In the early 1940s, a Black teenager living in the South wouldn’t be given a watch or a typewriter when they graduated from high school.
Instead, they’d get a bus or train ticket headed West to destinations including the San Francisco Bay Area, says historian Shirley Anne Moore in the 2020 documentary, “Homefront Heroes.” Arriving in Richmond, Oakland or San Francisco, they could find work in the World War II shipyards, which were seen as a chance for a better life, free of the poverty, discrimination and threats of violence that were a daily reality for many African Americans in the Jim Crow South.
“We all thought we could make money working in the shipyards,” the late Mary Lee “Peace” Head says in the documentary. The Louisiana native migrated to California after her husband, Leroy Head, enlisted in the Navy and was posted at Treasure Island. Head became a female welder in the Richmond shipyards. After the war, Head and her husband settled in Richmond and raised their four children there. She was a well-known local activist before she died in 2017 at age 94.
Mary Lee and Leroy Head were among the more than four million Black people who left the South as part of the Second Great Migration between 1940 and 1970. In cities in the West and North, they found opportunities for skilled jobs, decent wages on par with their white counterparts and access to education for their children. This internal exodus transformed American culture, as well as local communities and economies.
These transplants created thriving Black neighborhoods and institutions across the Bay Area. A large mural at the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Park in RIchmond shows the 1940s bustle along Macdonald Avenue in that city’s Iron Triangle neighborhood. In its heyday, Macdonald Avenue was lined with clothing stores, banks, nightclubs, restaurants, bars, pool rooms, movie theaters and even upscale fur and perfume shops. By 1960, the neighborhood was 60 percent black.
Meanwhile, the Fillmore District in San Francisco became known as the “Harlem of the West,” boasting a famous music scene that featured such acts as Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Lionel Hampton, Redd Foxx, Charlie Parker, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Miles Davis.
But even as their social, political and economic influence grew, Black Bay Area communities faced challenges. Discrimination in housing persisted for decades. They were pushed out of their historic neighborhoods by urban renewal, gentrification and the increasing cost of living. “White flight” and concerns about “urban blight” also contributed to the decimation of communities. Richmond’s once-thriving Iron Triangle, for example, became a focus for the city’s 1990s reputation for poverty, gangs and record-high homicide rates.
Visitors tour the Oakland Museum of California’s Great Hall during a 2016-17 “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50” exhibition commemorating the Black Panther Party’s founding on Oct. 15, 1966. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group File)
It’s fair to say that some of these historic communities don’t hum like they used to. But enterprising locals are determined to keep alive traditions of art, history and social justice. In Richmond, city and community leaders are pushing for a new renaissance with a Richmond Arts Corridor running along the length of Macdonald Avenue and anchored by venerable institutions.
One such is the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts in the Iron Triangle, which provides free arts education to local children and teens. The nonprofit center speaks to the resilience of the community. It began in a church basement in 1968, spurred by civil rights ideals of racial reconciliation and social change. Even as many businesses abandoned the Iron Triangle, the center thrived in a historic 1928 building, located at 11th Street and Macdonald, the neighborhood’s main intersection.
After a two-year, $16 million renovation in 2011, the center boasts state-of-the-art classrooms, rehearsal spaces and two theaters, where classes run six days a week. Kids can take everything from classical music lessons and ballet to theater and West African drumming. There are group and private classes in jazz, piano, hip-hop and Mexican dance, a nod to the Iron Triangle’s influx of Latino residents.
Alums who have gone on to enjoy successful careers in performance and other professions include Jamar Welch, a hip-hop dancer who has performed with Madonna, Usher, Ginuwine and Timbaland. His playwright mother first brought him to the center at age 9. After he saw a male ballet dancer doing spins in a class, he says, “I knew I wanted to be a dancer.”
After 13 years in Los Angeles, Welch has returned to Richmond and teaches youth hip-hop classes, in between publishing poetry and booking gigs at Yoshi’s jazz club in Oakland and other venues.
“The doors are always open,” Welch says. “I’m like the prodigal son.”
The center, however, has never seen itself as just training future performers. Its faculty members want to help students learn to make their way in the world and become leaders, using art to bring about positive social change.
“It’s teaching the kids life skills,” says Kwesi Anku, the director of student development and training. Ruthie Dineen, the center’s executive director, adds: “Art is culture. Culture is humanity. Humanity is healing.”
The rich cultural history and contributions of Black Americans can be experienced at museums and institutions around the Bay Area. But here are just a few places to explore the neighborhoods where so much of this history began.
Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Park, Richmond
The Visitor Education Center at the Rosie the Riveter national park focuses on the World War II years, which brought so many Black people to Richmond and other Bay Area cities.
The center is housed in a picturesque, brick auxiliary building overlooking San Francisco Bay, next to the restored Ford Assembly building. During the war, the Kaiser shipyards attracted tens of thousands of workers of all races and backgrounds to this then-semi-rural bayside community, quintupling its population and transforming it into an industrial boomtown of more than 90,000.
