by Bill Barich
Just so, our California paradise.
FROM SAUSALITO I drove through Marin City, the only black town in Marin. It had grown up around the ruins of Marinship, a Bechtel Corporation shipbuilding plant that had opened in 1942. Bechtel had resisted hiring black workers through the 1930s, and only under pressure from black leaders and the threat of legal action did it agree to take the workers on at the new shop.
The unions then screwed the workers by granting them an auxiliary status and denying them the right to vote. One black welder, Joe James of the Boilermakers’ Union, rebelled and led a strike, which resulted in firings. The struggle became a legal battle that didn’t end until 1948, when the Boilermakers were upbraided in court and ordered to integrate fully, without discrimination. The ruling made little difference by that time. The war was over, the demand for ships had slackened, and the union’s black constituency had dropped from a high of about 3,000 to just 150 members.
Ever since the first slave was dragged from the South into the foothills to dig for gold, blacks in California had been subjected to messages that were alternately hostile and conciliatory. The state had outlawed slavery in 1849, for instance, but a law on the books was only as good as the guns enforcing it, and any man who ran away from his master was likely to be apprehended and returned to him as property.
In a celebrated case of the period, Archy Lee, an eighteen-year-old slave from Mississippi, traveled to Sacramento with his master, Charles Stovall, in 1859 and soon fell under the influence of free California blacks. Lee broke for freedom himself, but he was captured easily and tossed into prison for four months while his fate was deliberated upon by the state supreme court.
Abolitionists took up Lee’s cause to no effect. The court acted as if the state’s fugitive slave law, which had expired in 1856, was still on the books and sent Lee back to his master, showing leniency toward Stovall because he was “young and inexperienced.”
Only a few years after the Lee fiasco, however, blacks were relieved of a burdensome law that had kept them from testifying in court on an equal footing with whites, a privilege still denied to Indians and the Chinese. They seem to have done reasonably well in business, too, and documents from the time suggest that a black middle class was emerging.
Education for blacks remained a muddle. Few schools in and around San Francisco were integrated in the 1860s, and the schools that black children did attend were clearly inferior. A report to the San Francisco School Board in 1862 described one typical black schoolroom as a poorly ventilated basement of a military barracks. Whenever the troops did their exercises, upstairs ceiling plaster and water from ruptured pipes rained down on the kids below.
The city did begin to integrate its public schools in the 1870s, although not primarily for humanitarian purposes. Under a court order to provide separate-but-equal facilities for blacks, educators agreed that it would cost less to incorporate black children into the existing all-white system than it would be to repair and renovate the segregated schools. Black teachers continued to be paid at a lower rate than white teachers, though.
In general, blacks were treated badly in San Francisco in the early 1900s. They were often turned down for jobs, even as unskilled laborers, in favor of the Chinese (who were perceived to be a better value for the dollar) and the Irish. Some fortunate blacks got work with the railroads as porters and sleeping-car attendants, but most men and women had to content themselves with far more menial tasks.
Discrimination and racist union policies created the first black suburbs in the Bay Area. Anybody who got fed up with taking a back seat could ride a ferry to Oakland, where about a thousand blacks were living in relative harmony in 1900. The black population had reached about five thousand by 1917, and boosters were so proud that they published a 140-page “Colored Directory” to their community. It pictured their houses and their churches in the best possible light. Similar suburbs were sprouting at an even quicker pace down south, even though W. E. B. DuBois put forth a caution.
“Los Angeles is not Paradise,” he said, “much as the sight of its lilies and roses might lead one at first to believe. The color line is there sharply drawn.”
The restrictive covenants that kept a black person from buying in a good San Francisco neighborhood did not exist in Oakland. They did not exist in Richmond, either, another largely black town on the bay that grew up around Henry J. Kaiser’s shipbuilding plants, much as Marin City had evolved around Marinship.
