell him I loved his book he replied without mentioning the blog.) Shon's just set off to teach English to Roma folks in refugee camps in Kosovo, so I bet he'll have some interesting stuff to say in the coming months.

April History Carnival

2008-04-01T09:29:00.000-07:00

This month’s History Carnival is up at The Vapour Trail. Lots of really awesome looking posts especially about women’s history are highlighted.

The next carnival will post on May Day right here at Bay Radical. You can submit stuff to me using the submission form and if you’ve got questions just email bayradical at gmail dot com.

San Francisco State on Strike

2008-04-01T08:03:00.000-07:00

San Francisco State lacks ivy and graying brick and doddering old Englishmen riding their bicycles to class or whatever it is that makes for a prestigious university. It is a working-class college by design and students are as likely to show up on the streetcar as they are to live on campus, just like in the 1960s. Its public school nature might explain why the student activism that was almost ubiquitous on campuses in the mid-1960s looked different at State than it did at schools filled with the children of the ruling class. Maybe the Sixties activism at State had a more lasting impact too. While college students around the country helped stop the Vietnam war, the current mire in Iraq leaves that victory a little hollow. But the demonstrations at State led to the formation of the country's first ethnic studies department – an institution that quickly spread to campuses around the country and is still a major feature of universities around the world. The classic Sixties student concerns were at State too. Anti-war students held marches and sit-ins at State. But anti-war protests were only a part of the picture.

State had innovated the general education requirement that students at most colleges now expect (or dread), but by 1965, State students were criticizing these general classes as irrelevant. They founded their own Experimental College – student-run seminars on topics like social change, avant-garde art and personal growth. After Steven Gaskin's Monday night class on mysticism, spirituality and etcetera outgrew its home at the Experimental College he brought his dozens of followers in a caravan of school buses to Tennessee where they founded the archetypical counterculture commune - The Farm. The trippy Experimental College people opened up thinking about what a college could be. They made student directed education a reality, which probably influenced the focus of the third and most lasting thread in State's student movement.

That third thread was the increasing militancy among black, Latino, Asian-American, and indigenous student activists. Radical students of color, many who were involved in off-campus movement work, wanted curriculum that mattered to them. They wanted the college to offer something beyond the white, Western histories, art, music, and perspectives that dominated academics at the time. They wanted teachers who came from their own communities and meaningful access to education for the people of color who were not getting admission to the school in the first place. Students of color wanted a say in the programs that impacted them, and as such, a formerly white-run community tutoring program where mostly white State students worked with mostly black children in the Fillmore was one of the first campus organizations to have a total personnel and color changeover. Black tutors rejected the apparent paternalism of the liberal white tutors and stepped in to teach black kids themselves. On campus, students and progressive instructors pushed for Black Studies classes and got them, but only with part-time professors. Student leaders pushed for a recognized Black Studies department with full time black professors. They argued for broader admissions policies to allow poor black and brown kids access to the school.

Mainstream white students started getting nervous. The campus newspaper, The Gater, printed a notice from their white editor stating that he had written to the Carnegie Corporation asking them to reverse their plans to fund off campus State programs including programs of the Black Student Union. This was 1967. Non-violent civil rights groups seemed irrelevant to a lot of young, black activists in San Francisco who were more likely to find inspiration from Malcolm X than Martin Luther King. The larger protest movement was taking on a militant flavor too. In this context, a few irate black students responded to the Gator editorial by beating the editor in question.

From the SF State Library Strike Collection

The students involved in the beating were suspended, supporters demonstrated in their defense, campus organizing grew. Part of what made the SF State struggle special was that students resisted a dichotomous view of race as simply black and white. Filipino and Chicano students were as influential as Black students in forming the radical agendas of the moment. PACE, San Francisco State's Pilipino American student group may have been the first radical Filipino American organization in the country. PACE, the Latin American Students Organization, El Renacimiento, a Mexican American student organization and other ethnic-based student groups united under the banner of the Third World Liberation Front. Radical white students supported Third World students with their own demonstrations opposing the war and supporting the call for racial fairness and Ethnic Studies programming. By 1968 students around the country (and in Mexico, Germany, France, Japan, and elsewhere) were seizing university buildings in protest or for their own purposes. In March of 1968 the Third World Liberation Front took over the YMCA office at State.

The administration cracked down. Not just on students but also on their progressive teachers. Professor and activist Juan Martinez had been hired by the history department and also to direct a new program aimed at bringing more "minority" students to the campus. When in the spring of 1968 he helped bring several hundred Mexican and Pilipino American students to demand applications from the Dean of Admissions, he was told that he would not be re-hired in the fall. George Murray, a minister of education with the Black Panther Party, was hired to teach general ed English classes, but when he told an audience at Fresno State that, "we are slaves and the only way to become free is to kill all the slave masters", he was suspended. George Murray's suspension triggered a breaking point for student activists, and in November of 1968 students walked out of classes. Led by Black and Third World students and supported by the radical and mostly white Students for a Democratic Society, they created two lists of their strike terms (one from the Black Student Union and one from the Third World Liberation Front) that included the demand to re-hire George Murray, automatic admission for all Third World Students who applied to the school, and a creation of permanent Black Studies and Ethnic Studies departments with paid, full-time staff.

From the San Francisco History Center

The administration panicked. The police were called in, in large numbers and clad in riot helmets. A series of college presidents resigned before S. I. Hayakawa, the Canadian-born Japanese-American professor was promoted to the position. (Hayakawa initially made a name for himself in Semantics and he wrote an important book which he hoped would serve as a critique of fascist propaganda. Apparently critiquing fascism lost its appeal – after State he served as a Republican in the US Senate and in the early '80s he founded US English, an English-only advocacy organization. I should also mention that for most of his career he was known for wearing a jaunty Tam-o-Shanter.)

From the San Francisco History Center

Hayakawa's first official act as president was shutting down the campus. If students insisted on walking out of class, then school would be closed to avoid the massive demonstrations. When school officially re-opened in early December (with sparse student attendance), Hayakawa confronted demonstrators who were broadcasting pro-strike messages from a soundtruck on the corner of 19th and Holloway. As the argument escalated the college president climbed on top of the protestors' truck to rip the wires out of its speakers. In return, someone pulled his tam off his head. In the hubbub Hayakawa apparently yelled ''You're fired!'' at author and State professor Kay Boyle, and she apparently replied by calling him 'Hayakawa Eichmann". The strike went on.

From the San Francisco History Center

By early January of 1969, Hayakawa had banned all gatherings on the central campus and limited access for non-students. Picketers were required to remain on the perimeters of the property. But at this point the situation was uncontainable. The SF State local of the California Teachers Federation joined the strike demanding educational reform, removal of police from the campus, agreement to student demands, and a collective bargaining contract. When the San Francisco Superior Court ordered the teachers back to work the next day they refused.

Strike related protests happened frequently and on and off campus. Sympathetic City College of San Francisco students marched to State to express their solidarity. State students and supporters marched to City Hall. Across the bridge students at Oakland City College (now called Merritt) protested in support of the struggle. In January of 1969 Third World students at U.C. Berkeley started their own, related strike for Black and Ethnic Studies departments. Movements for Black and Ethnic Studies were growing at campuses in New York, New Jersey, Washington, Wisconsin, North Carolina, all over.

The strike went on. Lines of police occupied the campus all day like a military force. One freshman was injured when his homemade bomb blew up in his hands. Professional negotiators were called in. San Francisco's Mayor Alioto appointed a citizens committee to negotiate the strike. And finally in March, the Third World Liberation Front, the Black Students Union, and university administrators (not including Hayakawa) signed a compromise agreement: An ethnic studies department was established. The university pledged to admit hundreds of new black and third world students. In short, we won. We won at State and like dominos, universities around the country dropped their resistance to Ethnic Studies programs, hired more teachers of color, admitted more black and third world students. Community control seems a pretty abstract idea now, but classes and teachers that reflect our real experiences and lives are the lasting gift that San Francisco State strikers left us when they took control of their own education and their own institution. So thank you.

For more on the San Francisco State Strike:

PACE has a little youtube video about their history:

And here's a short documentary on the strike from SGTV:

State has a great archive of the strike. Some of it is online here. Check out their list of books on the strike too.

For a little first person story related to the strike check out Its About Time, a Black Panther Party commemorative website for an account of the related San Francisco Community College strike. Don’t miss the PDFed news articles from the time, linked at the bottom of the article.

Shaping San Francisco has another account, and another.

Finally, if you can stomach some annoying Marxist voiceover for the sake of some fantastic footage, California Newsreel's San Francisco State: On Strike is worth a watch. It includes some pretty ugly police brutality that I hadn't thought to anticipate when I watched it with my five year old.

Scraper Bike

2008-03-31T20:33:00.000-07:00

Scraper Bike from Da Trunk Boiz:

What does this have to do with history? Not much. But check out ghost ridin' the trike!

Suffled How It Gush: Old News Book Reviews

2008-03-26T08:10:00.000-07:00

Shon Meckfessel's Suffled How it Gush tells the story of the Balkans from the perspective of Beckett-quoting street kids, hard-luck drunks, black-eyed fighters, squatters, singers, and protesters. It's part punk travelogue, part history lesson, part anarchist theory. Fortunately it's also very good, which is why I'm posting about it here despite its tenuous connection to Bay Area radical history.

Shon happens to have been my high school boyfriend. I hope he doesn't mind my saying that we had a very sweet if chaste relationship. I recall many happy drives in his old Jetta, his right hand holding mine across the emergency brake, his left hand crossing himself when he needed to change gears. While I'm revealing Shon's secrets I'll also mention that he was the first bass player for Cake. I seem to remember he did a stint trucking tomatoes around the Central Valley too. In any case, he has found himself in writing. Suffled How it Gush is poignant, often funny, never sentimental. Reading it made me feel smarter. I love how Shon quotes his favorite hardcore bands and Hannah Arendt within pages of each other. I loved following his drunken travels among the disaffected of post-Communist Eastern Europe, even as I was grateful not to be sharing a train car with him and his satchel of dirty laundry.

Shon gives Balkan history lessons without resorting to nostalgia and describes contemporary life there without choosing national or ethnic loyalties. His friends are Serbian, Croatian, Romani, Muslims, Jews, travelers from around the world who optimistically refer to themselves as 'penguins' – those who refuse to define themselves by the nations where they were born. I hope I'm getting this right when I say that Shon's thesis comes down to the idea that nationalism and neo-liberal economics, not supposedly deep-seated ethnic hatreds, are the causes of crises in Serbia, Croatia, Cyprus, etc. War is shown to be both immoral and absurd through his friends' matter-of-fact stories of survival and tenacity amid NATO bombings and genocidal ethnic purges. Despite the built-in cynicism required of any self-respecting punk boy abroad, Shon shows a certain cheerful optimism, happily reveling in the chaos of the Eastern European Third World and dreaming of a kinder, stateless world. If you can find it, I hope you'll read it.

Stop the War

2008-03-18T21:13:00.000-07:00

Holy cow have I ever gotten behind on blogging! Forgive me; I'm a single, working mom and I've been trying to get into nursing school, so unfortunately I can't always make enough time to post regularly, but I believe things have calmed down enough for me to get back in the saddle a bit. I'm putting the finishing touches on a post for next week. In the mean time, it’s the five year anniversary of this war in Iraq, and there's a big demo in the city tomorrow. (Direct action info here.)

Forty-one years ago 100,000 people marched from Second and Market to Kezar Stadium to protest the war in Vietnam. It took 8 years after that march, but we ended that war. Let's not have 8 more years of this one.

History Carnival

2008-03-01T10:10:00.000-08:00

A blog carnival is a collection of blog posts on a given subject. This month's history blog carnival is up and full of interesting links worth clicking.

Educate to Liberate

2008-02-29T20:25:00.000-08:00

I finally got down to the Oakland History Room to check out Billy X. Jennings' exhibit on the Black Panther Party children's schools. You'll never see more adorable pictures of revolutionary education.

There are a few photos downstairs and more upstairs in front of the elevator and inside the Oakland History Room. I was especially into the shots of the kids doing Karate.

RIP William Buckley

2008-02-27T15:28:00.000-08:00

Old-school conservative windbag William Buckley Jr. died today. Bankrolled by the ill-gotten wealth of his oil-speculator daddy, Bill Jr. can be remembered for his bold pro-segregation stance and his innovative ideas on public health (he stated in a New York Times OpEd that, “Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm to prevent common needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of homosexuals"). Let's look back at Buckley's glory days as he gets his rhetorical butt kicked by a youthful Noam Chomsky:

Books for Kids

2008-02-23T23:07:00.000-08:00

I try not to be too heavy-handed about politics with my kids but I do hope they will get some basics about how we are where we are. Here are two "messagy" books I've been reading to them lately:

And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell and illustrated by Henry Cole is the sweetest little bit of gay propaganda you could possibly read to your children. It's the true story of two male penguins in the Central Park Zoo who entwined necks, vocalized together, had sex with each other (OK, that part's not in the kids book), and were finally given the opportunity to raise an adopted penguin chick. You have to be a truly homophobic grinch to remain untouched by what sweet dads the gay penguin pair made. And the story is not too preachy feeling - what kid doesn't want to hear about penguins?

Freedom on the Menu by Carole Weatherford and illustrated by Jerome Lagarrigue tells the story of the 1960 Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins that led to the desegregation of Woolworths' and other restaurants throughout the South. I love how Freedom on the Menu emphasizes community action instead of just one or two key leaders. And even though it deals with the painful topic of segregation, it feels optimistic and hopeful about the power of collective action. The lunch counter sit-ins were started and led by college students and the book is told from a child's eye view which makes it easier for a five year old to connect with.

Bring on your suggestions for kids' books about activism and history folks!

Oakland Memorials

2008-02-12T09:27:00.000-08:00

This project ended with the close of the year but it's worth checking into: blogger nic b. documented the site of every homicide in Oakland in 2007 on his site Oakland Makeshift Memorials. Especially heartbreaking are the comments left by loved ones of the deceased.

Happy New Year!

2008-02-06T23:58:00.000-08:00

East Oakland is snapping with fireworks and standing on my back porch I can smell the sharp warm smoke that's everywhere in this little town tonight.

It's the Year of the Rat folks! Happy New Year!

photo from hoogrrl

Milk

2008-02-06T20:38:00.000-08:00

In case you, like me, fail to keep up with Hollywood, I'll fill you in that Milk, a biopic about this country's first openly gay politician, has been shooting in the Castro this week. Unfortunately, I snoozed on my opportunity to serve as an extra in the movie but because I'm a sour grapes type, I'll go ahead and say that I have a hard time picturing Sean Penn as the charming and sexy, Jewish and gay Harvey Milk. Castro Shopper has good photos of the current Castro 70s Makeover, but if you want to get to know Harvey, I suggest tracking down the moving documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. Here's an excerpt:

More Carolina Chocolate Drops

2008-02-02T12:49:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago I posted some videos from the adorably old-timey Carolina Chocolate Drops. Today blogger Undercover Black Man posted about them including a link to their cover of Hit 'Em Up Style.

And speaking of Undercover Black Man aka: David Mills, writer from some of TVs most favorites including The Wire, he's promised to do a bunch of Black History Month posts and if you're interested in good writing and history I suggest checking him out. He's never shy about addressing controversy, as his inaugural Black History Month post demonstrates.

Friday Night Videos

2008-02-01T09:40:00.001-08:00

I said I was going to start posting videos on Fridays, and then I kinda bailed, but now I'm back with the classic/ultimate in Bay Area Radical Music. In fact, they've been around long enough now that they're kinda historical too. Ladies, gentlemen, and none-of-the-above: The Coup!

Giant Burger represent!

