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• 1 2019-09-29T00:30:15-07:00 Mary Lavalais 3 Teacher at San Francisco Community School on growing up in Bayview-Hunters Point and Sunnydale Public Housing Projects plain 2019-09-29T10:18:39-07:00 Tell me about your background.
  I’m a native San Franciscan. There aren’t too many of us left here in The City, but I was born and raised here.
         My parents were from New Orleans and they migrated here. My father was in the war, so we lived in Bayview-Hunters Point. I lived in the housing projects and there was the Naval shipyard behind us. I went to school here in Catholic schools all my life. 
         went to school here in Catholic schools all my life. So my roots are here, but I now live in South San Francisco because I was rather pushed out, so I really had to downsize a lot. It’s a very tight space but I’m living in South San Francisco now, but everything I do, everything I know is in San Francisco.
       All my friends are here and I work here and so my church is in San Francisco, so my relationship is with The City that I was born in. [My father] had been in the war in WWII, and he was at the shipyard. He was working there painting ships... Oh, wow, [Bayview-Hunters Point] was one big family. Everybody belonged to everybody else. You didn’t talk back to anybody’s parent or anything. If you were doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing and the neighbor said something, it was like your own parent was talking to you. We were really, really a tight-knit family. Most of the people that lived out there then, the mothers had come from The South and the fathers had been in the war.
         My parents lived in the housing projects and then my father died when I was like 16 years old. He was only 46 when he died, so it was just my mother and I. She had a pretty rough time of it, although I didn’t know it then, but I can really appreciate it now because she put me through Catholic school. She worked for the school district, and she also ironed people’s clothes and washed clothes and went and cleaned people’s homes because she wanted to make sure that I had a good education, a Catholic education. But she was a teacher in The South, but when she got here she would have had to go back to school all over again and she didn’t have the time to do that. My father was at war.
         I was born in 1948, so that’s a long time ago. The relationship between us, the children that lived in public housing and the ones that lived in the homes was, we didn’t really care. We were all just friends and we just went to school together. That relationship was not a bad one. It wasn’t like, “Oh, you’re in a home and I’m in the projects.” However, as I got older I r e m e m b e r kids saying, “Oh, you live in the old projects. We live in the new projects,” and we were all basically on the same level of living, but now children get trying to, I guess, feel a little bit better than someone else, you know. At any rate, the public housing, they didn’t do a whole lot for us to help us at all. They did very minimal ... Like they didn’t come and fix things all the time.
         I remember a girl telling me, “Well, you live where?” And I said, “On Innes.” She said, “Are there houses there?” I said, “Yeah. On part of the street there are houses.” Then I went on to say, “But I live up over the hill,” and she said, “Are those houses there or apartments?” I said, “No, those are housing projects,” and she said, “You live in the housing projects?” I said, “Yeah.” She looked at me kind of like, not different but ... And she was a girl who was white. She wasn’t Black and she wasn’t Latina. She told me, she said “Oh, I’m so shocked. You’re different than the rest.” I said, “The rest of who?” “Well, the other Negroes,” at that time ... “The other Negroes that come from the projects. You’re just different.” I said, “Well, how am I different?” I really didn’t understand w h at s h e was talking about, but as I got older [I understood]. I’m going into the ninth grade and here’s this person talking to me about how I’m different than the rest of the Negroes that come from the projects, and they were my friends and I didn’t see any difference. But this was a white girl that was telling me, “Oh, you’re so much different than the others.” And it really stuck with me for life. It stuck with me.
  
  When did you move to Sunnydale?
  We were told we had to move because they were tearing down those projects and building some new ones. My mother moved right away, and she was one of the first ones in our area to move.
         We moved to Sunnydale Housing Projects from Bayview-Hunters Point, and that was just a totally different experience because when I moved out there it was so beautiful. The buildings there were two stories. It was your own apartment, so it wasn’t like someone was over you. In Hunters Point there were apartments on the bottom level and then you walked upstairs and there were apartments on the top level, and we were on the top level.
         When we first moved out there, there was a gardener, Tony, that came every other week and watered everyone’s grass. He cut the hedges, and everyone had parking in front of their house if they needed the parking. It was really, really nice there. Then over the years, the government stopped coming and taking care of it the way they should, and then things began to go down...I don’t know. They stopped caring for the property. They just stopped. Tings really changed a lot. But when we got there, people were friendly, and then it just seemed like ... drugs and guns came into our community.
         I can say that wholeheartedly, Black people, we don’t have access to drugs. We don’t have drugs being shipped over from another country here. Early on, I could tell the boys that were doing what they were doing were not bad boys. It’s just that their mothers had four and five and more kids, and they were doing what they were doing trying to help their parents. That’s the way it started out, and it just ended up tragically where people hated each other and it was just.
          Poverty breeds a whole lot of anger, and the anger is within yourself and then it goes out to other people. You have people that were angry back then that have grown up now and they’re saying, “What were we doing? What were we thinking?”
         I used to see the police officers talking to the boys on the corner, and I would say, “What are they doing?” My son, who was about 12 at the time, told me, “Mom, they’re talking to those boys. They have some connection with them. They’re not just sitting up there having nice conversations.” The boys would come over to the police car and they would lean in and laugh and talk back and forth with their hands inside. My son said, “Watch their hands. Their hands go inside” and they rested on this ... And I said, “Justin, what are they doing?” He said, “Mom, I think it’s a payoff thing to keep people quiet.” It’s true that the police knew who was doing what. If they really wanted to stop stuff they could have stopped it. If my son, who was 10, 11, and 12 knows ... And he wasn’t out there in the streets. He went to school here. He was with me. He was playing baseball. Every sport I could put him in he was in. But here’s this kid that knew what was going on. To me, it felt like a setup. Some people have to stay on top, and in order to stay on top you’ve got to keep some people down.
         Then when the crack epidemic hit it’s like a lot of them became their own best customer and they were just cracked out. Again, I’m going to say poverty leads to a lot of self-hate and just anger, and when some people are not strong enough to say, “I’ve got to do something else. I cannot push myself over the edge. I feel myself falling. I gotta catch myself and pull myself back” ... Sometimes people are so depressed they can’t do it. You know what I’m saying?
         Then you have generations and then you have races, and then the races are stigmatized and given a title, and it’s not true. Every Black man is not on drugs.
         Every Black man doesn’t sell drugs. You know what I’m saying? Every Black man did not drop out of high school. Every Black woman did not get pregnant at the age of 15 or 16, but this the image, so it’s what has been perpetrated and this is why people of color, and Latinas including, are just in a place of constant need to reevaluate ourselves and say, “I’m not gonna let anybody put this stigma and this picture on my face. This is not me. Even if I don’t have what everyone else has, I’m still a worthy person,” and sometimes people don’t feel worthy.
  
  Were you here during the Hunters Point Social Uprising of 1966?
  That story just rang in my mind. That was the beginning of people being angry about being mistreated, and then I remembered back to how we were still living in Hunters Point and this young boy...I don’t know what it was, but he was running up this hill and there were some police officers and they shot him in his back and killed him(1). But we were all just angry. It was like, “Why did they shoot him in the back?” We never really got the full story, and the police sort of covered it up, because we didn’t find out what it was.
         That was my first connection with the police hurting or killing someone who was African-American. I was still living in Hunters Point then. It’s very depressing to think that we’re still having that conversation.
  
  Interview by Alexandra Lacey Edited by Alexandra Lacey and Wynn Newberry
  
  Endnotes 1: See our center pull-out map, “We Out Here” for more on The Hunters Point Uprising.