Folkstreams

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

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.

Scraper Bike

Scraper Bike from Da Trunk Boiz:

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

RIP William Buckley

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:

Milk

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

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

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)

Friday Night Videos

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:

Week of Links! Shaping San Francisco!

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:

The Grace Lee Project

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.)

Sir! No Sir!

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

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.

Wattstax

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

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

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!

Rosie the Riveter Memorial Park

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.

More endorsements: The Organic City & Deep Oakland

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!

Free the SF 8!

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

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

Sekou Sundiata

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.