Oakland, California 94610

Smash up the place

(I picked old ones for the history angle folks)

the Library of Congress on Flickr

2008-01-30T12:56:00.001-08:00

Operating a hand drill at Vultee-Nashville, woman is working on a "Vengeance" dive bomber, Alfred Palmer, photographer, 1943

In fun Flickr news, the Library of Congress has a new Flickr page where they'll be posting some of their enormous catalog of public domain photos. Well worth a visit.

Point Pinole

2008-01-25T10:25:00.000-08:00

The typically racist New York Times

In July of 1892, an enormous explosion in what was then West Berkeley rocked so hard that windows across the bay on Nob Hill crashed to the ground. An unknown number of people died and many more were injured. The blast wasn't the first to destroy a factory of the Giant Powder Company – the first company licensed to use Alfred Nobel's recipe for dynamite. They'd already blown themselves out of locations in Oakland and San Francisco. After this explosion they relocated to the most distant Bay Area spot they could find – Point Pinole in what is now Richmond, but what they then dubbed Giant, California – a company town now totally disappeared.

There's a lot to say about this bit of history: about how Nobel tried to tame his own guilt for inventing Dynamite by establishing the Nobel Prizes in his will (and what a joke those prizes have become ever since one went to Henry Kissinger); about the life-threatening work of running a dynamite factory, and the mostly Chinese workforce, hired by white bosses who knew they could exploit local xenophobia and pay Chinese workers less to do one of the most dangerous jobs possible; about the sulfur mining in the Oakland hills that supplied the dynamite factories and that left a superfund site that still drains sulfuric acid downhill into a pretty little pond at Mills College. But instead of all that, I'm posting to say that Point Pinole is an absolutely lovely spot for a hike. Almost all the trails are flat and much is wheelchair accessible, the fishing is, apparently, not bad, and if you don't mind walking around directly on top of a major earthquake fault, the views are lovely.

There's not much left of the explosives factories. Apparently the old narrow gauge railway that moved explosives around the premises was purchased for use at Disneyland. Most of the buildings were destroyed. Bethlehem Steel bought the land to build a steel plant, but nothing came of it and finally the East Bay Regional Parks acquired the land in the early '70s. It's a lovely place to take a walk, whether you care to nerd-out about history or not. Point Pinole, here's a little of what it looks like:

Martin Luther King Jr.

2008-01-21T08:23:00.000-08:00

...A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death...

Full text and audio of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech, Beyond Vietnam, is available here.

Driven Out

2008-01-15T17:00:00.000-08:00

Since I started tracking visits to this site I’ve noticed one post gets more visits than any other. I wanted to pass on a related resource for folks who came here to read about the violence that Chinese-Americans faced in the Western United States throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Driven Out is the deepest, most thorough examination of that shameful piece of history that I’ve found. I’ll display a rare moment of agreement with the New York Times in saying that the book contains an unfortunate lack of analysis and narrative that would have made it better reading, but I still recommend this to anyone looking for more on the issue. Pfaelzer's research is strong and she looks unflinchingly at what she rightly calls pogroms of Chinese-Americans, citing case after case after case of legal and extra-legal violence and expulsion of Chinese immigrants. Its difficult reading, but worthwhile for the sake of understanding a long-suppressed history.

Friday Night Videos

2008-01-11T10:37:00.000-08:00

I've been wanting to launch a Friday music feature here on Bay Rad and I guess I'm finally getting around to it. Mostly I'll be posting explicitly political music and activist soundtracks but I couldn't resist the adorable and historical Carolina Chocolate Drops for an opening act. I chose the first video because it starts with a history lesson:

Cliopatra Awards

2008-01-08T08:36:00.000-08:00

Forget the Oscars, the Emmys and the Darwin Awards. The real news is finally in: here are this year's winners of the history blogging awards! Oddly, they don't have a category for screeds by crotchety leftists, otherwise I would have been a shoe-in.

Bay Area Directory of COLLECTIVES

2008-01-07T13:04:00.000-08:00

My dad just dug this handy guide to Bay Area collectives out of some long-buried filing cabinet. It looks to have been printed in 1980. I note with some amusement and some sadness that several pages of the booklet are taken up by a critique and rebuttal of itself. For some obsessive-compulsive reason I decided to scan the whole thing, so if you'd like to find out where you could have purchased collectively produced bagels in 1980, or if you want to know where Lilith, A Woman's Theater was located, feel free to click here for the full set of scans.

(Look, they've got it at Bolerium for $15 bucks!)

Freedom of Information Act

2008-01-02T20:04:00.000-08:00

Unbelievably, Bush just signed a bill that will reform the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to reduce some of the bureaucracy that comes with requesting government records and to create accountability for delays in processing those requests. These reforms should allow the public and the media better access to government records, although they won't require any more actual openness on the government's part. In other words, if the FBI crossed out large portions of your grandmother the communist labor organizer's record before sending you a copy, they can still do that. Bummer.

Still, there's no better time than now to request your FBI file, or if your life hasn't been interesting enough, get your grandpa's.

General Strike Heads Up

2008-01-01T08:08:00.000-08:00

The Davis Radio Theater will be premiering a new radio play about the Oakland General Strike on KDVS tonight at six. You can stream it live from the KDVS site. Enjoy!

The Murder of Fred Hampton

2007-12-31T12:38:00.001-08:00

Thanks to Axis of Evel Knievel I found the classic documentary about the life and death of Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton online. Everyone says that Fred was special. He'd get up at dawn to rally his recruits, then go off to cook in the free breakfast program, and spend his days on other programs, meetings and coalition work. Its no secret that there were guns in his house when he died, but there's also no longer any controversy that he was murdered in his sleep by a dozen Chicago cops. He was 21.

The film came out before certain details of the case were understood. For example, his close comrade William O'Neil who was with him the night before he was killed turns out to have been an FBI informant. Still, the movie is well worth watching. Here's the link.

Primary sources, baby!

2007-12-30T08:40:00.000-08:00

I've been digging a new collection on the Library of Congress' American Memory site about early California history.

It only includes works in English which excludes material from the Spanish speakers who had been running the place when it was a colony of Spain and then later when it was the most Northern province of Mexico. Also missing are voices from members of California's 70+ native tribes which used spoken but not written languages, and from the thousands of international gold seekers who came from China and Chile, and from all over the rest of the world, leaving an emphasis on adventuring Anglo-American men. As limited as adventuring Anglo-American men can be, I like the first-person accounts of California history. Here's a passage from San Francisco bartender John H. Brown, recalling the Anglo-American seizure of California from Mexico. At that time, those "rising up" were attempting to found an independent Republic of California until the Navy sailed into Monterey Bay and occupied California in the name of the United States, quickly quashing that idea. Note that the then-sleepy pre-Gold Rush city of San Francisco was still called Yerba Buena at the time:

Things went on as usual in the city until the latter part of May, when a report reached the city, that trouble was expected. A party at Sutter's Fort were raising a company to take possession of the upper part of California. In the early part of June, a boat arrived from Martinez, with the news that Sonoma was taken, and a proclamation, with Mr. Hyde's signature, was posted in a prominent place which announced that General Vallejo and Timothy Murphy, of San Rafael, with many others, were taken prisoners... A few days after, General Castro issued a proclamation, commanding all Mexican citizens to meet him at Santa Clara for orders. The only foreigners who left the city for Santa Clara, were Captain William Hinckley and Robert T. Ridley. They were ordered to stop all boats and prevent all persons from landing in Yerba Buena. On their return home, Hinckley was taken sick and died, on Burnell's Ranch, and was buried in the church at Mission Dolores.

Robert T. Ridley returned to the city to carry out the orders of General Castro, but could not find anyone to assist him, as there was not one Mexican citizen to be found in Yerba Buena, and the few foreigners who were here, were in favor of the ''Bear Flag,'' as it was called. This flag was made at Sutter's Fort, of bunting, and had the picture of a grizzly bear painted in the center, as the parties making the flag had no paint on hand, they used some blackberry juice, which answered the purpose very well. (The flag can still be seen at the Pioneer's Hall, in San Francisco). But they did not take up arms until the American Flag was raised.

Community Clinics

2007-12-28T12:42:00.000-08:00

Over the last few days I've learned some exciting new facts about scabies. Shall I share?

The Scabies Mite: as ugly as it is unpleasant

1) The first and most exciting fact I've learned about scabies is that I DO NOT HAVE IT. It took two visits to my friend the PA who works in an STD clinic, a phone call to the craigslist date who could have given it to me, and finally, my own admission that I don't actually have scabies symptoms to convince me, but I'm now sure that I do not have a communicable disease, at least not one involving tiny mites that cause uncontrolled itching by shitting underneath the skin.

2) If I did have scabies, or any other disease for that matter, I would be 100% reliant on my saint-like friend the PA who works in an STD clinic to care for me because actually, as it turns out, having no health insurance and living in the East Bay = having almost no medical care at all. I called three or four local low-income clinics and they all told me that they only do intake for new patients ONCE A MONTH. So in other words, keep scratching for a couple weeks until we can see you. The exception is the Berkeley Free Clinic, but their hours are limited as is the range of care available there.

3) Even if they take forever to see you, the folks who run the Bay Area's community clinics still rock. I spent 15 or 20 minutes on the phone with a nice gentleman at the Free Clinic who failed to scream and hang up when I said I thought I had a social disease and then shared his recommendation for best East Bay community health clinic (LifeLong Medical Care). The person answering the phone at Lyon-Martin was also patient and kind even as she was telling me that their next appointment for new patients wasn't until January 18th.

I'm a former radical health care provider and I've got a very big and very special spot in my heart for community health care of all types. The Bay Area is home to a number of community clinics that grew out of a part of late-60s history where folks believed that health care was a basic human right and also that people could and should control their own care. If I ever get my shit together to write a book about Bay Area history, it'll be about the history of the Bay Area community health movement, but its going to take a lot of research because I don't know much beyond the skeleton. I can tell you about a few of the local community clinics though.

La Clinica de la Raza was founded in 1971 by Chicano students and doctors and community folks to provide community-based care in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland. Now that La Clinica is one of the largest non-profits in the East Bay, it doesn't quite have the homemade community feel that started things off. On the other hand, they now provide health care for thousands of uninsured folks from South East Asia, all over Latin America, and all over East Oakland. Similarly, the Native American Health Center started in '72 when Indian activists and allies, post-Alcatraz occupation, called for a self-directed clinic for Native folks.

The way I heard the story of the Berkeley Free Clinic was that it was founded during the People's Park Riot by medic veterans of the Vietnam War. I can't recall the details of that story so I'll have to go with the vague history they have up on their site.

The BFC is especially close to my radical health care heart because they primarily use lay medical workers – non-professionals who undergo a rigorous in-house training program. A trip to the BFC often involves a discussion with the staff medic in front of an open medical textbook, with both of you trying to figure out what's bugging you.

The Haight Ashbury Free Clinic is the most famous of our clinics. As I understand it, they were among the first medical clinics to treat drug addicts like human beings, and they still specialize in treating addiction and caring for addicts. I liked this free-association piece about their history from David Smith, the clinic founder.

Thanks clinics. I'm going to celebrate my lack of scabies by signing up to become a patient somewheres.

Lost Amusement

2007-12-25T08:39:00.000-08:00

Idora Park in Oakland, 1910 (?). From the Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library.

Finals are over (thank the maker) and apparently, some guy named Jesus was born today. Seems like the right time to talk about boozing, gambling, and flipping upside-down on roller coasters. Here goes: Before TiVo, iPods, or Guitar Hero, when folks had to leave the house for a little something exciting, the Bay Area was peppered with amusement parks. The parks incorporated natural beauty along with human-made entertaiments like junk food, race-tracks and shooting ranges.

Playland at the Beach is the most well known of our lost parks. It started as a disorganized collection of concessions and rides at Ocean Beach in the late 1800s and only shut down in the early 1970s. At one point it spanned three city blocks and included roller coasters, merry-go-rounds, five restaurants, and eventually the Sutro Baths and the Cliff House restaurant which to this day traps tourists before they fall off the edge of San Francisco and onto Seal Rock in the Pacific. Outsidelands.org collects photos and stories of Playland and wikipedia has a pretty thorough entry including descriptions of the various rides nausea inducing rides like the Aeroplane Swing, the Whip, and Dodg-em.

Chelle and Noelle Beloy in front of the Fun House at Playland at the Beach.
Copyright Dennis O'Rorke, early 1970s from outsidelands.org.

From 1904 until 1929, Idora Park in the present day Oakland neighborhood of Temescal was home to a miniature railway, a car race track, the Illusion Theater, a successful opera house, and a skating rink that billed itself as the largest in the world. The park also housed a number of caged animal displays and served as a temporary home of the Oakland Oaks baseball team. This postcard set provides some images of that disappeared park.

Grizzlies caged at Idora Park on Oakland, from Alameda Info

Shellmound Park in Emeryville lasted from 1876 to 1924. It was built, morbidly, on the lopped off top of the Bay Area's largest indigenous Shellmound. The best online resource about the park is this PDF from the Emeryville Historical Society. You can read there about the pleasant picnic grounds, the shooting range, bowling alley, bicycle and horse racing and two dance pavilions that were part of this destination for San Franciscans who wanted panoramic Bay views and a getaway from city hustle. The picnic grounds in particular were utilized by all types of local civic groups, ranging from the Household of Ruth, a Black women's chapter of the Odd Fellows, to the notoriously racist Workingmen's Party. Local anti-gambling ordinances and the new national alcohol prohibition killed Shellmound Park. There's no point in picnics and horse races without booze, apparently.

Boxing kids at Neptune Beach, 1924, from Alameda Info.

Neptune Beach didn't open until 1917, late compared to other Bay Area parks, and it lasted until 1939 when the depression and increasing car use spurred in part by the recently completed San Francisco Bay Bridge made Alameda a less appealing destination for Bay Area funseekers. While it lasted it contained a giant swimming area, prime beach land, snacks, concessions, and a roller coaster that offered views across the Bay to San Francisco.

Neptune Beach Roller Coaster 1922, postcard from Alameda Info.

Amusement parks were popular around the country in the early 20th century. Most started as Trolley Parks, created by the streetcar companies as a destination for trolley lines. The parks were often built at beaches or, as in Idora Park, at locations that otherwise showed off nature's lovelier features. The natural features were eventually obscured by the gaudy rides that were installed later. The parks patterned themselves after each other and tended to rip off rides and even their names from larger or more successful parks elsewhere in the country. You might recognize the name "Playland" for example from the more famous Long Island park of the same name. Like the streetcar companies that built these places, the parks themselves were killed by the rise of car culture – not to mention the Great Depression and then television. Although as in the case of Playland, there were some late holdouts. Amusement Park fans are quite loyal. Besides lovingly maintained memorial websites to the various amusement parks, the Neptune Beach Amusement Museum is trying to build a physical space in the old location of Neptune Beach.

The destruction of Playland at the Beach,
copyright Dennis O'Rorke, 1972, from outsidelands.org.

(Thanks so much to peacay at the beautiful bibliodyssey for giving me the Cliff House link that started me on this post.)

Borax

2007-12-16T10:58:00.000-08:00

Hi Folks!

I'm still here, just severely weakened by a massive pile of biology homework until Wednesday. I might as well shout out the New Earth Artists Cafe where I'm finishing my microbiology papers and enjoying a Jill Scott (grits and eggs) and coffee and the view of basketball players and martial artists at the F.M. Smith rec center and playground. He was a classic robber baron and exploited Chinese workers in his Death Valley borax mines, but for those of us who live in The Town Frances Marion Smith is our robber baron, and we've got a corner of his once enormous estate as a cute little neighborhood park where I grew up playing and where my little Ru is playing with her Auntie today so I can get some work done. Speaking of which...

