potrero view

January 2012

Black Population Continues to Dwindle

Katrina Schwartz

Predominately relegated to the City’s Southside, plagued by violence and environmental justice issues, and suffering from a lack of cultural identity, San Francisco’s black community is ailing.   In 2005 then Mayor Gavin Newsom convened the San Francisco African-American Outmigration Taskforce, with a mandate to study outmigration trends and identify ways to bolster the City’s dwindling black population.  The taskforce, composed of civic-minded citizens, academics, and civil servants, among others, released a series of findings, including that the unemployment rate among African-Americans tended to be more than twice that of non-African-Americans; the number of African-American-owned businesses had fallen dramatically; and the population of very low-income African-American households in San Francisco jumped from just over half in 1990 to more than two-thirds in 2005.

The taskforce recommended that existing affordable housing be stabilized and improved, and that more affordable housing be built.  It called for improved infrastructure to support pre-kindergarten through college opportunities for African-American students, adoption of strategies that increase employment opportunities in African-American communities and more communication between police, community members and the criminal justice system.   The report was released in 2009, and promptly shelved.  

The University of San Francisco (USF) attempted to revive the issue this fall.  “The State of Black San Francisco” consisted of a panel of business, academic, activist and spiritual advocates discussing African-American outmigration.  Newsom’s taskforce based its findings on 2005 census data that showed a decrease in African-Americans since the 1970s.  The 2010 census paints an even bleaker picture. In the last decade the City’s African-American population shrank by more than 22 percent.  Simultaneously, the Asian-American and Latino populations grew by 11 percent, and the European-American population decreased by 12.5 percent. Black San Franciscans now make up less than six percent of the City’s population.   

The USF panelists agreed that African-Americans’ struggle for equality and improved quality of life resonates with San Francisco’s values. “The character of this City, where we are deeply motivated toward equality, expanding on notions of freedom, figuring out how to do democratic community better…All of those goals and objectives and themes are deeply resonant with the African-American experience, and in fact have been supported historically since the founding of San Francisco by the African-American experience,” claimed Rhonda McGee, a taskforce member and USF professor of law. “But the bottom line is who we are as a City is, in fact in ways we don’t acknowledge, deeply infused with the African-American experience. And we lose our soul when we lose that component of who we are,” she finished. McGee’s statement was met with murmurs of agreement from the crowd and the other panelists.

McGee noted that at its peak in the 1970s, blacks represented almost 14 percent of the City’s population. Many African-Americans worked in the Hunters Point Shipyard, or in Bayview’s “Butcher Town.”  After the shipyard was shuttered, and tanneries and meat processing industries closed, people left in search of other job opportunities.  In the first decade of the twenty-first century the flight of working class African-Americans in the 1980s and 1990s was replicated by middle- and upper-income black families, who left San Francisco seeking affordable housing and better schools.

“The traditional poverty rate is pretty meaningless in San Francisco. No one can survive even moderately on the poverty rate anywhere, but especially not in San Francisco,” explained N’Tanya Lee, the former executive director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, an organization that works to improve educational opportunities for working class families.  Lee advocated for adoption of the “self-sufficiency wage,” which measures how much money people need to live independently without public assistance in a given geographical area. “What’s significant is that people who make ‘middle class’ wages, are poor in San Francisco,” she said.

“As someone who has adopted San Francisco as my home, I’m upset. The tone of conversations about outmigration upsets me because we aren’t upset enough,” said Lee. “The state of black children in our education system is one of many, many, many indicators of how our City has failed our community.”  According to Lee, San Francisco has the worst test scores for black students of any urban school system in California.  Only half of African-American students graduate from high school; of those who do, only 20 percent have the credits that would allow them to attend a University of California or state college institution. Lee pointed out that this failure to educate black students prevents them from becoming powerful leaders of their generation and for the City.

“The bleakness is the rule, the good moments are the exceptions. And that’s the tragedy of the black experience in San Francisco,” lamented James Taylor, USF’s Politics Department chair.  “I’m not talking about that we haven’t had a Kamala Harris, but I’m talking about in terms of the quotidian, ordinary, pedestrian experience of ordinary black folk, it’s more like the Tenderloin than it is like City Hall.”  Taylor, who was asked to speak about the power of the black vote in San Francisco politics, was clearly upset. According to the academics, issues important to African-Americans have remained constant and unaddressed since the 1940s, including affordable housing, residential segregation, job discrimination, educational policy, and police brutality, all of which were identified in the 2009 taskforce report as meriting municipal attention.

Taylor was dismayed that one of the most defining moments in the African- American experience in San Francisco is Justin Herman’s Redevelopment Agency and the urban renewal projects intended to “improve” conditions in the City’s “slums.”  The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association catalogued this history of redevelopment and forced migration in an article entitled, “Fifty Years of Redevelopment: Lessons for the Future.” Redevelopment activities mid-century last displaced more than 4,000 African-Americans from their homes in the Western Addition and Fillmore Districts. After removing African-Americans from their “blighted” houses, the Redevelopment Agency set aside a percentage of those Victorians for restoration and eventual habitation by wealthier, European-American families.  “When you talk about the black experience…it is bleak. And it’s been bleak for 160 years,” Taylor emphatically stated.

“When you treat a people as if they don’t exist, you have robbed them of the most important component of being part of the human family,” began Reverend Malcolm Bird, pastor of the historic AME Zion Church in the Western Addition, which was established by slaves fleeing west in 1852. “By renaming the Western Addition “NoPa,” real estate investors, individuals in government and potential stakeholders robbed this community of its identity.”  When Bird arrived in San Francisco from New York City three years ago he thought his days of marching for equality were over.  He was surprised to find San Francisco’s black community in such dire straights. His congregation has dwindled from its peak of 1,100 in 1903 to just 193 today.

“It’s also part of a long-term intentional project to rid major cities of their black and poor populations,” Taylor said sadly. “This is a master plan. And when Truman said in 1949, ‘go redevelop,’ instead of them making it so that everyone could participate and partake of the fruits of this idea, some people decided, like they are doing right now, let’s eat all the cake and let them fight over some crumbs.”

In the end the USF panelists agreed that San Francisco’s African-American community has felt systematically marginalized, neglected, forgotten and ignored for decades, with little hope that the City will change.

 

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