Oral History: Dr. Raymond Tompkins
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2019-07-26T13:01:25-07:00
"At the time of the earthquake in 1906, there were 1,200 Blacks in San Francisco. Prior to World War II, there were 5,000. The peak of African-American population was in 1970 when the baby boomers were still here – they hadn't moved out and their parents were still alive from the war. The population jumped up to 60,000.
In 1906, Fillmore was downtown San Francisco, because everything east of Van Ness was burnt. That's where they made the stand, so Fillmore survived. When we first got here Fillmore was still Fillmore. I walked up Fillmore to go to Sacred Heart Elementary School. We’d go down to Woolworth's on occasion and get something. I liked root beer floats and that was a big treat. But I lived in the projects, public housing - 1750 Turk, Apt 4006. That's long gone. They had 12 story apartments. They still had the remnants of what we used to call the Pink Palace. Now it's senior citizen homes.
As a child growing up, I had no reason to go downtown because everything was there. You had Woolworth's, you had a dollar store you had the fresh fresh fresh fresh crab right off the boat - they're fighting each other in basket.
Fillmore had three theaters. We had Blackhawk Club, where you see Miles Davis on the albums with the jazz musicians. The Blue Mirror. I was too young to go in, being in the third and fourth grade. So many things were going on. They had a bowling alley, a skating rink as well as Hamilton, the gym and the park. What was there when I came in was everything. All walks of life. You had Tree's Pool Hall. You walk into Tree's you can get anything.
You had a diversity, you had Blacks owning nightclubs. Mr. Johnson Sr owned the Texas Longhorn. Later, Johnson Sr son [sic] became Wesley Johnson Jr., the pharmacist, and I worked for him for a hot second a little later in life. He had three pharmacies: one in Fillmore, one in Ingleside, and then one in Fillmore with Dr. Coleman, who went bankrupt because the state was four years behind in paying him after he bought medicine and gave it to the patients. He just went bankrupt. He wanted to provide quality medicine to Black people. That was his crime. And the state was so slow in paying him.
I remember Redevelopment coming in just about a year after they started '58. I was fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh grade.
About '57, '58, they started knocking and I started seeing friends' houses being wiped out. Whole blocks being wiped out. I remember when they did the Geary Street, that wiped out a lot of the Fillmore in terms of the businesses - Woolworth's and a few other stores. All that was gone. All housing was gone. They gave [Black residents] a piece of paper that's worth nothing. [The residents] sacrificed and lost so much. They can't even afford to go back in. It was a scam. Their descendants, the children, didn't reap the benefits."
Interview by Alexandra Lacey and Jin Zhu.
Edited by Jin Zhu.
Thread portrait by William Rhodes.