Dogpatch

2007-12-07T00:29:00.000-08:00

Illinois St. and 19th at the Eastern edge of Dogpatch.
An 1862 photo by Eadward Muybridge. From pier70sf.org

Hey, look at that: The Dogpatch has a website! Nice work. More cool stuff about Pier 70 elsewhere on the same site.

Bearings Blog

2007-12-06T12:48:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty much out of commission research-wise until my finals are over in two weeks. In the meantime, I'll keep up the links to sites that are a)Bay Area related, b)history related, c)activist related, and/or d)just really awesome.

Under the heading of Just Really Awesome and Bay Area History Related: Bearings A Geographers Blog. Bearings looks at our "built environment", often at the portions of that environment which have been abandoned in our ever forward moving rush towards wealth and progress. There's a strong emphasis on the West and on history, and there are lots of beautiful photos, both historical and contemporary. I was extra interested in a recent series of Bearings posts about sugar beet factories in Colorado because I watched Burn! last night, and now I want to learn everything I can about the changes and tragedies of the sugar industry.

Filter presses to purify liquid beet sugar, from Bearings.

Bearings is the creation of author and photographer Jon Haeber. He's got a great Flickr page too (recently profiled on Boing Boing). Maybe if I'm very nice he'll be my new best friend.

Letters from a Concentration Camp

2007-12-01T11:36:00.000-08:00

Clara Estelle Breed, a San Diego children's librarian, was outraged by the WWII era policy of internment for Japanese Americans. In response, she met Japanese American families as they were being sent away by train and distributed stamped and addressed postcards to the children, asking them to write to her and describe life in the camps. Her papers, including cards sent by interned adults and children are now collected at the Japanese American National Museum.

Thanks to amyms on metafilter for this find.

Guerrilla Oil Spill Cleanup

2007-11-30T13:16:00.000-08:00

The humble oyster mushroom.

I've been following the efforts of Bay Area guerrilla oil spill cleaner upers, mostly because I get regular updates from a friend who's been out there on the beaches picking the toxic stuff up with human hair mats and now as she and her comrades prepare to inoculate the oily mats with oyster mushroom spawn which will, apparently, break the oil down into harmless compost.

Today the project got covered in the Chron. It's worth noting that this work is not endorsed or assisted by the city, and especially not by the EPA. This is just regular folks with a little bit of knowledge and a lot of commitment, doing what needs to be done.

Makes me proud...

Oops!

2007-11-27T22:46:00.000-08:00

I fixed the topic tags on a bunch of old posts, and as a result, folks who read this blog through RSS (LJ, Bloglines, etc) will see all those posts as if they were brand new. Damn me! (If you read this blog by going straight to it's blogspot site, then you can ignore this post.)

Sorry, won't happen again.

Books and Bún

2007-11-27T21:17:00.000-08:00

Photocopier at the History Room:
My Best Friend.

Today I treated myself to an afternoon at the Oakland History Room - my last trip there for a while I’m afraid; I need to spend my limited childcare time studying for impending finals.

The History Room houses rotating exhibits and the current display about Emeryville's sports and gambling history should be of interest to those who want to learn more about the Emeryville Shellmound. It features a few pictures of the old Shellmound Park amusement area including photos of the dance pavilions, the shooting range, and the racetrack that were all there from the late 1800s through the 1920s.

Mmmm… Bún.

When the library closed I treated myself again, this time to vegetarian* bún at Kim Huong on 10th Street. Since having kids I've come to treasure meals eaten alone, and quietly reading a book while eating something prepared by someone else is a special treat. I'd rather the book hadn't been my microbiology textbook, and to tell you the truth, I've had much better bûn, but I'll take my treats where and when I can get them.

*(this is only true if you, like me, believe that fish are vegetables.)

Week of Links! Done!

2007-11-23T10:25:00.000-08:00

All this blogging is tiring me out. After today my 'week of links' is done. I know, five days does not a week make, but my kids will be happier if I go out and play this weekend instead of staring at my computer screen, so that's it until next week.

The last link in this week of links is this Bay Area race map. Click the ethnic group button in the upper right corner to see where different groups of people congregate, and then laugh in the face of the next person who tells you that the Bay Area isn't segregated.

This is just one page of a larger google maps/census data mashup project. The site also features maps that sort by population age, gender, family structure, and by other values. I guess there's even instructions for making your own census map.

Alcatraz

2007-11-22T00:16:00.000-08:00

From 1969 to 1971 a pan-national group of Indian activists called Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz Island, reclaiming the land 'by right of discovery'. This was their proclamation:

I N D I A N S O F A L L N A T I O N S

THE ALCATRAZ PROCLAMATION
to the
Great White Father and his People

1969

We, the native Americans, reclaim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery.

We wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the Caucasian inhabitants of this land, and hereby offer the following treaty:

We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man's purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago. We know that $24 in trade goods for these 16 acres is more than was paid when Manhattan Island was sold, but we know that land values have risen over the years. Our offer of $1.24 per acres is greater than the $0.47 per acre the white men are now paying the California Indians for their lands.

We will give to the inhabitants of this island a portion of the land for their own to then to be held in trust...by the Bureau of Caucasian Affairs...in perpetuity -- for as long as the sun shall rise and the rivers go down to the sea. We will further guide the inhabitants in the proper way of living. We will offer them our religion, our education, our life-ways in order to help them achieve our level of civilization and thus raise them and all their white brothers up from their savage and unhappy state. We offer this treaty in good faith and wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with all white men.

We feel that this so-called Alcatraz Island is more than suitable for an Indian reservation, as determined by the white man's own standards. By this, we mean that this place resembles most Indian reservations in that:

1. It is isolated from modern facilities, and without adequate means of transportation.
2. It has no fresh running water.
3. It has inadequate sanitation facilities.
4. There are no oil or mineral rights.
5. There is no industry and so unemployment is very great.
6. There are no health-care facilities.
7. The soil is rocky and non-productive, and the land does not support game.
8. There are no educational facilities.
9. The population has always exceeded the land base.
10. The population has always been held as prisoners and kept dependent upon others.

Further, it would be fitting and symbolic that ships from all over the world, entering the Golden Gate, would first see Indian land, and thus be reminded of the true history of this nation. This tiny island would be a symbol of the great lands once ruled by free and noble Indians.

What use will we make of this land?

Since the San Francisco Indian Center burned down, there is no place for Indians to assemble and carry on tribal life here in the white man's city. Therefore, we plan to develop on this island several Indian institutions:

1. A Center for Native American Studies will be developed which will educate them to the skills and knowledge relevant to improve the lives and spirits of all Indian peoples. Attached to this center will be traveling universities, managed by Indians, which will go to the Indian Reservations, learning those necessary and relevant materials now about.

2. An American Indian Spiritual Center, which will practice our ancient tribal religious and sacred healing ceremonies. Our cultural arts will be featured and our young people trained in music, dance, and healing rituals.

3. An Indian Center of Ecology, which will train and support our young people in scientific research and practice to restore our lands and waters to their pure and natural state. We will work to de-pollute the air and waters of the Bay Area. We will seek to restore fish and animal life to the area and to revitalize sea-life which has been threatened by the white man's way. We will set up facilities to desalt sea water for human benefit.

4. A Great Indian Training School will be developed to teach our people how to make a living in the world, improve our standard of living, and to end hunger and unemployment among all our people. This training school will include a center for Indian arts and crafts, and an Indian restaurant serving native foods, which will restore Indian culinary arts. This center will display Indian arts and offer Indian foods to the public, so that all may know of the beauty and spirit of the traditional Indian ways.

Alcatraz kids playing on abandoned equipment. Photo by Ilka Hartmann.

Some of the present buildings will be taken over to develop an American Indian Museum which will depict our native food and other cultural contributions we have given to the world. Another part of the museum will present some of the things the white man has given to the Indians in return for the land and life he took:

disease, alcohol, poverty, and cultural decimation (as symbolized by old tin cans, barbed wire, rubber tires, plastic containers, etc.). Part of the museum will remain a dungeon to symbolize both those Indian captives who were incarcerated for challenging white authority and those who were imprisoned on reservations. The museum will show the noble and tragic events of Indian history, including the broken treaties, the documentary of the Trail of Tears, the Massacre of Wounded Knee, as well as the victory over Yellow-Hair Custer and his army.

In the name of all Indians, therefore, we reclaim this island for our Indian nations, for all these reasons. We feel this claim is just and proper, and that this land should rightfully be granted to us for as long as the rivers run and the sun shall shine.

We hold the rock!

--------------------------------

Alcatraz occupier Atha Rider Whitemankiller after the
last residents were forcibly removed from the island.
Photo by Ilka Hartmann.

The Alcatraz occupation on the internet:
An article from the Native Press; original documents from Indians of All Tribes (and related ephemera); the National Park Service; and American Indian Studies professor Troy Johnson's Alcatraz site with a lot of period photos, including all but one of the photos in this post.

The Alcatraz occupation on paper:
Ojibway activist and occupation organizer Adam Fortunate Eagle's Alcatraz! Alcatraz! and Heart of the Rock (co-written with sympathetic white guy journalist Tim Findley); Like a Hurricane from Comanche writer Paul Chaat Smith, and Osage professor and writer Robert Allen Warrior; probable white guy American Indian Studies professor Troy R. Johnson's The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, Alcatraz: Indian Land Forever, and You Are on Indian Land! Alcatraz Island, 1969-1971.

The Alcatraz occupation on film:
Alcatraz is Not an Island documentary website including video of occupation veterans.

Alcatraz photo by Ilka Hartmann.

Happy Thanksgiving folks.

Week of Links! Train Porn!

2007-11-21T08:56:00.000-08:00

You'll never meet a group of people as obsessive as train enthusiasts. Considering that the entire Bay Area was once criss-crossed with municipal, interurban, and transcontinental train lines, there's lots here to obsess and enthuse about. Shall we begin?

Shafter and College in Oakland, 1952. Kenneth C. Jenkins photo. Garth G. Groff collection.

I once found it unbelievable that there used to be a commuter (and small freight) train line running up Shafter Street in North Oakland, through the hills, all the way to Sacramento, and then on to Chico! Don't believe it either? This site has proof!

OB&E was created by an adorable teenager. (Daniel, please don't be annoyed that I called you "adorable" or that I'm being semi-patronizing by referencing your age. I only mention these facts because they will increase viewer awe of your site!). The site focuses on the East Bay's electric commuter trains – now long gone. It is updated less frequently because the creator went off to college, but it's well organized with lots of sweet photos. Worth a look.

Key Rail Pics is the place where the Key Route Yahoo Group posts their awesome East Bay train pictures.

John Stashik Collection

Bay Rails. Again, mostly East Bay. Again, totally awesome.

This site maps various active train tracks. It's not a map of where the train tracks lead to, it's a map of the actual track layout. I am in awe of the nerdiness of this project.

Also highly nerdy (in a good way), this site is full of highly technical information (that I don't understand at all!) and cool close up photos relating to the Southern Pacific which, I believe, once terminated in Oakland.
The Western Railway Museum site features Quicktime videos of old trains in action, and don't miss this Telstar Logistics post about the snowbound and decaying fleet of MUNI trains in Lake Tahoe.

Finally, I can't forget the N Judah Chronicles, a fine blog of all things N-Judah which brings back my days living at the bottom of the N Line, when I used to have to sweep sand out of my living room.

Week of Links! Shaping San Francisco!

2007-11-20T15:08:00.000-08:00

San Francisco General Strike. From shapingsf.org.

You could say that Shaping San Francisco is a sort of spiritual parent to Bay Radical. Maybe you know the great anthology, Reclaiming San Francisco, or you may remember the late-90s library kiosks of the original version of Shaping San Francisco (apparently, there are still two of them in active use!). Well, since then the Shaping San Francisco folks have gotten a huge amount of material onto the internet, and according to their site, they are in the process of updating everything online (if you can spare a little, they need funds for the update).

The Reclaiming San Francisco site conains an awe-inspiring number of photos, videos and essays about San Francisco radical history. They've posted lectures and period video on their Archive.org page, and they host frequent talks at CounterPULSE and regular bicycle history tours of the City.

Chris Carlsson, Critical Mass OG, and founder of the awesome 80s Financial District Mag Processed World, is the backbone of Shaping San Francisco. I keep meaning to pester him into a lunch date. Maybe when my semester is out.

Anyhow, I really can't express the awesomeness of the project. Instead, I'll let this video of the White Nights Riot from their arvhive.org page show you the superness:

Week of Links! Shorpy!

2007-11-19T09:02:00.000-08:00

Since some folks will be off work this week, meaning, you may not want to fritter away your hours reading long posts, I'm going to do a week of links. Every day, I'll link to one of my favorite history resources.

First up is the link that may already be a chestnut to you internet history junkies out there, but it's one of the best: Shorpy.

Minor mill on Warren Creek by Arcata, California. Mack is the engineer, taken mid 1880s. Photographer unknown –from Shorpy.com

Shorpy posts historical photos. That's it. Explanations are minimal, but often unnecessary. When I look at the pictures on Shorpy, I think about how often a few photos can tell a story way better than a 2000 word analysis.

Shorpy also runs a comics subsite which is worth checking out too. Enjoy!

Bannerman's Arsenal

2007-11-17T20:52:00.000-08:00

This has zero to do with the Bay Area, but it is kind of political. BLDGBLOG recently posted a nice article about Bannerman's Arsenal, the now decaying castle of a man who was once the world's most successful arms dealer.

Thanks johnson at metafilter for the link. Here's wikipedia for a bit more.

The Shellmound

2007-11-16T00:48:00.000-08:00

The Bay Street Mall, home of the Apple Store, California Pizza Kitchen, H&M, and a wealth (so to speak) of other one-step-above the hoi polloi chain stores has been thoughtful enough to include a bit of local history on their website. I'll give you an excerpt: One day, a group of people, the Ohlone, arrived at the Bay… This was a great place to live, with plenty of everything people might need: water, food, space, and the materials to make shelters. The Ohlone decided to stay and call this place home. One paragraph later we learn that Today Bay Street Emeryville, an urban village where people can shop, dine, live and be entertained, calls the site home.

The mall website fails to mention the moments that intervened between today and the 'day' that tribal people, now called the Ohlone, arrived at the mouth of Temescal Creek where the mall now sits. Presumably, mall managers would rather not linger on historical happenings like the deadly Spanish Mission system that enslaved California's coastal tribal people, or the factories that for 75 years occupied the mall's current location, producing paints and pesticides and leaching heavy metals into the groundwater, or the protests that archaeologists and local Muwekma Ohlone activists registered in opposition to the mall's construction.

Most notably, promotional materials fail to clearly explain the fact that the mall is sitting on top of the remaining portions of what was probably the Bay Area's largest shellmound. Oh, they mention the Shellmound. The Mall faces Emeryville's "Shellmound Street", and they even put up a commemorative exhibit about the mound (and I do mean commemorative, since it emphasizes the past over present-day Bay Area Indian communities.) Their commemorative mini-mound was mandated by Emeryville's city council as an appeasement to the people who were understandably concerned about the construction of a mall atop the spot where their ancestors are buried.

Let me back up a minute.

The Shellmound at the base of Temescal Creek was at one time roughly 60 feet high and 350 feet in diameter. It, along with five or six smaller adjoining mounds lined the marshy land where the creek, now culverted under the streets of Oakland and Emeryville, meets the Bay.

There are hundreds of shellmounds scattered along the mouths of the Bay Area's numerous creeks. Anthropologists in the early 1900s counted at least 425. The remains of a massive shellmound sit underneath Spenger's - the old-school fish restaurant near the base of University Avenue in Berkeley. Shellmounds are found in coastal regions around the world from Brazil to British Colombia, Australia to Denmark.

View Larger Map
This residential street in Alameda was once a large shellmound.

