(Dis)location: Black Exodus

Dr. Raymond Tompkins

How did you come to San Francisco?
I was born in San Diego. My father was a Navy man. He was master chief petty officer. In 1955, he was transferred to Beeville, Texas. That’s just one year after Brown vs. Board of Education. Segregation was in full bloom. The base the housing was not integrated— we were the first. My father had straighter hair than me, so they assumed he was Hawaiian. I came back to California when my father was transferred. We moved to San Francisco because my mother’s parents were here. His active ship would come out of Treasure Island and dock there. That’s where he’d discharge.

       We lived in Fillmore. Then they called it Negro Removal in the Western addition. Now after they got rid of more of the Negroes, we call it Lower Pacific Heights.
       When the government incarcerated the Japanese and put them in the internment camps, the Fillmore was open. Blacks owned the businesses because they bought them from the Japanese who were only given five days. They had to sell the stuff [for] pennies on the dollar. That’s how the Blacks working over in Hunters Point in the shipyard had money to go buy the property in [the] Fillmore.
       Most Blacks that are in the Bay Area are from Texas or Louisiana. They were recruited by the Manpower Commission to bring workers into the shipyards into the military industrial complex. In the Bay Area, Rosie the Riveter was Black. There was over a thousand Black women welders here in the shipyard in Hunter’s Point and in Richmond building the liberty ships.
        The workers during World War II—they invested in the homes and bought homes because they were coming from the farms. My mother was a sharecropper her father was a sharecropper. Land had an important value. When they got their dollars, they bought homes, and that’s how the Black middle class was established.
        Because of discrimination, all Blacks were forced to live in Bayview. The first Black woman, Mrs. James, was allowed to buy property in 1938. (This is Oscar James’ grandmother. He’s still with us.1 )
       She asked how much for the house. Realtors laughed. She said, “How much?” They told her the price. She said, “OK, I’ll be back.”
       She went to the bank, came back, paid in cash for the house. That was the first Black person in Bayview allowed to buy a home.

How did you get involved in science?
My first year chemistry [teacher] was Dr. Brian Ramsey, who was the head of the graduate division in chemistry. He saw I had a gift for it. Dr. Ramsey offered me a job as his research assistant and also [as] a TA for a course—Chemistry in the Human Environment. Rather than waiting til I was a graduate student, Brian had me doing research as a sophomore.
       We did Sickle Cell screening. That kicked me off in terms of seeing the different results for the African-American community. Later that comes up into my studies of genetic variances in populations.
       I was very lucky and fortunate that I had thinking men and women in my career that provided me an opportunity and exposed me to science and also the Civil Rights movement.

Can you give an overview of the history of Bayview and what industry has been there historically?
In Bayview, the shipyard was the economic driving force for many decades until they shut it down in the 1970s. You had Bechtel steel. You had the stockyard. All the cattle. Then you have tanning industry, so you had a lot of the heavy [industry].Death has its own unique smell. It would travel from here all the way over by the zoo. That’s how strong it was. You have about 90% of the light industry still here, or between [freeways] 101 and 280. You have three cement factories and they’re going to put three more out here to build downtown.

How does the shipyard contribute to the health impacts in the neighborhood?
The shipyard just wasn’t a shipyard—this was also the national Navy’s nuclear research center. If you go on a shipyard, you see a gray building nine stories high, no windows. That was a lab2 . The decontamination of the Bikini Tests for the H bomb—the decontamination of the ships was out here. The bombs that were dropped on Japan shipped out of Hunters Point.
 
Map of Dr. Tomkins' geo-coded sites by Flora Weinstock and Marisa Weinstock and Adrienne Hall. For a full list of all California Department of Toxic Substances and Control Cleanup Sites, check out the Environmental Justice Interactive Infographics tag or click here.
 
       We are still fighting World War II, from the radiation exposure that’s coming off of the shipyard. A lot of the stuff is still kept here, buried underneath. The earth is still a growing thing, a moving living organism in many senses. In time, gases and things emerge. There are earthquakes.
Things move, so you get release.
       The government’s approach is not clean-up, but containment. The pollution is still there. You still cannot grow any vegetables in the ground. The soil is contaminated. You’d go too deep you’d be bringing the stuff back up.
       The average life expectancy for a Black male worker was 42 years old working at Hunters Point. The homes were right up on the base. They had it right on the shoreline. Homes were built on stilts. Blacks, just as what happened over in Port Chicago3, were given all the dirty jobs. We’re a disposable people and that’s what’s happening here.
       One Black worker said he carried the irradiated animals. They would radiate the animals and then dump them in the pit. The pit is now what we refer to as [parcel] E2. They dumped everything in there.
       That’s why the Black workers died so damn young. They had all the chemicals on them. They never taught them: “Don’t ever wash his clothes with the children’s clothes. Don’t wear your shoes in the house keep them outside your work shoes.” All of that came into the homes. Which then transferred over to the descendants.
       An administrator who worked there— she was dying from a tumor that you get from plutonium exposure—she said, “Ray, we spilled it all over the place.” The Navy said, “It’s only in this area.” She said, “It’s all over the base. We spilled it all over.” Who are you going to believe? You’ve got to ask where did you learn your science from.

