(Dis)location: Black Exodus

Arnold Townsend on Community Organizing and Redevelopment

When it started there was no such thing as relocation programs because folks had no rights to come back whatsoever. We need to really understand it. But let me just say: folks demonstrated, they got mad at what was going on to them, and they laid down in front of bulldozers and other things like that, and Ms. Mary Helen Rogers and Hannibal Williams and others, they went to court as well. So it’s a two-pronged approach, direct public action and court, and they sued and they won, and the relocation part of it, bringing people back, was created. One of the biggest problems with relocation, and the reason that it didn’t work is because our black communities were built naturally. What I mean by that is that okay, I moved here in the 40s WWII era and I get a job on the shipyards, and you’re married and your husband is my best friend, we grew up together down South, I write him, and say, Look Joe, I talked to the man on my job about you and he’s holding a job for you, how soon can you get here? Joe’s gone, he brings you up, sends for you later, and you stay with us, and then the apt opens up across the street, around the corner , down the block d ow n s t a i r s , whatever, you move here, now when Joe and I were growing up together, he spent some nights in my house down home, his parents tore my behind up, his parents got me when I got out of line, and when we get here, he and I do the same thing in our neighborhood, we look out for each other. And then Joe gets here and he calls his brother, and then his brother calls his best friend. So in some ways, now that didn’t happen to—everybody didn’t get here like that, but that was the core of the community: was group of folks who knew each other, who had a relationship, and every other relationship was built up around those relationships. So we all build of that. Well when they tore down and built back... they threw a bunch of strangers together, and strangers are leery of each other, it doesn’t matter what color they are.

Home-owners
When redevelopment first happened, the people that moved back into rental units, were the people who used to rent. Home owners by and large, bought somewhere else, and didn’t come back. Because they didn’t build home ownership opportunities for a really long time, so they didn’t come back, they went somewhere else to stay, and then businesses were relocated out, and the tragedy in the businesses being relocated out is that it took 20 years until they started building stuff on Fillmore Street, and those business have relocated somewhere else, or gone out of business. Look, the redevelopment agency came to 800 something business in Fillmore: 600 of them had to be Black-owned minimum. 600. We don’t have ten now.

WACO & Community Resistance
I became a member of and then the chair of the Mayor’s committee team CAC. But first there was WACO (Western Addition Community Organization). They were the ones that led the lawsuit. 
       They could have designated WACO as the project area committee to oversee the redevelopment agency or create a new one. They chose to create a new one. They felt that WACO was too militant. WACO kind of died, and WAPAC (Western Addition Project Area Committee) took over.
       It was different because it was funded; they had more rules. The people that ended up taking over—just like everything— when the real folk on the ground riot and demonstrate, and the folks with the college degrees and skills come in and get the jobs and sometimes they abandon the people.
       By the time they started the lawsuit it was too late. That’s really what it was, it was too late. Once they declared this an urban renewal area, it was too late, because what they were determined to do, and what happened, is they took wealth, and everything else doesn’t even matter, they took wealth away from Black folks and gave them a whole lot of other...the redevelopment agency created a whole lot of millionaires in this project. We owned business, we owned property. So what I always say, in America in general, and the Fillmore specifically, we have more money now, but we had more wealth then, because we own things now, now we consume things, there’s a big difference, and it’s a tragic and sad, and deadly state of existence.
     
Background
So, what happened is we’re out in State College [San Francisco State University] studying students’ rights and everything and I got assigned to the Fillmore, I started coming to meetings, and I’ve been here ever since, for 40 years, working and living in this community and trying. And we worked very hard, but the bottom line is, as far as I’m concerned, we weren’t very successful.
       I submit that had it not been for the [Reverend] Wilbur Hamiltons and the Jean Sutters and people like that, it may have even been worse than it turned out to be. What we have here now might not even be here, if some of us hadn’t just fought and lobbied, and won a concession here and there. I see them as folks who got in the middle of the problem, trying, and so in that sense became a part of the problem. I don’t think there was much that Wilbur could have done, or you or I, once the wheels were rolling, once The City was invested. The City invested in this.This place became a generator of money for people all over the United States, if you look at who made money of of this, banks from Connecticut or wherever, Boston, try to get in the redevelopment archives and see the kinds of contracts they gave out to major white law firms to do work in the Western Addition, million dollar contracts.