The Emeryville Shellmound is made up of thousands of years of accumulated shells (shellmounds get their name from the enormous volume of waste-shells that make up much of their bulk), along with earth, ash, and other remnants from the villagers who lived nearby and likely also on top of the mound. It also contained and still contains bodies of the human dead - sometimes accompanied by traditional burial objects. Anthropologists wager that the purpose of the mound changed over time, but it appears that it was a home, a place to deposit refuse, and a burial ground all at once. For non-Ohlone people, the mound can at the least serve as a reminder of both the mundanities of daily life and the rituals of loss that made up the experiences of the tribal people who lived and continue to live here. For many Ohlone people, the mound is the place where their ancestors are buried, and as such, Ohlone activists have worked to have their graveyard treated with appropriate respect and dignity.

According to the detailed journals of Spanish surveyors who were the first Europeans to explore the Bay, what is now the Emeryville Shellmound was already abandoned before Spanish invasion in the 1700s. It wasn't long after the Spanish came that the destruction of the mound began. Luis Peralta, the Spanish soldier who had received a land grant of the entire East Bay as a reward for his military service (mostly killing Indians, actually) apparently used the base of the mound as a place to corral and slaughter his cattle. Or maybe his son Vicente who settled in the Temescal area actually did the cattle ranching – I have to read up on this more at some point.

In the 1870s the enormous mound was turned into a sort of local amusement park (the Bay Area had a number of these places, but that's another post). Developers chopped the top off the mound to add a pavilion where (white) revelers could watch the Bay while they got loaded and literally danced on the graves of the indigenous dead.

1902 photo (published in 1907) of Shellmound Park, from the University of California's collection

In 1924, the mound suffered a greater blow. Steam shovels removed the bulk of it to make way for paint and pesticide factories. At the time of the destruction, the mound's importance was already well-understood, even by non-native people. It had been twice excavated by researchers from the University of California - this overview of Bay Area shellmounds was written by one N.C. Nelson in the early 1900s. While the language is peppered with outmoded and racist ideas about the coastal tribes, the often lovely descriptions of the mounds make clear that anthropologists understood at least some of their significance.

Rusting factories on the remaining portion of the mound

The factories were torn down in the late '90s. While City of Emeryville officials were in the midst of deciding how to develop the at that point vacant land, a particularly heavy rainy season upset the ground where the factories had been leaching arsenic, heavy metals, and other poisons for more than 70 years, and toxic runoff started to pour into the Bay. The city hired workers to stop the runoff, and as they dug holding pools, the workers discovered that a large portion of the Shellmound, thought to be totally destroyed, was still there just under the topsoil. The City hired an archaeologist who reported that the area was "massively significant". They promptly fired him. They also brought in the Native American Heritage Commission, which appointed a "Most Likely Descendant" of the dead found inside the mound.

An abalone pendant from the mound

It should be obvious that the descendants of the ancient people who lived in the Bay Area do not speak with one voice. Historian Andrew Galvan, an Ohlone, favored exploring the mound for its archaeological value. But the local tribal community, officially represented in this case by 'most likely descendant' Katherine Perez, tended to oppose further excavation and instead pushed for reburial of the remains and sealing of the mound. For it's part, the City of Emeryville was under no legal obligation to listen to anyone, so they followed their pocketbooks by limiting the controversial archaeological research and allowing developers to move forward with building the Disney-esque shopping/entertainment/living complex that we have today.

When I walk into the Bay Street Mall my heart breaks. What kills me is how very many people are drawn there. On the immaculate, privately owned and maintained streets I see people of every ethnicity and age. Gay and lesbian folks. Transgender folks. The wealthy and the working class. I've even spotted one of the Bay's favorite leftist hip hop artists dining at California Pizza Kitchen (hey, I was dining there myself). There is a way that the Mall is like my dream of an idealized Bay Area where all kinds of people can be both themselves and be together, working, eating, laughing, but it's the looking-glass ideal. Behind the mall are minimum-wage retail workers, piles of clothes and toys and things, made by sweatshop workers in China, the environmental cost of the hundreds of cars stacked in the parking lots. And most painful, the mall's foundations, which rest on human remains.

Today, Indian People Organizing for Change along with members of Vallejo Intertribal SSP&RIT and their allies were meeting at the Intertribal Friendship House to launch a Shellmound Peace Walk, visiting Shellmounds and other sacred sites around the Bay Area, praying, and drawing attention to the past that is under all of our feet. The walk will wind up the day after thanksgiving, Buy Nothing Day, at the Bay Street Mall.

Photo of 2006 demonstration taken by M. Villanueva, posted on indybay.org

Do you want to know more about the Ohlone or the Shellmound?

The short film Shellmound will be screening this Sunday, November 18th at La Pena as part of the Hecho en Califas festival.

The City of Emeryville's site about the Shellmound, created as part of their compromise agreement with local Ohlone people has quite a bit of (at times softened) historical information including photographs of dozens of artifacts found during the 1999 excavation.

A lovely site about East Bay Creeks features photos of the current Temescal Creek outflow.

Wikipedia handles Ohlone issues fairly well.

This SF weekly article has some interesting background about the Muwekma Ohlone tribe.

A recent study of bird bones from the Shellmound led one investigator to the conclusion that local tribes overhunted native birds to a significant enough degree to have severely reduced sea bird populations here. I was interested in the way this article challenges simplistic stereotypes about Indian people.

There were a number of articles about the mound written during the development and construction of the Mall:

The East Bay Express, Terrain Magazine and California Wild all printed worthwhile pieces.

Improvements, hopefully

2007-11-15T21:29:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to improve the readability of this page by switching from white print on a black background to black print on a white background. Maybe eventually I'll even have a user pic. Any suggestions for making things more readable around here are welcome.

Veterans Day Links

2007-11-12T08:25:00.000-08:00

"Caring for a dead veteran is easy...bring a wreath, say a few
words and walk away. Caring for a living veteran requires
time, money and a life-long commitment. Every Veterans
Day our politicians show they don't know the difference
as they visit a cemetery instead of a VA hospital."

•VA Watchdog
•G.I. Rights Hotline
•Hire Veterans
•National Coalition for Homeless Veterans
•PTSD Combat Blog

and…
•Iraq Veterans Against the War
•Veterans Against the Iraq War
•Vietnam Veterans Against the War
•Veterans for Peace
•Citizen Soldier
•Courage to Resist
•Military Families Speak Out
•Gold Star Families Speak Out

…and the G.I. Movement Archives from the Sir! No Sir! Website.

Feel free to add to the list.

Resource re: Pakistan

2007-11-08T13:50:00.000-08:00

I just discovered Chapati Mystery - a blog about South Asia, history, and politics. It's well-written and smart, and lately its all about the current state of Martial Law in Pakistan. I'll be reading there to keep up with the state of the dictatorship.

Thanks to Surf Putah, (one of my favorite semi-local bloggers), for pointing out this blog!

Woo-hoo!

2007-11-06T11:42:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased and flattered to share that my recent post on photographer Cathy Cade has been included in this month's History Carnival. (I also submitted the article to the Carnival of Feminists which will be posting tomorrow at Ornamenting Away, so cross your fingers that you'll see me there tomorrow too.)

In case you're new to Carnivals, they're traveling, periodic collections of blog posts on a particular topic.

In case you're new to this journal, its a bunch of posts loosely organized around the themes of history, radical politics, and the San Francisco Bay Area. I have time for a really well-researched post about once every six weeks or so. In between I post movie and book reviews, photos of my kids, or whatever else strikes my fancy.

The Grace Lee Project

2007-11-04T21:35:00.000-08:00

The Grace Lee Project: Filmmaker Grace Lee interviewed a dozen other women named Grace Lee, looking for what Grace Lees have in common, and where they differ. I loved it.

(Ya, so, I have had a lot less time for reading and research, and a bit more time for watching movies lately, but I swear I have a "real" post coming in the next couple weeks.)

Community Radio Smackdown!

2007-11-03T20:52:00.000-07:00

My radio spends the vast majority of its time divided between 90.7 and 94.1 (it's true that a small percentage is also spent playing classic R&B and contemporary country – ya, you heard me - but mostly I'm loyal to the big two) and right now my favorite stations are conspiring to host simultaneous pledge periods. I can think of only one way to get revenge: Community Radio Smackdown! KALX vs. KPFA, or more specifically, KALX pledge breaks vs. KPFA pledge breaks – the winner gets my ass volunteering to answer phones during their next pledge period.

I'll be evaluating the pledge breaks using 3 important criteria: On-Air Banter, Premiums, and Volunteer Pledge Taker service. Everybody ready? Here we go:

On-Air Banter: KALX
KPFA, I love you, but your pledge period on-air banter is dry dry dry. Dry like an all-gin martini. Not dry like funny, but dry like dull. And Dennis Bernstein, although I admire your conviction, you should not be allowed to participate in fundraising. Does your doctor realize the level of stress you undergo during each pledge break? I'm concerned about heart failure. Also Dennis, as much as I care for KPFA, and as much as I care about Palestine – I just can't believe that donating to KPFA will save Palestinian children. But shit, keep trying, maybe you'll convince me eventually.

KALX banter on the other hand is so awesome that I actually look forward to their pledge periods. Their prerecorded celebrity endorsements are amazing – Joan Jett tells me to give money – let me tell you, I'm gonna give it. Their breaks are short, they are funny, and the DJs lack the pledge break desperation found on most public radio stations. Of course, it may be that they have much smaller financial needs – how much does the KALX news cost to produce anyway? Even so, KALX wins this category.

Premiums: KPFA
KPFA beats KALX's ass on premiums. Right now KPFA is giving away some sort of expanded Paul Robeson CD that includes both interviews and performances, Michael Moore's Sicko, and the Good Vibrations Guide to Sex. KALX on the other hand is giving away Modest Mouse CDs and tickets to see the Coup. In December. Shit, I love the Coup from the bottom of my leftist heart, but I see them for free at every other political action. Yay for the Coup, but this is not a good premium.

KALX used to give away actual DJ slots to big donors. Meaning, for the right price you could host your own show. I admit that is an awesome premium, but I haven't heard it offered this time around, so even though KALX also gives out cool t-shirts and temporary tattoos, I'm handing this category over to KPFA for their consistently quality pledge shwag.

Telephone Volunteers: KALX
I am fucking broke people. I mean, overdrawn for a week, praying to the baby Jesus that the landlord doesn't cash my check broke. But my commitment to this scientific comparison is so great that I attempted to pledge to both stations despite my financial problems so that I could accurately report for all of you. Here's what I found:

I received excellent service from the KALX phone-answering volunteer, who also happened to be KALX volunteer DJ Pop Goes the Weasel. In all my years of donating to KPFA, KQED, and KALW, I have never talked to a DJ when I've called in my pledge, and KPFA would really have to have gone above and beyond to have come close to KALX in this category. Unfortunately, by the time I finally got around to calling KPFA, their pledge period had ended! I thought these things lasted forever. Sorry KPFA, but by ending your fundraiser in a reasonable period of time, you've forfeited your spot in this competition. This category goes to our friends at KALX.

The winner in this year's Community Radio Smackdown? KALX. Competition was stiff, but KALX wins my ass, volunteering to answer phones during their next pledge break. Thanks for playing along at home and remember, it's always the right time to donate: 510.642.KALX, or 510.848.KPFA. And don't forget to pay your pledges folks!

Sir! No Sir!

2007-10-31T22:43:00.000-07:00

Shoot, folks have been telling me to watch this for months - I guess at this point it's been a couple years. Anyhow, I finally saw Sir! No Sir! last night. I had about 30 other things to do, but I'm glad I blew them off because this is a great movie and I learned so much!

I'm embarrassed to admit that I was at least 25 before I understood that the US had actually lost the war in Vietnam. And I sure didn't get the level of resistance against the war within the military until I saw this movie. There's even some great local info including a bit about vets breaking our of the stockade at the Presidio in San Francisco. The stockade at the Presidio?? See, I've managed to spend my naive 33 years thinking of the Presidio as a really pretty park. Sometimes learning history makes me feel like a moron. Anyhow, here's the extended 12 minute trailer:

The Free Speech Movement

2007-10-31T15:27:00.000-07:00

Don't you just love that? In truth, I don't know much about the Free Speech Movement beyond the basics: Mario Savio and other students who had worked on civil rights campaigns in the segregated South came back to school at Berkeley and brought the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement with them – this time advocating for everyone's basic rights to free expression. I'm not one for hero worship, and I know that Mario Savio was just a part of a large movement, but I love listening to him here because he fucking means what he's saying. There's nothing rehearsed or rehashed about that speech. It's from the heart, 100%. I love that passion. I love that kind of need.

The internet's got a lot of resources about the FSM. Notably, the Bacroft library at UC Berkeley has a pile of documents online as part of their Free Speech Movement Digital Archive. They link to transcriptions of all kinds of related original documents (like flyers, newspaper articles, relevant government paperwork, etc), and a collection of related oral histories - for example - you can read the reaction of then President of UC Berkeley Clark Kerr to the movement. (He's the guy that Mario Savio is pissed off at in the video above.) I also recommend this segment of a lovely interview with civil rights attorney and Old Left royal Robert Treuhaft who represented the FSM, and got booked with the activists during what turned out to be the largest mass arrest of students in this country's history.

Savio.org is the site that represents a fund established in Mario's honor which awards young activists, and also pays for annual lectures in his name. This year's lecture is coming up tomorrow! Angela Davis will be speaking about "Prisons, Democracy, and Empire". (I love listening to Angela, not just because she's one of the smartest people ever, but also because she thinks that history is important, and historical context is so often incorporated into what she has to say.)

Free Speech Movement Archives includes a number of nice overviews, timelines, etc that help to summarize the movement. From that site I found a link to this little photo gallery from Ron Enfield who was chief photographer for the Daily Californian at the time that the movement was active.

Of course, free expression is still an issue. It's always an issue. The Cal Disorientation Guide has this to say about our current rights to free speech on the Cal campus. Enjoy the links folks, while we still get to read 'em.

Sister Comrade

2007-10-26T16:36:00.000-07:00

You don't want to miss this one: Sister Comrade, a celebration of the lives of poet activists Audre Lorde and Pat Parker:

Catherine Roraback

2007-10-25T08:30:00.001-07:00

Catherine Roraback was the only woman in her class at Yale Law School. She was a founder of the Connecticut ACLU, and a president of the National Lawyers Guild. During her long career she defended labor organizers, immigrants being threatened with deportion under McCarthy era policies, civil rights workers, Black Panther Ericka Huggins, and maybe most famously, Estelle Griswold before the United States Supreme Court in the case that struck down restrictions on the distribution of birth control (at least to married women and men) and set the precedent for Roe vs. Wade. She died this week at age 87.

A friend sent me this lovely obituary from the Hartford Courant, and here's the New York Times.

You Can't Stop Me – an interview with Cathy Cade

2007-10-23T15:23:00.000-07:00

If you have an image in your head of a lesbian feminist, Cathy Cade probably helped put in there. For at least my entire adult life, I've been looking at her pictures in the dozen books and magazines where they've been featured, and in her own book, A Lesbian Photo Album: The Lives of Seven Lesbian Feminists.

Cathy became an activist while she was in college: in 1966 she joined the Civil Rights Movement, demonstrating and organizing with SNCC. As an opponent of the Vietnam War, she helped found the Tulane chapter of SDS, and later was an early actor in the Women's Movement. In 1970, Cathy moved to San Francisco where she soon came out as a lesbian and started taking pictures, and her interconnected dedication to social justice and to photography has persisted throughout her life. Along with her documentary photo projects, Cathy runs a business as a professional photographer and personal historian. (Her website has details.) I was so excited when Cathy agreed to do an interview with me, and not only did we have a great time talking, but she managed to recruit me to a whole pile of women's history related projects she's involved with!