Joggers are reflected in the window as they run past the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group File)
The visitor center features permanent and temporary exhibits about the city’s wartime industries and its workers, with a particular effort to honor the contributions of Black Americans and women, the so-called Rosie the Riveters. You can see the “Homefront Heroes” documentary here, too. The center is part of the larger national park, which stretches along San Francisco Bay and encompasses portions of the Bay Trail, the Rosie the Riveter Memorial in Marina Park, the historic Kaiser Shipyard No. 3 and the SS Red Oak Victory ship.
Details: Open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily at 1414 Harbour Way South, Suite 3000, Richmond, www.nps.gov/rori/.
Original Rosie the Riveter Beatrice Mitchell, center, talks with her granddaughter Candice Montgomery, left, and Natasha Proctor, of Richmond, during the fifth annual Rosie Rally Home Front Festival at Craneway Pavilion in Richmond in 2019. Rosie the Riveters were honored for their service during World War II during this community event which also included entertainment and costume contests. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
Richmond Art Center
The proposed arts corridor for Macdonald Avenue would start just east of the Civic Center, which is the home of the Richmond Art Center. What began as a community studio workshop in 1936 has expanded over the decades to include classes and ambitious special programs and exhibitions.
Past programs have included a panel discussion last year with children of the Black Panther Party sharing their stories about growing up in a revolutionary movement that changed history. The museum also hosts an annual Art of the African Diaspora exhibition, the longest-running event of its kind in the Bay Area, which will showcase the work of more than 150 artists of African descent beginning Jan. 22.
Details: Open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday at 2540 Barrett Ave. in Richmond; https://richmondartcenter.org/.
In the Black and Sheba Piano Lounge, Fillmore District
The glory days of San Francisco’s Fillmore District as the “Harlem of the West” may be long gone, but some enterprising Black business owners are doing what they can to retain a sense of African-American identity in the neighborhood, a subset of the Western Addition which extends across Geary Boulevard to the edge of tony Pacific Heights.
“We’re just trying to make sure our presence is here,” says Pia Harris, a longtime Western Addition resident and the chief economic development officer at the San Francisco Housing and Development Corporation. “Believe it or not, people don’t believe that Black people live in San Francisco. Yes, we’re still here.”
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Harris’ words echo the plot of “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.” The protagonist of the acclaimed 2019 indie film is Jimmie, a resident of Bayview-Hunters Point, the other historic Black neighborhood where about 22 percent of the city’s Black residents still live. Jimmie regularly travels to the Fillmore to gaze upon a regal-looking Victorian that once belonged to his grandfather but is now occupied by a white couple. The film follows Jimmie as he hatches a plan to take the house back, when it goes up for sale. But, of course, there’s no way a guy like Jimmie can afford even a closet in the gentrifying Fillmore. (That movie is available to stream on Max and Apple TV, by the way.)
Two years ago, Harris opened a nonprofit store, In the Black, which gives Black artisans and designers a brick-and-mortar location from which to sell their unique clothing, jewelry, homewares and beauty products.
The store occupies a light, airy 1,500-square-foot space, just south of Geary Boulevard and below the iconic Fillmore Auditorium. Harris appreciates that the storefront used to be a check-cashing and payday loan business, which used to be “so predatory to our community.” She and her fellow entrepreneurs have turned the space into what they hope will provide opportunities “for community engagement, wealth building and prosperity.”
In 1995, the city established the Historic Fillmore Jazz Preservation District and in 2007 made Yoshi’s, the famed Oakland jazz club, its primary tenant in the Fillmore Heritage Center, a massive-mixed use building that was supposed to revive the neighborhood. But Yoshi’s struggled, and a bankruptcy and a series of other financial disasters involving the city’s Redevelopment Agency led to the club pulling out of San Francisco in 2014.
As the city struggles after a decade to find a viable new tenant, the Sheba Piano Lounge and The Boom Boom Room are trying to keep the Fillmore music tradition alive. The former is a cozy, classy venue that serves up Ethiopian cuisine and jazz music five nights a week. The owner is Netsanet Alemayehu, a longtime restaurateur and the widow of the late impresario Agonafer Shiferaw, who ran Fillmore’s famed Rasselas Jazz Club from 1986 to 2013. If you’re lucky, you can get seats on a sofa near the fireplace, tuck into spicy African lentils and admire the decor, which feels inspired by an ancient Ethiopian palace.
Venture eight miles south to Bayview-Hunters Point, and you’ll find several Black-owned businesses trying to maintain a beachhead there, as the neighborhood’s blocks of classic, San Francisco-style houses become targets for affluent professionals. Some of the best soul food you’ll find in the Bay Area is served at Social Gumbo, which opened in 2023. Chef Dontaye Ball grew up eating gumbo at his grandmother’s house in the Fillmore, and his version brims with chicken, andouille and okra.
Details: In the Black is open Wednesday-Sunday, with varying afternoon and early evening hours, at 1567 Fillmore St. in San Francisco; https://intheblackshop.com. Sheba Piano Lounge opens at 5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday — the music starts at 7:30 p.m. — at 1419 Fillmore St.; www.shebapianolounge.com. And Social Gumbo is open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday at 5176 Third St.; www.gumbosocial.com.