When World War II ended, many black families stayed on in Marin City, where the daunting housing projects now floated like an archipelago in a sea of utter whiteness. Richmond was also still a mostly black community that was dispersed over a tangled industrial landscape of refineries, docks, and railroad tracks. There were some fine homes on the water and in the hills, but most people lived in modest stucco and wood homes (median price, $144,300) with patchy little lawns.
I CAME NEXT TO BERKELEY, a nuclear-free zone, where the citizens were worried about things.
They were worried about the rain forests in the Amazon, Sendero Luminoso, South Africa, and the Norwegians who ate whales. They were worried about the depleted ozone layer and about the microwave ovens that were short-circuiting pacemakers and about the radon that might be seeping up from the earth into their homes. They were very worried about the nitrates in their bacon and about the cruel way that little calves were butchered into veal.
In Berkeley, nobody believed that Lee Harvey Oswald had shot John F. Kennedy on his own. Everybody knew that it was a plot cooked up by the Mafia in collusion with J. Edgar Hoover, and they knew that Hoover liked boys and played the ponies and sometimes carried a pink purse. They knew of massive conspiracies that the fascist-dominated media had never divulged, plots to assassinate Mother Teresa and to make Pol Pot the potentate of Guatemala and to put little-known bacterial agents into the water supply to control people’s sex drives and make them want to live in Tiffany Ridge.
Some Californians thought that Berkeleyites worried too much. It was as if they’d been assigned the job of worrying for the entire state, as if all the brain-burning, soul-troubling issues had befallen them and were their responsibility, freeing every other Californian to have fun.
Berkeley was only a few miles from Richmond, but it orbited in another solar system.
Telegraph Avenue was the city’s Broadway. It ran all the way from Oakland to the UC Berkeley campus. It was a street of refractory sounds and images, where anorexic poets mingled with jugheads in flak gear who were dedicated to resuscitating the Symbionese Liberation Army. On Telegraph, the dread Cinque might yet pass muster as a philosopher, and Charles Manson could pawn himself off as a misunderstood victim of a dysfunctional family. Manson had started his own Family in Berkeley, in fact, latching onto a librarian and moving in with her.
The street had its own argot, its own codes. As I walked along it, I sensed that signals of various kinds were being semaphored over a tom-tom skin of pavement. Lying on the sidewalk or crouched by the tables of vendors selling life-giving crystals, there were ravaged speed freaks, messianic hipsters, bad dudes in hooded sweatshirts, and Deadheads in tie-dye, each of them looking for the transformative score that would make it happen for them, the big lift-off into the California ozone.
Among them moved an improbably clean-cut group of young men and women, who were purposeful where the others were lost, untarnished where they were scarred, solidly grounded where they were all fucked up—students at the University blithely skirting the perimeters of a lost world.
A walk on Telegraph was another memory garden for me. The street was linked indelibly to certain events of the 1960s and the 1970s that had given me the sort of instruction that I had never got in school. In those early days of exploring away from San Francisco, I had crossed the bridge not only for the bookstores and the cultural institutions but also to be part of the action, the so-called revolution.
I could remember how the store owners on the strip would nail plywood p
anels over their windows at the slightest hint of a demonstration, and how the cops and the protestors would collide with the inevitability of two football squads marching toward a disputed fifty-yard line. I remembered, too, the smell of tear gas and the air thick with smoke, and the sight of faces and heads split and bloodied by nightsticks, innocence going down with an angelic swoon.
The revolution never came, of course, but the war in Vietnam had ended. There was that to consider when it seemed that Berkeleyites worried too much. Now those days were being raked over and codified, their fragments laid claim to, the mythic Berkeley of intellectual dissent and fervent opposition and too much hair and baggy clothes rising into the pantheon of mythic California.
Where Telegraph Avenue stopped, UC Berkeley began. Sather Gate was the entrance to a campus that stretched over 1,232 wooded acres. Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of Manhattan’s Central Park, had done the landscaping and had given the campus a parklike atmosphere. There were gnomish grottoes, rippling creeks, and charming fieldstone bridges that carried you to secluded footpaths through the shrubbery, where the odd marijuana joint could be smoked and the odd kiss exchanged.