Along with the interview, I asked Cathy to chose a few pictures which show how her work has changed over the years. You can find them below, each with a little bit of background from her in the caption.

Gail Grassi and Kate Kaufman repairing a car. "It was a time when we all looked to the Chinese Revolution for progressive ideas of making the world a better place for people."

Bay Radical You talked before we started taping about how when you first started doing photography, you couldn't believe that women could really use that equipment.

Cathy Cade That's right.

BR You started taking pictures in '71 – is that right?

CC Ya. The same spring I came out as a lesbian; they were very connected. It was a time when a lot of lesbians were getting into the trades. And so one of the first things I did was photograph women in the trades, and photograph my friends tuning their cars, and the Women's Press Collective printing books, and carpenters. I still like to do that. Recently I've been photographing men doing skilled work. Uptown Body and Fender is in downtown Oakland and the woman who owns that loves art and she hired me to photograph her workers. [Now] there are these big beautiful black and white prints up on the wall, so when you've had your car smashed up you drive in there and you get out of your car and here are all these skilled mechanics doing their work.

BR That's really cool.

CC It turns out I like to photograph men doing skilled work also.

BR Have you taken pictures of men over the years?

CC Some gay men. But this is all political. Most of the men who work in that shop are immigrants from Latin America, one of whom was just being deported the other day. So it all stays political.

BR Was there some lag between when you started taking pictures and when you started thinking of yourself as a photographer?

CC Not very much, but it's a good question because one of the reasons I started taking pictures was because I was tired of going to meetings and all the processing and yet I still wanted to be in the movement. I figured I could make my contribution and not have to go to so many meetings. When I started photographing there were all these new magazines, and there [were] new exhibit opportunities because the women's movement and the lesbian feminist movement was just bursting out. And so my work got used right away. There wasn't any long period of me wondering if anybody was going to like my work or anything. It was totally grabbed up and used in newspapers, and magazines, and local exhibits, and in the new coffeehouses, so that made it really easy.

I didn't want to use the word "artist" because when I was growing up an artist was one of these rare people who was born with humongous talent and "please don’t embarrass us by thinking that you might be talented". But there were people like Holly Near and others using the word "cultural worker", so I could call myself a cultural worker. Things have changed over the years and I call myself an artist. And I'm glad to identify as an artist, but the fact that I was starting to do my photo work when it was wanted, needed, used and I could call myself a cultural worker – was helpful!

"I became involved with a coalition of union women called Union WAGE - Union Women's Alliance to Gain Equality. Some of the leadership were of an older generation than we were and had been activists in the '30s. This was one of the only places in the '70s where women in the women's movement of different generations were connecting with each other."

BR Right. That makes sense.

CC I didn't get paid.

BR Right. [Laughing] Some things don't change.

CC I think that I worked in photography as opposed to film partly because I could take pictures without having to raise a lot of money. My attitude a lot was, "You can't stop me." With a camera and wanting to take pictures and maybe wanting to get them out a little bit, the "you can't stop me" would work.

Now a days with the new technology you probably can make little films and put them up on YouTube, that's probably shifted.

"I wanted to do a book on lesbian mothering but I never got to, and when I couldn't do a book I said 'I'm going to take some of my favorite images, and I'm going to print them on cloth and embroider the cloth onto diapers'. The great thing about it is, I hang it up on a clothes line with old fashioned clothes pins - I can hang up an exhibit in 20 minutes - which means that I can hang it up for a one day event. I have it in the works to expand it."

BR Right. Well, it's a trade off because, what we don't have now is a movement to go with it and so it's…

CC You don't think we do?

BR Well, I'm curious how you think about it because your work was such a part of a movement. Does it still feel like its connected to a movement in the same way?

CC Well, backup a minute. I had two kids as a lesbian by donor insemination. My first son was born in '78, and my second in '85 – this was the beginning of this new lesbian mothering movement – so I had my kids and raised my kids in a political context. There were those years where lesbian mothering was my movement. After they got to a certain age, I guess high school or something, they weren't around as much and I started looking around and saying, "OK, so where's the Women's Movement? Where's the Lesbian Movement now?" And I couldn't find it. At first it seemed like it was nowhere. Like, when I moved out here in '71, I knew where the Women's Liberation Movement was: it was at Glide Church on Friday nights at 7:30.

BR That makes it easy!

CC Ya! But then we're talking the late '80s, early '90s, it's like nowhere and everywhere. And that's what it feels like now. But I'm now more and more connected with an old lesbian movement, and that's easier to identify - where it is - so I've lucked out again, in another identifiable movement.

Old Lesbians Organizing for Change marching at an early anti-Iraq War demonstration. "I started cutting up my pictures and making collages. This was radical. I had all been black and white, documentary photography, and all the sudden I'm cutting up a print and I'm going, 'Who do you think you are? God?'"

BR [There's a] theme that I see in your pictures that I wondered if you see, or if you have other themes that you want to point out: The subjects in your pictures are without self-consciousness, and especially because it's women doing non-traditional work, or people who are seen by the outside world as ugly in a certain way, that you just present in this really matter-of-fact way.

CC Well, I really appreciate you calling it that because some people think I'm overly positive, disgustingly positive, just this old Pollyanna, so it's nice of you to call it self-acceptance and a lack of self-consciousness. But I really did want to show us as human beings and to show us acting out of our personal power. Those early women in the trades pictures have a lot of sense of personal power you know. And I wanted to show women as smart and loving.

And the lesbian mothering pictures, I called them "mothering" not just "lesbian mothers" because nobody talked about mothering and what a job [it] was, and that it had skills. Part of what I wanted to do in those pictures was to articulate, "What do mothers do?" Not just what do lesbian mothers do but, "What is the job of mothering?"

The other thing is the everydayness - celebrating the everydayness. Everyday activities and everyday people.

"These quilt photos start out being 4X6 color prints that I take to the lab and they make 'em. No more sweating in the dark room. I cut the prints up and I reassemble them like you would a quilt if you had little pieces of cloth. They're about beauty, and I think in this day and age beauty brings hope, and getting to have hope is very political."

Library Love

2007-10-13T19:15:00.000-07:00

I know I don't have to tell you how awesome the library is, but I'll tell you anyway:

I went to the Dimond branch to dig through their American Indian collection (getting a pile of books for a post I'm working on) and found, not just that very awesome wall of books and magazines, but also in the teen section a library-produced flyer on resources for teens about sex, and a pamphlet, also library-made, about the realities of joining the military with lots of references for books, websites, and movies that could help help talk a 17 year old out of joining up.

Related: my little Rutabaga got her first library card this week. She just turned five, so she's old enough to take on the responsibilities and privileges associated with that piece of plastic, and I'm proud to report that she's been showing off her new card to everyone she talks to.

Can we just take a moment to praise librarians here? Libraries might be the last, great anti-corporate institutions left.

Wattstax

2007-10-07T21:07:00.000-07:00

Have you seen Wattstax? Maybe because it was released a year before I was born, I never saw it until just this second. I thought I would watch it while I worked on the homework for my web design class, but this is shredding me - I cannot take my eyes off the screen! Not only is it an amazing concert movie, not only is it an awesome document of a particular historical moment, but the seventies outfits are blowing me away!

If you have a pulse, you must watch this film. Here's the preview (you can ignore the dumb voiceover, but don't miss Oaklander Ted "Isaac, Your Bartender" Lange!):

Compton's Cafeteria Riot

2007-09-30T22:59:00.000-07:00

It's a hot August night in San Francisco in 1966 -- three years before the famed Stonewall. Compton's Cafeteria, in the seedy Tenderloin district, is hopping with its usual assortment of transgender people, young street hustlers, and down-and-out regulars. The management, annoyed by the noisy crowd at one table, calls the police. When a surly cop, accustomed to manhandling Compton's clientele, attempts to arrest one of the queens, she throws her coffee in his face. Mayhem erupts -- windows break, furniture flies through the air. Police reinforcements arrive, and the fighting spills into the street. For the first time, the drag queens band together to fight back, getting the better of the cops, whom they kick and stomp with their high-heeled shoes and beat with their heavy purses. For everyone at Compton's that night, one thing was certain -- things would never be the same again.

photo and text from comptonscafeteriariot.org

More than ten years ago, historian, author, and former director of the GLBT Historical Society Susan Stryker uncovered the history of a riot in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. In 2005, together with fellow historian-turned-filmmaker Victor Silverman and producer Jack Walsh, she released a documentary about that night, its context, and the early gay liberation and transexual human rights movements which the riot helped to inspire. Before Susan's work on this project, the Compton's story was mostly forgotten, but that doesn't mean that night didn't matter. It was a turning point for the queer community: San Franciscans were catalyzed by the event to start organizing, and the boldness of those queens and queers sent a message to the cops that harassing and brutalizing trans people, queer people, and poor people wasn't going to fly anymore. That spontaneous, furious fight was a landmark in the movement against police brutality and for human rights.

Wikipedia has a bit more on the riot, Susan's film delves into the whole story. It's called Screaming Queens. Here's a clip:

East Bay Lesbian Bars

2007-09-26T07:55:00.000-07:00

Because the gnomes that control google prefer that blogs have straight-ahead titles, I had to give this a straight-ahead title. Were that not the case, I would have called this post Women Unite in Armed Snuggle, a slogan found in the following wonderful link:

A brief history of East Bay lesbian bars.

I don't know much about bars because I spent my 20s clean and sober, and now that I'm not sober, I already feel too old to leave my house after 8 pm. But having read this piece by Barbara Hoke (and heavily illustrated, mainly with photos from the prolific Cathy Cade), I can say that I genuinely wish I spent more time in bars! Most specifically, I wish I could have gone to the Driftwood in Hayward to check out the former Roller Derby queens who ran the place. Seriously, I think bar history is important because bars are where we found each other even when we couldn't find each other anywhere else. Community is important and Stonewall should confirm that what happens in the bars has repercussions that are much bigger.

Related, I haven't watched it in a few years but I remember liking Last Call at Maude's about a long-lived San Francisco dyke bar. And for more on lesbian bar history, this Curve article discusses it, including references to a couple books on the topic.

I'll close with some silliness: popular culture's take on lesbian bars. I would have included Roseanne's lesbian bar kiss, but the only clip I could find on YouTube was too long. Instead I offer you these two:

Susie Bright uploaded her cameo in the bar scene in Bound (which I walked out of after the first 10 minutes when it was in the theater a dozen years ago).

And Pam Grier beats off the lesbians in the Foxy Brown bar fight scene (which I confess, I am too young to have seen in the theater):

Drink on gals!

Two Bookstores

2007-09-23T08:25:00.000-07:00

I've had a pretty stressful few months, and unfortunately for my generally overdrawn bank account, I've been pacifying myself by buying a lot of used furniture and new books. Yesterday I found myself twice unable to resist the temptation of bookstores.

Laurel Bookstore on MacArthur and 39th is now (since I moved a couple weeks ago) my neighborhood bookstore. They mostly carry new books, with a large children's section and a nice mix of other topics. I spent some time talking to the owner and she was especially warm and helpful. The place generally has a friendly, happy, neighborhoody feeling that I liked. When I was there yesterday I found a copy of Storybook Strings and a new history of the Laurel District by Oakland lover Dennis Evanosky. Turns out he'll be doing a reading at Laurel Bookstore next month, so I'll be back!

Then last night, after filling up on injira at Cafe Colucci I stopped into Book Zoo on Telegraph at Alcatraz and found a couple used Arcadia history books and a well-preserved first edition of If They Come in the Morning from the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and Other Political Prisoners. I don't care about the first edition thing, I just want to read it, but I was impressed that the Book Zoo folks only charged four bucks. Their prices are all very reasonable and the store is beautiful, with lovely old hardbacks shelved almost to the ceiling. Very worth a visit.

I really wanted to close this with a link to John and Yoko singing Angela, but I couldn't find a copy online, so you'll have to content yourself with reading the lyrics.

More Rosie

2007-09-20T22:48:00.000-07:00

In the massive oversight department, my recent post about the Rosie the Riveter Park failed to mention an awesome related project. The Bancroft Regional Oral History Office conducted almost 50 oral histories of men and women who lived and worked in Richmond during the war. You can read a few of the transcripts on their site.

Good news for history nerds (like me)

2007-09-18T07:58:00.000-07:00

History Nerds Rejoice! The New York Times is making their Times Select features including a large portion of their archives available for free to all. I could give a hoo-ha about reading the Times columnists, but the archives – all the archives from 1851 to 1922 and some content from 1923 to 1986 available online for free! I never have to leave the comfort of my computer screen again! Unfortunately, you still need to register (for free) to read the article about it.

(Just watch out for giants!)

Technical Problems

2007-09-17T14:31:00.001-07:00

A bit of tech housekeeping that you can ignore if you read this site by going straight to bayradical.blogspot.com:

Apparently, those of you who read Bay Radical through an RSS reader like bloglines or LJ syndication are seeing re-posts of my old entries, sometimes all of them at once! I know this is annoying, but my research about this hasn't uncovered exactly where the problem lies. Basically, for some reason, the RSS reader perceives that I have updated or changed old posts, and is trying to show you the 'new versions' even when there isn't a new version.

From what I understand, this problem is common, and happens to lots of blogs in all different readers, but I have been told that google reader does this the least of any other reader, so you could try subscribing there instead.

If you have any idea of how I can reduce this problem, please let me know!

Chron coverage of War era social change

2007-09-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

Apparently, Ken "Jazz is best when its played by dead people" Burns has a new documentary on WWII. Despite my feelings about Burns (and I know about Burns, because for some reason I sat through the endless Baseball documentary even though I haven't really been into baseball since I was a tomboy kid) I'm pretty interested to check it out, because he focuses on the impact of the war on urban communities, including Sacramento where I lived when I was in high school. An article about the documentary in today's Chron includes some cool historical tidbits about the Bay Area during the war. Here's the link.

Rosie the Riveter Memorial Park

2007-09-10T00:27:00.001-07:00

I told the kids I was taking them to the Rosie the Riveter Park, which they seemed very excited about it despite the fact they've never heard of Rosie the Riveter. The concept of Rosie the Riveter is confusing because the idea that there was a time when women weren't allowed to work the same jobs as men is foreign to them. I mean, their parents are lesbians – in their world, women do everything including fixing cars, washing dishes, and rolling children up in their blankets like human burritos; why shouldn't women rivet? And what the hell is a rivet anyway? On the way to the park I gave them my now classic lecture (most recently used when discussing Martin Luther King Jr.) about how Sometimes People Have Ideas That Aren't True, and It's Important to Tell Those People That ANYONE Can Be a Riveter (or that anyone should be able to ride in the front of the bus, depending on which lecture I'm giving). (I restrained myself from giving a lecture on war profiteering, which might have been more appropriate for this memorial – more on that in a minute.)

I hadn't been to Richmond in a while, and when I got off the freeway, I was completely confused by the impenetrable wall of condos. This isn't the Richmond I'm familiar with, and if it is part of Richmond now, what is the city doing with all the new property taxes? Please, someone with some real Richmond knowledge fill me in. In any case, I got lost in condo land and finally ended up at an upscale mini-mart where I asked the proprietor for directions to Rosie the Riveter Park. He looked over his glasses at me and chuckled (I'm not exaggerating - he really chuckled!), "Your expectations are too high," and directed me back to a patch of grass next to a parking lot I'd just passed.

The kids and I got out at the Rosie Memorial, a little exhibit about women homefront workers that was commissioned by the City of Richmond, and designed by artist Susan Schwartzenberg (Susan, why don't you have a website?) and landscape architect Cheryl Barton. Given, I'm a nerd, but I really liked it. The memorial runs the length of a Liberty Ship, and as you walk along the path spanning the ships distance, you can read a mini labor history of WWII, with a focus on people of color and women. Also interspersed are quotes from women shipyard workers, and these, along with photos posted at the site, are the most affecting part of the exhibit.

