CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

New Bio of Jessica Mitford Recalls Fine Old Conflict Over Civil Rights 

Jessica Mitford appearing on the British talk show After Dark on 20 August 1988.

During World War II, the shipyard workforce in Richmond, CA. numbered one hundred thousand—and 20 percent was non-white.  By 1945, Richmond had the largest public housing program in the nation, with seventy-three thousand residents. Eighty percent of Richmond’s black residents lived in these hastily constructed units but in racially segregated fashion.

As a “thank you” for their service building ships to defeat fascism in Germany and Japan, Richmond’s fourteen thousand African Americans became victims of renewed housing and job discrimination and wholesale displacement efforts, after the war.

The city’s federally funded projects became a major postwar battle- ground because of decisions made by the powerful, all-white Richmond Housing Authority (RHA). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, nonwhite public housing tenants were showered with eviction notices warning that their apartment buildings were about to be torn down. 

The RHA’s demolition plans were protested by the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) because they were clearly designed to drive African Americans out of town. Black tenants responded by signing petitions and attending mass meetings, picketing the RHA, and organizing rent strikes, all of which slowed the process. Nevertheless, by 1953, all seventeen of the public housing projects near Richmond harbor had been dismantled. 

Private housing options in the city were far more limited for blacks than whites, as navy veteran and American Legion post vice-commander Wilbur Gary discovered. He tried to move his wife, Borece, and their seven children from the Harbor Gate wartime housing project when it was scheduled for destruction. Their new home, purchased through a black real estate agent, was located at 2821 Brook Way in a subdivision of eight hundred single-family homes called Rollingwood.........

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