Berkeley was the finest public university in California, the crown jewel in the UC system. It had twenty-six libraries, scads of Nobel laureates, and about 22,000 students. Established in 1873, it was the oldest of the nine UC campuses, which had an aggregate enrollment of about 163,000. Most students were California residents and paid a very low tuition, so Berkeley was severely strapped for cash, like its fellow institutions and like California itself.
The University of California had its fingers in many pies. Its Board of Regents read like a corporate Who’s Who. Its scientists and its researchers still had a strong bond to the military-industrial complex. Other branches of the UC system counseled farmers, ranchers, fishermen, the timber industry, and so on. The Davis branch handled agriculture and viticulture, the San Francisco branch did medicine, and the Scripps Institution in La Jolla did oceanography.
A Berkeley grad was inducted into a worthy and valuable club. Students toiled under that tension, but you’d never guess it by watching them at play in Sproul Plaza. They were strumming banjos and zooming by on Rollerblades, passing Hacky-Sacks from toe to toe and flipping Frisbees in looping spirals, eating tacos and falafel and chow mein from carts, and soaking up the suds at the Bear’s Lair, as though the very idea of cracking a book were laughable.
Even the faculty seemed absolutely above any academic concerns. Whenever I saw a bearded, graying professor amble through the plaza trailed by a gaggle of female admirers and beaming in tenured delight, I felt a stab of envy and wished that I’d done all my homework on time and had never cut a class, hewing instead to a straight and narrow path that might have led me to a similar Olympus.
BERKELEY WAS A SMALL CITY, but it held a large sway in matters Californian, being the cradle of a haute bourgeoisie style of living that had later spread around the state. The style had its origins in the British Arts and Crafts Movement, which was sponsored by William Morris and John Ruskin in an attempt to provide an antidote to the dehumanizing effects of industry. An Arts and Craftser valued simple, organic things and tried to stay attuned to and in harmony with nature.
A Swedenborgian minister, Joseph Worcester, introduced the principles of the movement to the East Bay. He built a house for himself in Piedmont, near Berkeley, in 1876, that broke with all the contemporary modes of design. The house was open, airy, and light, and drew its elements from the environment. The interior walls were rough redwood, while redwood shingles covered the exterior walls. It could not have been conjured up anywhere else. The essential physical properties of northern California were imbedded in its bones.
Soon the architects around Berkeley were casting away their traditional pattern books and meeting to discuss the theories of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Bernard Maybeck plunged into the new world with particular abandon and made redwood his building material of choice. He so disliked the look of raw plaster that he started using stucco instead, imitating the straw and adobe walls of missions. Sometimes in a Maybeck house the dividing line between a parlor and a garden appeared not to be there at all.
Another architect in the circle, A. C. Schweinfurth, designed a Unitarian Church in Berkeley in 1898 that was an Arts and Crafts monument. It had two porches beneath its pitched roof that drew their support from unpeeled redwood logs. The church became the locale for meetings of the Ruskin Club. The club had such members as the architects Maybeck, Schweinfurth, Charles Keeler, Louis Christian Mullgardt, and Willis Polk. Keeler’s The Simple Home, published in 1904, was their handbook.
The Ruskin Clubbers had a women’s satellite in the Hillside Club, whose members fought to save the “wilderness” of the north Berkeley Hills. The women were fanatically pure. They slept in the fresh air, showered in cold water, and worked out to keep fit. They wouldn’t touch coffee, tea, or meat and believed that any house was merely “landscape gardening with a few rooms to use in case of rain.”
Precisely at this historical moment, the cultural elite in California, all centered in the state’s great university, began turning its collective back on the beaux arts of Paris to appreciate the natural wonders in front of them—the light, the trees, the air, and the ocean.