The memorial is planted on the former site of Kaiser Shipyard number 2, where steel magnate Henry J. Kaiser employed many thousands of workers to build ships for WWII.

Richmond's history is inseparably linked with Kaiser's factories and with the war. Richmond became a largely African-American city (36% of the population according to the latest census) as a result of migration related to the war industries. And the poverty that many Richmond residents confront now is directly linked with the city's failure to create adequate housing and infrastructure for its many new residents during the war, and the sudden disappearance of jobs that occurred when the war was over.

In 1940, Richmond had a small town feeling and a population of around 23,000. By 1950, the population was more than 99,000. Workers came in carloads and trainloads, brought by the more than 170 recruiters that Kaiser employed around the state and around the country to power the shipbuilding empire that he had centered in Richmond. So desperate was Kaiser for workers that at one point, LA recruiters instituted a "work for drunks" program where judges issued suspended sentences to 'vagrants' in exchange for an agreement to come work in the Richmond yards. That program didn't last long, but even for the average newly arrived worker, (if you can say that there was an 'average' since folks came from all over the state, from all regions of the country, and represented dozens of ethnic groups) the attrition rate was high. Once workers arrived they found limited housing, working conditions that were both stressful and tedious, and the loneliness of leaving home. The many new African-American workers transplanted from the South found themselves subject to the same Jim Crow racist hiring and housing practices they were familiar with from back home. War industry work crews were racially segregated, Black workers were rarely promoted to supervisory positions, and Black workers were refused membership in the major unions and instead relegated to auxiliary 'negro' unions where members were expected to pay dues but received little or no protection. (White women faced job discrimination as well, receiving significantly lower pay for jobs that white male workers got more for). While many protested these conditions, for example, in the Sausalito shipyards nearly all the Black employees walked out in protest of racist conditions in 1943, government agencies, white labor leaders, and industrialist business-owners were less than sympathetic. Outside of the factory, public housing built during the war was segregated in Richmond, as it was in Oakland and elsewhere in the Bay Area. (According to The Second Gold Rush, details on that book below, Berkeley community leader Byron Rumford started a petition drive protesting public housing segregation which finally lead to federally mandated integration of Berkeley/Albany public housing in 1946.) Basic workplace rights and decent housing were a struggle for Richmond's many new Black residents. For their part, newly arrived white Southern workers tended to complain about 'having to' work side-by-side with African-Americans.

Who was Henry J. Kaiser? He was your basic guy-out-to-make-a-buck, all-American, success story. He got his big start running a road-paving business, and ended his life turning Honolulu into the tourist sink that it is today. He was successful to say the least – his company, along with another Bay Area local, Bechtel and four other companies managed the construction of the Hoover Dam. During the war, Kaiser employees in Richmond (and his three other factories along the West Coast) were building a whole war ship in about a month (the record was set when workers constructed an entire ship in just over four days). His name also lives on in the Kaiser Permanente HMO, which was created because Kaiser needed to provide some basic health services to his thousands of employees, and who can afford that kind of expense (while maintaining a millionaire lifestyle)?

When the war ended, Kaiser moved on to new projects. He even (briefly) got into the auto industry. For the thousands of factory workers who had moved to the Bay Area, many full of patriotism and hope for the future, life wasn't quite as easy as Kaiser's. The jobs disappeared almost immediately. Soldiers came home and were given priority for the few jobs that remained. Women and men of color found themselves fired or demoted to make way for white men who were prioritized by employers. Today Richmond is still full of art, culture, and hard work, but undeniably, Richmond has been scarred by the poverty that is a legacy of the war industry here. The Rosie Memorial is just a little thing, but I loved getting to learn more about why things happened the way they did here. I was glad to come. I confess that the kids liked the nearby boats a lot more than that exhibit, but what can they do, they're a captive audience.

This entry barely scratches the surface of what can be said about the long-term impact of WWII industry on race, gender, and economics here. If you want to learn more, there are a bunch of other sources I'd recommend:

Marilynn S. Johnson's The Second Gold Rush provided a bunch of references for this post. It's factually dense but it maintains a readable narrative. I don't think you have to be as obsessive as I am to enjoy it, which is unusual for this kind of regional history book.

Fight or Be Slaves also has tons of information about this period.

Robert Self discusses issues related to changing racial dynamics in the East Bay after WWII in American Babylon. Unfortunately, I got about 50 pages into this book last summer, and then accidentally left it at Feather River Family Camp, so I can't tell you for sure if it's worth reading, but my friend Jess was just saying good things about it, so on his recommendation, I'll say, go for it.

I thought this Bay Crossings article had some interesting history about water travel related to Richmond.

Finally, I was inspired to check out the Rosie park after reading a nice article about it in the San Francisco Bayview. The article originally appeared on Black Commentator, but I'm including the Bayview link because of some additional notes at the end of their version.

Hey, if you want to learn more, Here's a whole pile of relevant sources.

I'll send you out with this video by historian Betty Soskin on African-Americans in the Richmond war industries. You can read some details about the content of the video here.

History is a Weapon

2007-08-29T19:13:00.000-07:00

How could it be that I'm only now discovering this site?

History is a Weapon has transcribed and uploaded dozens of original books, flyers and other texts related to the history of radical activism. They have a blog too! Plus, imperialist history maps!

One gem from the site - John Brown's last public speech made to the judge and jury that convicted him:

...Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved (for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case), had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.

Bay Radical recommends:

Sink or Swim and How Did We Get Here?

2007-08-24T10:38:00.000-07:00

Two of my favorite Bay Area history books are designed for kids. I always prefer books that are written simply and clearly, and both of these fit that description.

Sink or Swim was written and illustrated by water activists Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and Annie Danger (who, full disclosure, gave me one of my tattoos – but that's for a different post). I emailed Cleo to ask if there were any more copies of Sink or Swim available and he hasn't gotten back to me. I bet he's super-busy right now since he just finished another book that's been getting well-deserved national attention. (There's more on that book at the Greywater Guerrillas site.) I'm not sure if it's possible to find this book anymore, but if you can track one down, your efforts will be worthwhile. Sink or Swim is a short history of Sausal Creek, the creek that runs from the Oakland Hills, through Dimond Park, and underneath Fruitvale. Although Cleo and Annie document a huge loss for the natural and human environment, the tone is compassionate and optimistic. It would be a great resource for an older child to learn about both local history and the international issue of environmental destruction. Here's an excerpt from the introductory material:

Another excellent resource for kids and adults is How Did We Get Here by Miriam Walden and the staff of Urban Habitat. This comic tells the history of Bay Area land use with an emphasis on the history of urban renewal and gentrification, and the impact of those phenomenon on communities of color in particular. Illustrator Christine Wong Yap brings the history alive, showing grim, grey freeways snaking through once vibrant communities, but also the human faces of displacement and struggle. The story is narrated by young people, and emphasizes the role of elders, youth, and everyday people in protecting their own communities. You can read another review at tolerance.org.

I'm always interested in suggestions for reading more. If you have a favorite book for kids about history, or a book that deals with a history in a new or different way, I'd love to hear about it.

More endorsements: The Organic City & Deep Oakland

2007-08-17T20:51:00.000-07:00

While I deal with moving, starting my fall semester (I'm taking microbiology – wish me luck!), and helping my kids transition into a new school too, I'll be mostly reviewing other people's Bay history resources. Look for research-based posts from me again starting mid-or-late-September (hopefully including info on the farmworkers movement, underground queer scenes, and more on the Panthers). But for now, here are two of my favorite sites dealing with my favorite town:

The Organic City is some kind of awesome hybrid of mapping software and community blog. Or something. Clearly, I don't understand the technicalities, but I can tell you that the heart of the site is an interactive map which you can click on to hear, read, or watch stories based in corresponding Oakland neighborhoods. Part of the charm is the brevity of the stories – each small enough to give you a flavor, an impression. This home movie of bird-chasing at Lake Merritt is one of the best examples. I can almost feel my Oakland childhood in some of those shots. (Although mine was probably much less-hip than the little girl in the clips - her name is Song, and actually, I even knew another kid named Song when I was growing up here!) There are also some fine videos of Oakland history walking tours. William Wong, who has his own great Oakland Chinatown History site is a featured 'tour guide'. Here's a clip.

In a similar vein is Deep Oakland. Also organized by neighborhood (but including a wider range of 'hoods), and with a beautiful interface, Deep Oakland includes stories, photos, and audio clips. There are some real gems – particularly the interviews with long-time Oaklanders. My favorites so far is the snipped of an interview with Lewis Mahlmann, the now-retired master puppeteer at Children's Fairlyland. If you haven't had the chance to take in a show at Fairyland, here's a taste – with Mahlmann voicing the greedy Oswald Bear (warning: intense moralism ahead):

Next up: local history zines!

Endorsements part II: Sparkletack

2007-08-09T22:14:00.000-07:00

Sparkletack, Sparkletack, Sparkletack. Sparkletack. Sparkletack is a podcast about San Francisco history. It's also a blog and a website. Richard Miller produces the in-depth, well-researched, stories on an irregular basis (it takes a lot of time to research this stuff) but it is worth the wait for each new episode. For money, he's a designer, and you can tell because Sparkletack has a beautiful and accessible interface. But he's a natural historian, with an audible love for his hometown.

From Sparkletack, I learned who really invented blue jeans. I understood why California stayed out of the Civil War. And I discovered that my father's countryman, Robert Lewis Stevenson, lived in SF's Chinatown, and was a vocal critic of anti-Chinese racism.

When I started this blog a couple months ago I sent out emails to everyone I could think of to promote it, and I sent a cold email to Richard who was a total stranger to me. He wrote back right away and was beyond encouraging. He even added an enthusiastic endorsement for Bay Radical on his links page. If you're into San Francisco, or you're interested in history, listen to Sparkletack. Why is it called Sparkletack? I don't know. Why aren't you listening to it right now? I don't know that either.

Sparkletack. It's awesome.

2007-08-08T11:14:00.000-07:00

Hi there Bay Radicals,

The next few weeks promise to be pretty overwhelming for me, so I won't be doing any research or major posts. I do want to use this time to point you to some other great resources about Bay history though. To start with, I'd recommend that you come down to Mama Buzz café for some granola with soymilk and fair trade coffee and most especially, for their current photo exhibit and installation about Chester Street in West Oakland.

Julie Plasencia, a photojournalist and now freelancer has created a very sweet portrait of the people and architecture of a neighborhood. I think you'll like it.

Free the SF 8!

2007-08-05T21:05:00.000-07:00

When I started this site, I wanted to find a way to connect historical movements with contemporary struggles. Unfortunately, I now have an opportunity to do that:

Eight men are in jail in San Francisco, charged with a 30 year old murder. All these guys were radicals a long, long time ago. When they were charged this year, some of them were still community activists, a couple were already serving prison time, mostly, they are older men who one would be hard-pressed to see as dangerous. In the words of 64-year old defendant Ray Boudreaux (an electrician who lives in Southern California), "…for the last 25 years I've lived a pretty peaceful and quiet life. My politics are still the same. It's just that I'm not active. People come to me sometimes as a peace-maker."

I'm aware that most of us progressives suffer from a certain overwhelm about the unjustly imprisoned. We marched to Free Mumia until our marches petered out into t-shirts and then occasional arguments and then, nothing. Mumia is still on death row. We've been carrying our "Free Peltier" signs since 1977 but with every rejected parole hearing, we say less about him. It's easy to give up when we feel so hopeless, and for that reason, it's important to find ways to stay connected to the people who are stuck behind bars.

Mostly, when I think about these guys in jail in San Francisco, I think about their families. I imagine my dad having to go to jail at this point in his life – how he'd feel – how I'd feel. You don't even have to know that they're innocent to agree that they should be given a reasonable bail (it was set at 3 million each) so they can go home while they deal with the legal proceedings that are still ahead of them. For me, a prison abolitionist, just knowing that eight former activists who are clearly not a threat to anyone now are in jail is enough to push me to want to do something. If you're better motivated by outrage, then you should know that the evidence that prosecutors say points to these men was obtained through torture.

There are eight men in jail now – there on the strength of a confession obtained under torture. That's ugly and worth fighting against. But its worth also wondering what the point of this is for the state. While I'm not going to suggest a conspiracy, it's pretty obvious what message this is sending to any radical activists now: take your movement beyond the choreographed protest march and you'll spend the rest of your life with the threat of prison hanging over you. It's important that we stick up for each other as activists, even 30 years after the movement is gone. Solidarity isn't a one-time action, it's a lifetime commitment.

All of this is a long introduction to what I want to say here, which is this: Tomorrow, Monday, August 6th, the San Francisco 8 will be having a hearing dealing with the terms of their bail and other matters, and your presence at that hearing would not only make a psychological difference for the guys, but would also help make a point to the court, prosecutors, and media, that we care about these men, and want to see them treated fairly. It doesn't take a lot of work to get down to 850 Bryant. I've made the trip twice, both times with kids (sure, I only made it through 15 minutes of hearings before I had to usher the bored and confused 4 and 5 year olds out of the courtroom, but I did manage to show up). Go down. Show your support. Check out the website. Put up a poster. Wear a button. Blog about them. Do what you can, because you can do something.

When a Grand Jury started calling former Panthers to testify about the murder case a couple years ago, four men were jailed for refusing to testify. At that time, Bay Area activists Andres Alegría, Claude Marks & others at The Freedom Archives made a video about the grand jury resistors called Legacy of Torture. It played at the Roxy and various venues around town. Here's the preview:

whitewashing

2007-07-25T18:04:00.000-07:00

A government propaganda film on Japanese "relocation" camps - stunningly bland in its portrayal of the camps as an unfortunate "necessity". (found on metafilter today):

Ericka Huggins

2007-07-23T11:29:00.000-07:00

Dana and I went out to Thai food on Grand Avenue the other day, and happened to sit next to one of my heroes. Later I wished I had said something really thoughtful and articulate like, "Excuse me, I apologize for interrupting your meal, but I couldn't let you leave without telling you how grateful I am for the work you've done to support the liberation of African American people, and of all people, and for the many very real sacrifices you've made over these many years. Thank you." Of course, if I had actually talked to her in the moment, whatever I said would have come out making me sound like a gibbering stalker, (I know this to be true because I ran into her once before, and did talk to her like a gibbering stalker), so it's for the best that I contented myself to bask in the glow of her fashionable (although in no way ostentatious) back, which was seated only a foot or two away from me.

I doubt she's recognized much now, but Ericka Huggins spent a few years being infamous. In 1970, she was a defendant in an internationally notorious and highly politicized murder trial in New Haven, Connecticut. Folks like Dr. Benjamin Spock and writer Jean Genet came to Yale to speak on her behalf. One year before that trial, her husband John Huggins, a leader in the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panthers, was killed at UCLA by members of a rival activist faction. Throughout the 70s she co-authored a book of poems with Huey Newton, held political offices, and directed a Black Panther school. I wish I knew more about what she's doing now – meditation, spirituality and education seem to be among her current interests, and she does some speaking about her time in the Black Panthers, but it's hard to find out much about her because, although one site says that she's writing a memoir, she clearly isn't out to promote herself, which is a consistent theme for her, actually.

Ericka grew up in Washington, D.C. She was politicized early on, attending the March on Washington when she was 15. The late 60s, the moment when Ericka was coming of age, was a point of increasing militancy among activists in general, and Black activists in particular. (SNCC for example, a major organization in the Civil Rights Movement, officially changed its strategy from specifically nonviolent, to including a broader range of tactics when Stokely Carmichael took over the organization in 1966.) Like thousands of young people around her, Ericka probably felt shocked and horrified by the poverty and violence that Black people and poor people were experiencing around her. Race riots were a regular feature of the late 60s, and were invariably inspired by, and then followed by, harsh police violence. The Vietnam War, and protests against it, escalated around her. Internationally, militancy seemed to be on the increase, with revolutionary movements gaining prominence in Palestine, Northern Ireland, and even next door in Quebec. In this context, in 1968, Ericka joined the Black Panthers. She met John ("Jon" in Ericka's love letters) at college and they moved together to LA where they got very involved in the growing Panther chapter there. They took and then taught political education classes, organized, fundraised, served in the Party social programs, and I'll assume they studied marksmanship, a requirement for all Party members. John took on a leadership position. Ericka got pregnant.

