Bigotry in The Suburban Wall That Was and Is San Leandro

(Image credit: Banksy)

In the midst of all the discussions taking place about the problems facing San Leandro in the here and now regarding racism and policing, I think it's important we take a step back to look at part of how that happened.

Well, it was on purpose. See, San Leandro was, as far back as the early 1900's, a sundown town. Look through the entry for our city by Bay Area historian, James W. Loewen. His holistic work is available here.

What is a sundown town, you ask? Sundown towns, occasionally known as sunset towns or gray towns, is an all-White municipality or neighborhood in the United States that practices a form of racial segregation by excluding non-Whites. This is usually accomplished via some combination of discriminatory laws, intimidation, and violence. As a result, entire sundown counties and sundown suburbs were also created by the same process. The term originally came from signs posted that demanded Black people, and sometimes other racial minority groups, had to leave town by sundown. These signs typically expressed this using slurs and violent language.

Notably, discriminatory policies and actions distinguished sundown towns from towns that had no Black residents for other racism-driven reasons. Historically, towns have been confirmed as sundown towns by newspaper articles, county histories, and Works Progress Administration files, often corroborated by tax or U.S. Census records showing an absence of Black people or sharp drop in the Black population between two censuses.

San Leandro was one such place. In fact, it had such a strong reputation as a hotbed of White supremacy that it was often known as "Klan Leandro" according to many. (Cross burnings continued in the city until as recently as 1989!) Particularly the Black people in neighboring Oakland, who experienced the racist hostility from our city firsthand.

Some of you may be familiar with a short documentary that aired in 1971 entitled, "The Suburban Wall." If you aren't, I encourage you to watch it and see just what kind of prejudice, discrimination, hostility, and even violence, that San Leandro engaged in to keep Black people out. In 1960 the city was over 99% White. In 1970, the city was still over 86% White. To watch the documentary, you can visit here.

There was also a follow-up documentary in 1980 showing how these practices, such as restrictive covenants, still continued to exist, and notable San Leandro resident Brian Copeland wrote about his experiences from this period. You can check out his work, with links to the documentaries and writings, at his website.

A related factor in this was a technique known as redlining. What is redlining? Put simply, it's racism through the systematic denial of various services by federal government agencies, local governments as well as the private sector either directly or through the selective raising of prices, and even the denial of providing services to certain populations at any price. KQED has an explainer available here. You can also learn more here and also here.

If you look at a report by the Haas Institute, you can see a detailed discussion of how redlining, alongside other discriminatory, prejudicial, violent, and racist tactics related to housing (among other things) were used across the Bay Area, including San Leandro. A copy of the report is available for viewing here.

It was from this history that many of the xenophobic attitudes you find among today's residents became coded into our local lexicon. Throwaway comments about how, "we're not like those people in Oakland," or "all those homeless and the people setting off fireworks need to go back where they belong." Few residents trafficking in these comments even realize the history of violent, systemic racism behind them.

In fact, there is no better example of our ignorance than the city's official slogan, "Proud Of Our Past, Looking To the Future."

Proud of what past? Looking to what future? And for whom?

There is a direct connection between the history of racism in San Leandro and the NIMBY protests against expanding affordable housing, including multi-unit apartments, and the "concerns" by residents of the "changing character" of their neighborhoods. In fact, our elected officials' decision to spend city resources lobbying for an increased property transfer tax on prospective homeowners in our city is just one facet of a larger system that was designed to keep non-White people out as much as possible.

Meanwhile, we're continuing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on red light cameras that do not increase road safety, let alone bleed enough revenue from residents to cover their operating costs, particularly those too poor to fight those tickets in court. We're continuing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a Bearcat tank, tear gas, flash bangs, unnecessary gun range upgrades, and six-figure salaries for police officers alongside six-figure settlements for their cases of murder, harassment, assault, and abuse against innocent Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color.

And even then, with all of their gear and tech and weaponry and propensity for violence, even as they were there on the scene, SLPD was unable to protect our community from a burst of destruction and looting by individuals who weren't even associated with peaceful local and nationwide protests against racist police brutality.

All this for SLPD to clear fewer crimes despite overall stagnant levels of criminal activity for the past decade or more and a department budget that has since ballooned to over $42 million.

Yet, we need another calculated tax imposed on the residents least able to afford it? That this tax, which is so reminiscent of how we became "The Suburban Wall" of White supremacy, is being pushed under the guise of fiscal responsibility during this time of a new Great Depression is as embarrassingly laughable as it is transparently false. For more information about the tax, a good article to start with is available here.

See, in San Leandro, we've always been able to find a reason to make it harder for non-White people to live here with seemingly benign justifications that ignore our shameful history as much as our unjust present. We've always been able to rationalize inequity and, when necessary, blame the victims of oppression instead of holding up a mirror to our worst selves. Whether we're talking about the millions of dollars in federal housing and property investment we received under the FHA for development that grew into immensely profitable real estate for those White families allowed to live here under the auspices of de facto segregation, or the purposeful creation of a culture of racist exclusion that still resonates today in every neighborhood from Estudillo Estates to Washington Manor.

That is the intersection of racism, policing, and avarice that needs to be understood through a critical lens grounded in the context of our history.

And this is just one chapter, in the story of one city, tucked in the corner of one state, among an entire nation literally built on the backs of slave labor, genocide, and bigotry. There is so much more. The foundations of our nation are nearly beyond the point of repair - they decayed and rotted away through neglect long ago, and the current crisis we are facing is the result of that failure to reckon with the choices we made.

I hope this post proves useful as we try and work together as a community of neighbors to rebuild a more perfect union, one that redresses longstanding grievances and, yes, accepts that we need to provide reparations to those we harmed.

Truth and reconciliation is the only way forward. There is a spark of the divine, of stardust and light, that lives within us. We have tried to bury it. We tried to hide from it. We even tried to hide that it also existed within others. But it cannot be buried. It will not stay hidden. People will remember the lovingkindness that is our heart and soul, and we will return to our better selves. We will bend the arc of time towards justice, inch by painful inch if we must.

Until, one day, maybe even when my children or grandchildren are still alive to see it, there will truly, finally, be life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.

Thank you, and take care.