How were you involved in the clean-up of the shipyard?
I been involved with base cleanup of the shipyard for twelve years. In the 1990s all the way through to 2006, when they got rid of the [Restoration] Advisory Board4. I chaired the technical committee for six years. We would review the Navy’s documents but we could not do any testing, which puts the community at a disadvantage.
        We catch so many screw-ups left and right. People just accept whatever they say. “Well, yes, you’re right. You’re the expert.”
        No! This is not correct. This is not the correct protocol. This is not how you do this.
        They weren’t used to having a group of men and women challenge them. The Navy was scared to meet with the folks in the community. They used to meet at the police station. If they got too scared, they can call for help from the police and it’s a short walk over to the jail. That didn’t stop us from fighting for the truth.
How does the radiation affect the community if the Navy claims the waste is contained?
In 2000, in August, [the shipyard] had a land fire. That underground fire burned for 105 days. The Navy didn’t have any test take place until 22 to 27 days after the surface fire was out. There was an underground fire burning and they didn’t inform us until 60 days afterward. The Navy [also] didn’t notify the health department of the fire or the potential of the under other chemical fire and exposures until 16 days after the fire was out.
       All that dust, the PM2.55, blows into the neighborhood. My brother and I bought property on Jerrold Street, which used to be military property. My brother was living there—he was exposed. His kids were exposed. If you went to the emergency room, the doctor would treat you as normal [for] asthma or allergies. They wouldn’t look for chemical exposure that was triggering the symptoms.
       Why are people sick? My argument is because of the particulates. In 2013, Harvard Medical School did a study and found that what the mother inhales is transferred to the fetus. That’s how dangerous this is. Pulmonary and heart attacks are a byproduct of this exposure. Bayview has the highest [rate of] heart attack, stroke and pulmonary disease out of all eleven districts in San Francisco. Carver Elementary School—their asthma rate is 60% higher than the national average. In 1998, 55% of the babies in a first grade were asthmatic as defined by a physician. I come back to school ten years later: 85% of the babies in the first grade are asthmatic.
       When they wanted to do destroy Candlestick stadium, they wanted to blow it up for entertainment for halftime at the Super Bowl. Over 700 [residents] showed up at two meetings saying, don’t blow it up because what happened [at] Geneva Towers6. They blew that up and said all the dust will magically stay in a parking lot—it won’t even leave the parking lot.
       They never blow up anything in St. Francis Wood or the Marina. That’s just on this side of town were you people are expendable. The rich will buy luxury apartments. They’ll have their own air filtration systems. The working class people, the poor people, are sucking the dirty air.

What are you currently working on?
If I could reduce the dust in the air, find out the sources of contamination and reduce the dust, I would change that asthma [rate] dramatically, and the heart attacks and strokes in this community. I see a lot of dead people. I see people dying 14 years earlier than they should be. I see extremely high asthma rates in the children. I’m talking about life and death.
        What I’m doing now with the Air District, I’ve been advocating for several years. They’re finally agreeing. We’ve already did a little pilot with some of the residents. I plan to get the old records of where these old industries during World War II were located, along with the young history. Students, long-term residents, elders like Oscar James. He has pictures that go back to 1923. Taking advantage of the memories that are still with us along with the records, we may yet be able to reconstruct the truth. You go block by block, lot by lot. It’s tedious work, but then we’ll have an accurate map.
       The Air District will analyze particles and give us the chemical composition. Then we can say it came over there, because on that block, in that lot, this factory was there, or the current auto body shop is polluting. We could pinpoint it—it’s almost like a thumbprint— and get to the source.
       If we get this map done correctly then this will help me teach the doctors what’s going on so they can treat their patients correctly. It’s interconnected. It all works together. If we can reduce particulates, we can look at the other stuff down the line. But this is the first step.
       Hopefully we can get younger people to go into the sciences as they engage in a real research to help generate real policy reflecting the conditions that exist in this community. It’s about who’s coming behind because others made it possible for me to be here. Put these kids in college and give them a scholarship!
       They will have the most compassion because their families, just like my family, are impacted by this. It’s not a little rat you play with in a laboratory—it’s their parents, nieces and nephews or cousins.

Interview by Alexandra Lacey and Jin Zhu
Edited by Jin Zhu and Bean Crane
Thread portrait by William Rhodes


Endnotes
1.   Museum of the African Diaspora’s I’ve Known Rivers project contains an oral history interview with Oscar James.
2.   Dr. Tompkins is referring to the building which housed the National Radiological Defense Laboratory.
3.    On July 17, 1944, an explosion occurred at Port Chicago Naval Magazine, a Bay Area military base. Most of the 320 were killed and 390 injured were African-American soldiers and conscripts.
4.   A Restoration Advisory Board composed of members from the local community and representatives from the Department of Defense, the state and EPA is required by the DoD on all bases or installations which are closing or closed as a part of the Technical Review Committee (TRC) process. According to DoD implementation guidelines, “The boards are a forum for exchange of information and partnership among citizens, the installation, EPA, and State. Most importantly, they offer an opportunity for communities to provide input to the cleanup process.”
5.   Air pollution is a health hazard when particulate matter such as smoke, exhaust, chemicals or gases suspended in the air have a diameter less than 2.5 micrometers. Particles this small are not filtered by mucus membranes in the nose and throat, and can thus penetrate deep into the lungs.
6.   The Geneva Towers were a public housing project in San Francisco which was demolished in 1997.

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