Ericka in the late 60s

With his beard and bellbottoms, John gave off much more of a hippy vibe than his fellow militants, especially Bunchy Carter, a charismatic former gang leader who was a rising star in the Party (and was known for his impeccable style), and who was with John on the day they met with, and then were shot and killed by members of the US organization at UCLA. I won't pretend that the details of this story aren't complicated*, but one thing we do know from 1975 senate hearings on the FBI's counterintelligence program (Cointelpro) is that the FBI actively sought to increase tension between the Panthers and US**, before and after these killings, by sending inflammatory cartoons and letters to both organizations, and by propagating rumors about each organization. I've read that Richard Held, the FBI officer in charge of the L.A. office at that time took credit for the deaths of Huggins and Carter. I can't back that one up with a citation though.

After John's death, Ericka moved with her daughter Mai to Connecticut where John's parents lived. With local activists, she started a Panther chapter in Bridgeport, and then moved it to New Haven. She was 21.

In her memoir, A Taste of Power, Brown remembers Ericka as being checked out and disconnected after John's death. An interview with a Connecticut Panther in another memoir - David Hilliard's This Side of Glory - describes her as "spaced out but genuine". I don't know why she kept sleepwalking through her activist career at that point. Maybe if your partner is killed for the revolution, you feel you must soldier on, to give his memory meaning. Especially because, as she trudged through what must have been a personal nightmare, the bigger community was turning uglier around her too.

John Huggins was killed on January 17th, 1969. That night, the LAPD raided John and Ericka's home and arrested all twelve Panthers inside, including Ericka with their infant daughter. There were no real charges filed against those arrested – the LAPD justified the arrests by saying that they were preempting retaliatory action towards members of US. This kind of police action towards the Panthers was typical. They raided Panther offices across the country frequently, and often repetitively, sometimes looking for specific suspects, sometimes just to destroy their typewriters, or break up their free breakfast program, which the FBI specifically sought to destroy. (Details on that here. Just search for "breakfast".) In April of '69, 21 New York Panthers were arrested and charged with conspiracy. All 21 were eventually found innocent. Also in April, the Des Moines Panther office was leveled by a bomb blast, injuring two Panthers. In response, local police arrested Panthers. In the first two weeks of May that year, the LAPD arrested 42 Black Panthers. Of course, this hostility wasn't one sided. The Panthers were both a service organization and a militant one, and as much as their free clothing, free food, free medical clinics, ambulance service, and free breakfast programs have been underreported, their armed confrontation of police was also quite real. Panthers regularly engaged in shootouts with police, and not all these were initiated by the cops. After all, the Panthers were trying to engage in a revolutionary struggle.

Outside of the Panthers, even mainstream liberals were aware of how harsh the repercussion could be for activists who opposed the status quo. In August of 1968, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had sent 12,000 police officers and 7,500 National Guard in to disrupt protests at the Democratic Convention. (Bobby Seale, the Panther's co-founder and essentially second-in-command officer, spent several years fighting legal charges from the Convention protests. He'd famously been bound and gagged in the courtroom during his trial.) In December of 1968, more than 450 students at SF State were arrested in connection with a student strike in support of Black Studies program. And only a few months earlier, police had massacred hundreds of student demonstrators in Mexico City. Vietnam raged on. Nixon had just been inaugurated. Someone who was as involved in the Panthers as Ericka was in early 1969 must have been pretty convinced that the revolution was needed, that it was coming, that a new system of socialist governance prioritizing self-determination for Black people and economic fairness for all seemed like a real possibility. And militant struggle probably felt like it was the strategy for bringing that revolution.

Courtroom illustration of Bobby Seale, bound and gagged during the initial Chicago 8 hearings

It feels important to know all this context before you read what happened next. What happened next is that that someone, a Panther, murdered someone else, another Panther, a 19 year old from New York. And that young murder victim, Alex Rackley, was killed after two days of being tortured – having boiling water poured on his body and so forth. And Ericka was in the house where all this happened.

A mentally-unstable out of town Panther named George Sams instigated the kidnapping and torture of Rackley, who he accused of being an undercover agent. Several New Haven Panthers participated in the torture and then in the murder. Sams only did four years in prison for the killing, and rumors persist that he was an agent provocateur himself, although I've never read any evidence for this. He was certainly crazy, and was heavily medicated during his own trial. And it is unarguable that the Panthers were heavily infiltrated. Still, at the point when you are pouring boiling water on someone, or even watching your comrade pour boiling water on someone, you must take some personal responsibility. Going along with what you're told isn't any more justifiable for revolutionaries than it is for Nazis.

May Day rally at Yale protesting the trial of Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale

While it's not a justification, I'm sure that Ericka Huggins learned this lesson. After the actual killers were convicted (some confessed, turning state's evidence), she and Bobby Seale were tried for ordering the murders. They spent two years in jail in New Haven during the proceedings, inspiring an international protest movement.*** Yale students staged a months-long strike, starting with a massive May Day rally featuring Abbie Hoffman et al. While she was in prison, Free Jazz pianist Francois Tusques composed a song for her. (You can listen to it on this archived WFMU jazz show. The song starts roughly at minute 1:46 and then restarts at 1:48.)

What shocks me about Ericka Huggins, is that after seeing the absolute ugliest sides of revolutionary movements, she moved to the Bay Area and spent the 1970s working on the Panther newspaper, running for and then serving on the Berkeley Community Development Council (an anti-poverty agency) and on the Alameda County School Board, and eventually running the last surviving segment of the Black Panther Party – their children's school. She was, I guess, one of the last members of the Black Panther Party, since she continued to run the school throughout the 1970s until it finally closed in the early 80s, long after every other Panther institution was gone, and after Huey Newton, the organizations' charismatic but borderline leader had lost all credibility among activists and even most of his friends.

Another thing that strikes me about Ericka Huggins is the way she just doesn't show up in Panther memoirs. Elaine Brown, who named her daughter Ericka dedicates more page space to her than any other Panther alum. As far as I remember, everything Elaine says is positive, and even in her book, there's not much. In other memoirs, Ericka tends to show up for a few pages as a benign force and then disappear, as if she was never there. For someone who was so important in the Party, I can only guess that she found a way to stay out of everyone's way and for the most part, do the work that felt important, instead of engaging in power-plays or battles of ego.

The Oakland Community School - the final Black Panther project.

Sitting next to her at dinner, I confess I had a difficult time paying enough attention to my date. What does someone who spent more than a decade trying to make the impossible work feel when it doesn’t? What does it feel like to be so key in a grassroots, militant, educated, disciplined, activist corps - a group that seemed so close to revolution – and then to lose it? Does she resent the way Panther leaders spiraled out of control? Does she feel defeated by the forces of the state – the FBI, the police, the media – that did, in fact defeat her movement? Does she feel manipulated? Is she angry? Her manner is quiet and poised. She projects a feeling of attentive calm. I hope she thinks back on serving free food to children, on writing and explaining, on teaching and running a school that provided a real alternative for kids who needed it and feels proud.

_________

That's how I ended this article. And I was just looking for a few more photos before posting, when I decided to start googling Ericka's name and the world "meditation" (since I know she's a practitioner) and found her to be associated with that ashram on San Pablo – Syda.

Apparently, the New Yorker did an investigation of Syda a few years ago, and quoted members who reported sexual and financial abuses within the largely secretive organization. Former members complained that they were harrassed if they spoke out. There's a website where ex-members share their (bad) experiences, although for the record, most of the alleged abuses happened quite a while ago, and even the New Yorker article points out that most members have no contact with the people at the top of the organization, and simply go to Syda's various ashrams to meditate, chant, and find spiritual community. At this point, I'm feeling a bit depressed by imagining my hero as a cult member. And I'm sure it's more complicated than that anyway. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that she can stomach a degree of unquestioned hierarchy, since she managed to work under an abusive power fiend like Huey Newton for so long.

I really admire Ericka Huggins. I'm not an investigative reporter, and if I was, why would I want to 'expose' someone who has spent most of her life working for good? So what if she likes charismatic leaders? I want to respect the fact that she has a life. Has some privacy. So good luck to you Ericka. I'm not going to read any more about what you did or what you do. Thank you for your work. Good luck to you in your life.

_______________

*Trying to make out what really happened here is completely impossible. Every Panther has their story, and the stories tend to contradict each other.

**Every December I subject some poor soul to my annual anti-Kwanzaa rant. I know that if the holiday has come to have meaning for people, I should support it, but for me it is uglied by the fact that it was created by Ron Karenga (or, as he named himself, Maulana – a Swahili word for master teacher). Karenga was the head of US at the time of the UCLA shooting. He went on to serve prison time for assaulting and torturing two female members of his organization.

** As usual, Snopes does a nice job of clarifying the line of bullshit that circulated on the net a few years ago suggesting that Hillary Rodham, a Yalie, was Ericka's defender. (As if Hillary would have advocated for militants!

If you're not done already with learning about Ericka:

I mentioned it a bunch of times because A Taste of Power talks more about Ericka than most published material on the Panthers. The author, Elaine Brown, has been accused of including some inaccuracies, or maybe outright lies in this book, but it is as good a history of the Black Panther Party as any, and, coming from a woman's perspective, manages to be honest about some of the disparities that did exist in the organization.

Most of what I know about Ericka's trial comes from the long out-of-print Agony in New Haven, which was certainly descriptive. It seemed to depict the four month long jury selection process in real time, detailing each potential juror, each recess called by the judge, and each outfit chosen by the various lawyers. Well written, but only worth while if you're obsessed. There's a newer book I haven't read yet called Murder in the Model City which probably provides some more context.

I know he's become controversial, even among radicals, but Ward Churchill's Agents of Repression (written with Jim Vander Wall) is still the most readable, detailed, and footnoted book I know about Cointelpro and it's where I first learned anything about the Panthers. I recommend it.

Finally, the very best website for Black Panther information is It's About Time. This site has tons of original source material on the Party: newspaper transcriptions, dozens of photos, regional chapter histories, and updates on issues impacting former Panthers now. Most of the photos in this post came from that site (thank you!) and I haven't even gotten half-way through all there is to read there yet. Check it out.

Note that I've made a couple small factual and editorial corrections and changes since I first wrote this, although the post is pretty much the same as the original.

Sekou Sundiata

2007-07-19T20:43:00.000-07:00

I just heard that Sekou Sundiata died this week. If you don't know his work, here's a little:

Based on interviews I've heard, he seems to have been as thoughtful a person as he was a poet. He'll be missed.

LaborFest 2007

2007-07-16T06:40:00.000-07:00

Hi folks!

I have another entry coming soon - probably Wednesday. In the meantime, there is a ton of Bay Area radical history action going down at laborfest, and I'm missing it because I'm out of the country! Please report back with any laborfest stories here.

Issues, J's, and Rocky Baird

2007-07-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

Photo by Rutabaga, age 4

Next time you're in the Piedmont Avenue neighborhood, I suggest you visit the new and wonderful Issues.

I'm not just saying it's wonderful because the proprietors happen to be friends of mine. That fact only coincides nicely with the simple truth: Issues is rivaled only by DeLauer's on Broadway (which is in fact also super, but which actually doesn't carry a bunch of the magazines that I actually like to read), for the title of "Best East Bay Newsstand Evar". As far as I can tell, they carry every magazine known to humankind including Male Nurse, XLR8R, and the usual Family Circle etc. They have newspapers in many languages, 80s buttons, 70s t-shirts, and did I mention the charming staff (owners Joe and Noella)?

I like Issues so much that I brought my kids there the other day, and let them photograph it for you. So ya, Issues isn't actually dimly lit, out-of-focus, or (generally) full of preschool kids. Enjoy!

This appears to be some sort of hip music magazine. I wouldn't know, I only bought copies of Vegetarian Times and Sheep! The voice of the independent flock master.

Coffee is welcome at Issues. As are 4 year old members of the Paparazzi.

They're open from 7 to 7!

Issues also carries a small selection of books and vinyl

After you get your copy of Bitch or Bust or whatever, I suggest you bring your reading material over to the last normal restaurant on Piedmont Avenue – J's. Only two doors away from the recently arrived Cesar (tapas and fancy drinks for a lot of dough), J's is an old-fashioned burger joint. Since I'm a vegetarian (well, except for that whole 'fish aren't a vegetable' thing) I suggest going for breakfast. Mexican breakfast will run you about 8 bucks. American the same or cheaper depending on what you get. The portions are big and the coffee refills are free.

J's.

Somehow, almost every seat at J's is 'at the bar'

The best thing about J's though is the historical details. (You were wondering when I was going to get to the history bit weren't you?)

J's used to be a station house for the streetcars that stopped right outside, in what is now a large parking lot. There is still a semi-train-related theme, with clocks representing various time zones and photos of old Key line trains and stations on the walls. Wood paneling lines the walls, and about half-the seating is on rotating bar stools. The stained glass lamp covers add to the warm and low-key feeling.

Once you're full up, head out back to look at Rocky Baird's mural of the Key trains through Oakland's history. I love this mural; it's a much better historical marker than the old-school metal plaque that explains when the last train stopped there (1958).

If you want to see more of Baird's work, head down to Gaylord's and get a view of his moving interpretation of the loss of Ohlone culture and land here in Oakland: The Capture of the Solid. The Escape of the Soul.

Then take yourself home to read your magazines. And take care.

Thank you!

2007-07-06T20:24:00.000-07:00

It looks like somebody just donated a paid Flickr account to me. What, do you want to make me cry or something?

Thanks whoever you are. I mean it when I say, that meant a lot.

Locke, CA

2007-07-02T08:23:00.000-07:00

Little Rutabaga and I left my folks' house in Sacramento on Sunday, and drove along the levee road, watching the river, and listening to an audio tape of Stuart Little, which probably doesn't need any advertising, but, in my opinion, should be regarded as one of the masterpieces of 20th century fiction. Little Stuart is as complex as any literary hero: he's gutsy and self-assured enough to win a toy sailboat race in his first time at 'sea', but also so proud that he misses his chance with the first woman he meets who shares his diminutive stature. At first I thought Stuart's predicament – as the mouse child of human parents – was a metaphor for homosexuality. Stuart is a bit of a dandy, meticulous in his grooming and manners, carrying a small cane within his first few weeks of life, and with none of the loud, messy habits of his 'normal' older brother, but I gave up that theory at the point in the story when he falls for the bewitching songbird, Margalo. Stuart's status as an outsider is a classic theme, subject to a number of interpretations, but I shouldn't try to make his story mean too much. I enjoyed it more when I was just enjoying the understated, dry storytelling of E.B. White. Please, no one tell me if he had some horrible skeletons in his closet because he was really super writer.

The tape ended (in a wonderfully ambiguous conclusion) just as Ru and I got to Locke, a small town in the Sacramento Delta that is still entirely made up of the wooden homes and businesses that were constructed there in the early 1900's. Some of the old buildings haven't been maintained much in the last 30 or 50 years, but most are still habited in one way or another. There are a lot of art galleries now, Al the Wop's bar (full of bikers) seems to be doing well, and the Locke Garden restaurant was very busy. Even though Locke is completely authentic in its original construction, it's not a tourist version of an oldentymestown. There are no Locke t-shirts for sale, no saltwater taffies, no spinning rainbow windsocks. For a few dozen people, Locke is just home.