Eminent Domain
They declared eminent domain: now you can move or you can stay here, but the bulldozers are showing up next week. If you own it here’s your check, if you’re renting, here’s fifty dollars, and then when they sued and then won, the relocation benefits became more, but originally it was 50 bucks and you’re out of here, they didn’t have to convince nothing. All of the opposition, and intensive planning— CAC and WAPAC—all that came about after and because of the lawsuit. In the early days there was nothing. That was the reality. They said it was a blighted area, they cited statistics, and the TB statistics 1 were true, but they didn’t say that the statistics were the same as the average TB stats throughout The City. They took pictures for the newspaper showing garbage cans showed over in the street, what they didn’t tell you was that it was on garbage day. And scavengers come by, in those days you brought your trash to the curb, they employ the can and throw it on the street, when you come home from work you pick it up and take it in the back. And the other thing that made it a blighted area, is that it was too many people of the same race. So when you look at that you tell me what it was.
       People needed some help, they wanted some help. Let me tell you why they needed help: because the banks, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, many years later admitted, they redlined the community. So, many people who didn’t have their houses took it under eminent domain and sold out, because like any family, the most important capital, most of the time, the only capital possession they have, is their home, and they were working for anything they have, because they can’t get money to paint it, can’t get money to ithe walls to improve it, to enlarge it, to add on, put on a deck, or whatever you do to your homes. And so they were faced with that option, they had to move. And the banks say, We know what we did and we’re sorry. But when we were totally out there accusing them of redlining our neighborhood, they told us they weren’t. I remember Diane Feinstein telling us one time No, I talked to the president of Wells Fargo, so and so, whoever it was, and he assured me…They lied, that’s what they were doing to us, and it wasn’t like we didn’t know it, and it wasn’t like we didn’t say it. And everyone in The City, would talk badly about the redevelopment agency, but trust me, you’re young you wouldn’t know, wasn’t no other city officials jumping up saying don’t do this. They went right along with it, and let happen.
       But people wanted some help in fixing up their homes, fixing up their neighborhoods, but by and large, was it a slum in the sense that folks didn’t want to live here? You not only have your people, we had institutions, we had churches, fraternal organization, civic and social clubs, we had nightlife, we had restaurants. I’ve been here forty something years, you could stand on top of the Broadway hill up there and look down on Fillmore street and looked like New York City, and they were swinging of their rockers, live music, an alive community an alive neighborhood, seeing people walk down the street on Saturday morning, and running into each other, and folks hollering at each other across the street, Hey Willie what’s up, kids who maybe only saw each other on Saturday morning when they were out with their mama shopping and mama stop talking, and they’d play with each other while their mothers stood and passed the time of day for a while. Was it all sweetness and love? Of course not, we had problems in every Black community, but we had an envelope in which we could work on our problems, now we have no envelope. Two, our children, and I think this is important, our children had a sense of place, that we had some semblance, or we felt some semblance of control over.
       [Now] we have no sense of place, and our children have no sense of place, and that’s why I think the churches become so severe in our neighborhood, because they see a situation in which their parents have no control over their neighborhood, what happens to their neighborhood, and so those are the kind of long term, long lasting effects.
       When it comes to Black folks this city of San Francisco has accepted a couple of things. You know the mayor did his commission exodus2 , and the problem with that is the only conclusion you can really make out of that is the conclusion I made before he ever did: it took an agency, and a whole lot of money to get rid of us, and it would take an agency and whole lot of money to get us back, and the will for that is not there because the various politicians of this town are not going to put their careers in jeopardy by going into their districts and telling them, their constituencies, that its right to spend money on Black folks, they’re not going to it. And they did not, no matter how much they said about it, they’re not going to do it. The other issues is if things were ever going to get right with us in this town, San Francisco needs to go into a twelve step recovery program. Admit you have a problem, and then seek to make amends.
      We live in a very unique time in history, we live in the first time in history, where the wealthy covet the homes of the poor.
      Now, as poor folks we always want their house, there’s nothing you do about that, when I was a boy people used to come to California, that’s the first thing we would do, take them to Beverly Hills, in LA, here we take them to Pacific Heights, show them how the right folks live. But we couldn’t do nothing about it except look. But when they come down here and see your house and they like it and they have unlimited wealth they can get it, they have the political power to get it, even when you don’t want to sell it.

Interview by Ariana Allensworth
Edited by Maya Sisneros

Endnotes
1 San Francisco used public health statistics to justify urban renewal. In this case The City obscured the data in order to justify seizing the land.
2 Report of the San Francisco Mayor’s Task Force on African-American Out-Migration, 2009

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