The Ruskin Club’s knack for transforming the specific attributes of a place into something special, borrowing as necessary, would be recapitulated more than seventy years later when a young woman in love with Provence and the stories of Marcel Pagnol opened a restaurant in a shingled Berkeley house. She grew her own herbs and lettuces in a backyard garden, bought free-range chickens fed on organic grains, and relied on local ingredients that were fresh, aromatic, and pure.
“I am sad,” she would write one day, “for those who cannot see a lovely, unblemished apple just picked from the tree as voluptuous, or a beautifully perfect pear as sensuous.…”
In Berkeley, she had found an armada of kindred souls. The little shingled house, Chez Panisse, filled with gourmets and gourmands clamoring for a taste of her spit-roasted capon or her rocket salad with goose fat and garlic-rubbed croutons. So it was that Alice Waters paid an accidental homage to the Ruskin Club and struck it rich by launching California cuisine.
OAKLAND, SOUTHEAST OF BERKELEY, was orbiting in still another solar system. It was a tough, drug-wracked city, the fifth-largest in California, anomalous in the suburban landscape and almost out of control.
In the Oakland hills, there were pockets of gentility and many people of a liberal conscience, but down in the infernal flats you came upon decaying old houses and horrid housing projects that had been burned and gutted, where crime was taught in busy tutorials. Gangs of Crips and Bloods plied their trade there and distributed crack cocaine and heroin, with boys sometimes no older than ten hooked into service and outfitted with beepers.
The gangsters and their wanna-bes dressed as if to advertise the fact that they were dealing, hip and nonchalant in Raiders’ paraphernalia with its piratical emblem and its buccaneerish colors of silver and black, or in FILA T-shirts, baggy pants, and pump-em-up Air Jordan sneakers. There was something of the clown or the fool in the mix, at once streetwise and heartbroken, but that changed when the gangsters were in their late teens and understood that they were in the life for good, with no chance of escape. Then their eyes grew hard and cold and murderous.
Friends kept vanishing, that was part of it. They got busted and were shipped off to prison, gone to Susanville or Pelican Bay, locales as exotic to an inner-city kid as Bucharest might be. Or they turned up dead, stabbed or shot or overdosed. A young person in the worst sections of Oakland became intimate with death in early childhood, and with sex not much later, as girls just beginning to menstruate gave birth to infants out of wedlock, babies making babies.
I walked around Oakland and saw the young mothers as they waited at bus stops for a ride to a clinic or a hospital or maybe to a relative’s house. They put on a brave fro
nt while they clutched their children to them, looking proud and loving but also terrified and overwhelmed, barely managing to hang on to their squirmy bundles.
A curious look of annoyance sometimes crossed a mother’s face, as if it had just dawned on her that she’d be stuck with her infant now and forever—that she’d been tricked into playing a game without knowing all the rules.
Oakland wasn’t unattractive. It had handsome lakes and parks. The architecture had a distinctive 1930s sturdiness, spared from the glass-and-steel skyscrapers that were interchangeable among California cities. It had a good museum, a good zoo, and a fine sports complex for baseball and basketball. Its port continued to grow, earning substantial revenues from two big military tenants on its waterfront, depots for the army and the navy.
Yet Oakland still fought against every attempt at redevelopment. Millions had been sunk into renovating a downtown area around Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, but the shops and the restaurants couldn’t stay in business, because nobody wanted to be on those streets at night, although a project to construct a new Federal Building was supposed to change all that.
Gangs appeared to be the true bosses in Oakland. The city had a murder rate that had blasted right off the scale. Drive-by shootings were an everyday affair. Often the killers—teenagers acting out of a warped sense of honor—were too stoned or dumb or inept to hit their target and instead sprayed bullets from their Uzis, the modern equivalent of the sawed-off shotgun, into homes or apartments where grannies snored before a TV.
The Crips and the Bloods weren’t the only ones in business. Tongs ruled the roost in Oakland’s thriving Chinatown and banged heads with the gangs of Vietnamese immigrants who were closing in on them. Hell’s Angels were also partial to the city. They did their usual trading in weapons and speed and buried their dead at Evergreen Cemetery.