Houses facing the levee were built high to avoid the periodic flooding from the Sacramento River.

I lived in Sacramento for 6 years, but I'd never been to Locke or any of the other agricultural towns in the Sacramento Delta. I'd never even driven through, and it's only about an extra half hour to get back to Oakland that way, along 160, the levee road, to Highway 24. At Dai Loy, now a museum but once one of a number of casinos in Locke, the attendant told me that she hears that all the time. Even folks who drive along 160 to Antioch don't stop much.

Of course, there's not so much to see while you're there. Locke is literally two streets and even though my parents warned me that it was tiny, I was still surprised. The houses and businesses are built neatly and closely in two small rows, maybe because in 1914 when Locke was founded, Chinese-Americans weren't allowed to own land, and the town founders had to lease their little chunk of property from George Locke, a white farmer who owned the land.

Actually 'grown and packed by' Chinese, Japanese, and Philippino laborers paid a dollar and maybe a meal for each day of work.

Locke is the only surviving all-Chinese rural town in the United States. It was built during the depression, after the Chinatown in neighboring Walnut Grove burned down. Unlike many Chinatowns where distinct ethnic groups of Chinese immigrants lived together, speaking different languages (dialects = languages, or at least, the difference between a dialect and a language is arbitrary), sometimes competing for control of various resources, Locke was settled and occupied almost exclusively by immigrants from the Zhongshan region in China. It lacked the tension that, in other communities, sprang up between competing and ethnically separate Tongs. (Kind of like competing mob families, Tongs tended to control the prostitution, gambling, and opium sales in the community.)

Dai Loy, once a casino, now a casino museum. Do I choose the lottery room or the money room?

Gambling was a major part of Locke's economy. At one point there were 3 separate casinos featuring lotteries, various Chinese betting games, and later, Blackjack tables. Locke also had five brothels (at times the only businesses in town owned by white people) and during prohibition, a couple speakeasies.

Despite the vice-filled main street, lots of folks raised their kids in Locke. Most residents lived on the second street, behind the business district. With the river right there, kids had a great time fishing and swimming and playing outdoors. Because they were Chinese, most were forced into the segregated Delta schools (until WWII when the internment of Japanese-Americans reduced the number of students at the Asian schools to the point that they couldn't stay open). In the afternoons, after public school, Locke kids went to the Kao Ming School, where they got instruction in their language and culture. The school went through a couple incarnations, and finally closed permanently in the '80s when there weren't enough Chinese kids around to keep it going.

Martha Esch painting the old Star Theater. She's got a gallery in town and hosts studio painting sessions and other events there.

Rutabaga and I spent a couple hours in Locke, eating Mu Shu vegetables at the Locke Garden Restaurant (housed in the town's oldest building), and checking out the art galleries and bikers. I'm not sure if bikers are a regular feature of the town or of this was just a big rally weekend. Feel free to let me know members of the biker community. The streets were surprisingly full for such a little place, but of course nothing like in its hayday.

At its peak, Locke had hundreds of residents. During pear season, and on certain weekends, more than a thousand people stayed in the rooming houses, gambled in the casinos, ate at the restaurants, and shopped in the markets and dry goods stores. Now, the Chinese populations is around 10. I saw one Chinese-American guy in town, a biker at Al the Wops. Most all of the young people of Locke moved away to bigger cities – many going to college and mainstreaming into the larger culture. The folks who stuck around got older. Most have died.

Rutabaga hides in the shade of a Locke alley.

I just finished reading a lovely oral history of Locke, with photos accompanying the stories of the elderly residents. Written and photographed in the 70's and early 80's by James Motlow, a white guy who had lived in Locke, along with a co-writer Jeff Gillenkirk, and Connie Chan, a Locke native who worked as their interpreter for the project, Bitter Melon presents a range of experiences: the relatively successful men who got work as foremen or ran the local businesses, the women who worked in local canneries and often had to leave their kids to fend for themselves, and the dollar-a-day laborers who never made enough to get married and start families, go back to visit parents in China, or to move out of the little town as it shrank away.

In the 80s, a Historic American Buildings Survey documented the town. The whole report is worth checking out, especially the photo series of the town.

Finally, and I probably should have put this first, you should check Locke's own website. You can see photos of just about every building, and read about the galleries and historic sites that are there now.

The community garden behind the town of Locke, from the Historic American Buildings Survey of the National Park Service.

On the way back to our car, Rutabaga and I passed a family trying to resolve some engine trouble outside of their home on Locke's second street. They seemed to be immigrants too, Latin American not Chinese, as Mexican and other Central American immigrants are now the main laborers along the Delta and throughout our country's agricultural sectors. A couple of visiting painters were packing up their little canvases of Locke's scenic buildings and getting ready to drive off too. Ru and I pulled out onto the road. Not north (like Stuart Little), but (like him) I somehow felt I was headed in the right direction.

S.F. Shootout

2007-06-26T08:11:00.000-07:00

Isaac Kalloch: S.F. Mayor 1879-1881

I'm glad that I'm not a professional historian because if I were, I might have to find some other way to express this: Dennis Kearney* was an utter ass-wipe. An immigrant himself, Kearney founded California's briefly influential (and highly racist) Workingman's Party. He made a political career out of the thoughtful slogan, "The Chinese Must Go". His fiery speeches were quite radical – he advocated lynching of wealthy business owners – but he wasn't marginal. His political ally, Isaac Kalloch, became San Francisco's mayor in 1879.

That is disturbing, but not surprising. Here's the crazy part: in the 1870s, the founder and editor of the Chronicle, Charles de Young, railed against Kearney and Kalloch (then only a mayoral candidate) in his paper. I haven't read the editorials directly – anyone know of where I can find those archives online?

Dennis Kearney: major asshole

But from what I understand, de Young wasn't particularly concerned with Kalloch's racism, but more with his popularity. Trying to undermine the mayoral candidate, he publicly exposed a sex scandal that Kalloch (a Baptist minister) had been involved with in another state. Kalloch ridiculed de Young right back and from the pulpit, calling de Young's mother "whore-mongering", and then in retaliation de Young, the editor of the Chronicle, shot Kalloch, the mayoral candidate!

Kalloch survived, and won the election in part because of the sympathy he garnered for his injury, but a year later his son, defending the family honor, fatally shot de Young. He admitted to the shooting but got off free. Fortunately, Kearney's Workingman's Party faded shortly thereafter, but Kalloch did fine, serving two years as mayor.

*Note that Wikipedia reveals that Kearny Street, which runs right through Chinatown in SF is not actually named after Dennis Kearney. This information comes as a relief, but I wasn't too excited to learn who it was named after: Stephen Kearny, who founded of the US Cavalry and used those troops to expand white US occupation into Native American homelands in the Western part of the continent. He went on to command a number of battalions in the Mexican-American War, winning California for the US of A, which, I imagine, is why he got a street named after him in San Francisco. Related: we can also breathe a sigh of relief that Geary street is named after a former postmaster, not California Congressman Thomas Geary, who wrote an 1892 law extending the Chinese Exclusion Act, and expanding it to require Chinese-Americans to carry permits at all times, or risk deportation or punishment by hard labor. His act also denied habeus corpus to imprisoned Chinese-Americans, removing their rights to ask a judge to review the legality of their detentions. If you want to know who any other SF streets are not named for, look at this site.

Anti-Chinese violence

2007-06-25T08:44:00.000-07:00

I’m going to do a few entries about the history Chinese-Americans in the Bay Area, and the relationship between the white labor movement and Chinese workers. It's been pretty disturbing reading about this stuff. I had a sense of some of the racism that was historically directed at Chinese immigrants, but I certainly didn't understand the scale. The most appropriate word to describe what happened to Chinese people here is probably 'pogroms'. I grew up here in California, and I definitely didn't learn about any of this in school. Anyway, here's the first post – about labor:

During the Gold Rush, prospectors, mostly men, flooded into San Francisco from all over the world. Most came from the Eastern United States, but also from outside of the country, especially Chile and China. Chinese gold-seekers made up a significant portion of the new 'settlers', setting up communities in San Francisco and in rural areas too.

This 1852 photo by J. B. Starkweather shows a rare site: Chinese and European Americans working together in a gold mining operation.

Over the next few decades, Chinese immigrants became involved in a wide-range of work: Rurally, Chinese settlers created the fishing industry here, established agriculture in the Central Valley, and worked as laborers building the levee systems on the Delta, almost always living in isolated, Chinese-only communities. By the 1860s, 2/3 of the laborers building the Western portion of the transcontinental railroad were Chinese men.

Chinese rail workers in 1898, from the California Historical Society, San Francisco

In urban settings, Chinese workers took jobs in just about every trade: manufacturing, building, and running small businesses including laundries, restaurants, markets, and repair shops. Around the Bay Area, traveling Chinese peddlers sold fresh produce out of large baskets that they'd carry from house to house, and later from the back of horse-drawn produce carts.

1898 – a produce market. Photo by Roy Graves

Like many immigrants, new arrivals from China tended to stick together in the same neighborhoods, seeking out and forming supportive associations with people who came from their same regions and extended families back home. But the segregation of Chinese men and women into Chinatowns wasn't just a preference of the residents there. It was mandated by law and required for safety.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the level of hostility and violence directed towards Chinese-Americans in the late 19th century. Before I started reading about this a few weeks ago, I had no idea how overwhelming and horrific this bit of history was: white Americans, encouraged by labor leaders and sometimes officially sanctioned by local governments, perpetrated a series of pogroms against Chinese communities throughout the late 1800s. A few examples:
- In 1871 in Los Angeles a brutal race riot left roughly 20 Chinese men dead, after white residents ransacked Chinatown there.
- In 1885, in Wyoming, European immigrant mine workers rioted against Chinese workers (who were paid less than white workers and who had historically been recruited as strikebreakers), killing 28 Chinese miners and destroying 75 of their homes.
- In 1886, virtually every Chinese resident of Seattle was rounded up in an attempt to remove them from the city.
- In 1887, 31 Chinese gold miners were murdered by bandits in Oregon, and no one was prosecuted for the murders.

"Massacre of the Chinese at Rock Springs, Wyoming" From Harper's Weekly housed at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

Legal repression of Chinese immigrants escalated dramatically as the years progressed: By 1852, Chinese gold miners were subject to a significant foreigner tax that no other international miners were required to pay. Two years later, the Supreme Court of California extended to Chinese people a ban already in place prohibiting 'Negroes' and 'Indians' from testifying for or against white people. In 1872, Chinese people were barred from owning real estate or business licenses in California. And devastatingly, in 1882, Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring Chinese laborers from entering the country. This ban was generally applied to almost every Chinese person, making it impossible for example for Chinese men already living in the US to bring their families here to join them. (And because the immigrants who came here from China were almost exclusively male, and because the Exclusion Act prohibited anyone else from coming, the Chinese community dwindled as its bachelor class aged without raising children.) The Chinese Exclusion Act wasn't repealed until the 1940s and the severe immigration quotas reserved only for Chinese immigrants weren't ended until 1965. 1965!

Theorists and intellectuals fell over each other advocating for the removal of Chinese people from this country. Here's a fairly typical anti-Chinese screed of the time, devoted to the "Chinese Question". I confess, I didn't read this whole steaming pile of garbage, and instead skipped to the final chapter (starts on 196) titled "One course, and one course only, can stay the Eastward migration of the yellow race, and its gradual conquest of the land." You can guess what course that is. 'Progressive' non-Chinese thinkers tended to advocate for Chinese immigrants solely on the basis that they were willing to do the tedious, humiliating, or back-breaking work that white people were refusing to take. Hmm, sounds familiar.

Government leaders and others in the mainstream were certainly responsible for the legal sanction of racism here, but labor leaders in particular should be held culpable for the anti-Chinese hysteria of that time. By the 1870s, the country was experiencing a post-Civil War economic downturn. Jobs were hard to come by. In California, the gold that so many people had flooded in to find was already mostly gone by the early 1850s. Meanwhile, the monopolistic railway companies (and most other industries), exploited Chinese workers by paying them less than the going wage for white workers. Instead of directing their hatred solely at the Goliath-like industrial giants, white labor turned to a seemingly easier target. A couple quick examples:

Samuel Gompers, founder of the AFL, co-authored a paper entitled, "Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion. Meat vs. Rice. American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism. Which Shall Survive?"

I'm not going to reproduce the most grossly offensive posters, pamphlets, and cartoons I've found that were produced by labor advocates in opposition to the Chinese, but here's a typically racist 1889 poster promoting a boycott of a business that was rumored to have hired Chinese workers: It's from the California Historical Society.

In San Francisco, anti-Chinese sentiment was common. The city's most famous anti-Chinese 'advocate' was Dennis Kearney publicly advocated rioting against both bosses and Chinese people at the old Sand Lot near City Hall.

White labor's anti-Chinese hysteria was horrifying, and it was also a missed opportunity. Directing rage towards immigrants (rather than business owners) didn't change labor conditions, or make workers wealthier. As usual, bigotry trumped solidarity.

Anti-Chinese violence peaked in the 1880s, but it's probably obvious that anti-Chinese sentiment (and legislation) wasn't over. It wasn't until WWII that there were significant improvements in legal and living conditions for Chinese people living here. And of course, racism directed at Chinese-American's is still a major issue. A 2001 phone study indicated that one in four Americans has 'strong negative feelings' towards Chinese Americans.

I'm going to close this out for now. Next week I should have some more on Chinese resistance to racism.

Signing off,

Some self indulgence

2007-06-19T23:23:00.000-07:00

My next topic – Chinese-American workers and the relationship of the white labor movement to the Chinese community of the Bay Area is kind of enormous. While I continue my 'research' (mostly late night googling), you can tide yourself over with documentation of my efforts.

Friday afternoon: our intrepid blogger sets off for a research mission.

Damn. Missed my train. Yet, in less time than it takes me to answer my emails, I made it to San Francisco. Near, and yet far from my provincial home in Oak Land. First attraction in SF, the F line.

It's designed for the enjoyment of history nerds like me! And of course to attract tourist dollars. But so what! It's so shiney!

Woo-hoo! Boat train!

OK, time to go to the library. Every time I come to the San Francisco Main branch I play "Where are the books?"

Nope, not here:

Not here either.

None here either. Oh well, who has time for books anyway - time is limited when you've got to think about childcare. I quickly move on to the hallowed grounds of the SF History Center! Here, you must check your bags, sign in at the front desk, and walk silently among the softly-lit shelves.

It's best to speak in hushed tones around the historians - they scare easily. And frankly, I was kind of sweaty and incoherent when I arrived. I cornered a soft-spoken librarian and described my blog project to him in detail. When I was finished he nodded helpfully and then said, "It would be easier if you put your request in the form of a question."

He was able to assist me though by piling a large stack of bibliographies in front of me. Since I've never done academic research of any kind, I'm not sure if that's the best place to start, but at least I now know what to look up when I go back.

I really hit pay dirt with this bibliography about Chinese American's in California. I love picturing the poor soul (or enthusiastic obsessive compulsive) who hand wrote the dewey decimal number for each entry into the margins.

I spent most of the afternoon reading from this congressional report on Chinese Immigration – a nauseating foundation for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

I found out later that the whole ugly thing is digitized. So if I can make it through hundreds of pages of the white men of business and congress falling over each other to present Chinese immigrants as gamblers, prostitutes, and disease vectors, I'll be able to complete it at my leisure.

Several hours later, my childcare was about to run out. I collected my backpack from the quiet librarian, and as I left, he mentioned that perhaps I should check the Chinese Center on the third floor. WTF?! I should have been there in the first place!

Still, I was in a good mood – a history junkie happily fixed – the whole way home. I even stopped to say hello to the folks painting a new mural on the Ella Baker Center. Good luck muralists! Way to represent for Oakland!