Refinery Town Page 4
Community and labor campaigners for the Garys also pressured the Richmond city council to ban segregation in local public housing. A special council session heard complaints about housing, joblessness, and other problems facing the city’s African Americans. A contemporary survey of private businesses in Richmond showed that 30 percent refused to employ blacks at all; another 40 percent would only consider them for menial jobs.21 Richmond’s own exclusionary hiring practices came under fire too. At the time it had no nonwhite firefighters and only two black police officers.
A COMMUNITY FOR ALL?
African Americans became the majority of homeowners in Parchester Village, a four-hundred-unit development of single-family homes constructed in 1950 by Fred Parr, a white real estate developer. Now located within the Richmond city limits, this neighborhood was built in a then unincorporated area between the Standard Oil refinery and the old Giant Powder Company site. It was marketed as a “community for all Americans” but it was far from downtown and lacked public services. Few whites bought homes and moved in after they discovered it was racially mixed.
Even when African Americans could find better postwar housing, in a place like Parchester Village (where all the streets were named after prominent African American ministers and historical figures), further plant shutdowns put good union jobs beyond their reach. In the mid-1950s, Ford decided to relocate its Richmond production to a new plant in Milpitas, a San Jose suburb fifty miles away. As Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute writes: “The United Auto Workers negotiated an agreement with Ford permitting all Richmond workers to transfer, with their seniority rights intact. White workers were able to take advantage of this agreement, because inexpensive single-family home subdivisions were blossoming in the Milpitas area. Black workers, however, could not, because these subdivisions were open to whites only.”22 Community representatives urged Ford management in Detroit to address the housing needs of Richmond African Americans who might want to transfer. The company responded that “it was only interested in building automobiles” and “unconcerned with workers’ housing problems.”
Jobs and housing were still big civil rights issues when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against racial discrimination before a large crowd in the Richmond Auditorium in 1963. By the mid-sixties there was mounting racial tension at Richmond High School between black and white students. At the time, the latter still outnumbered the former by two to one. In March 1966, a school fight spilled out into the streets, resulting in rock-throwing and vandalism along Macdonald Avenue, as African American students headed home to their respective neighborhoods on the north and south sides of the city. “Emotions ran so high that Richmond’s police chief issued an order to ‘shoot all looters,’ an action approved and defended by many citizens,” according to Lillian Rubin, a UC-Berkeley sociologist and resident of the area.23 A dusk to dawn curfew was imposed and additional police were mobilized and deployed from surrounding communities.
Forty Richmond religious leaders—including ministers, priests, and rabbis—urged law enforcement restraint. In an open letter, they called for greater sensitivity to “the underlying causes of lawlessness and tensions,” which included African American exclusion from better housing, education, and employment. Two years later, however, in 1968, National Guard troops were deployed in Richmond during three days of rioting after a white reserve police officer shot and badly wounded an unarmed black fifteen-year-old. Retail outlets along Macdonald Avenue were the target of looting and fire-bombing. In its World War II heyday and even into the 1950s, the city’s main thoroughfare had banks, restaurants, theaters, hotels, chain stores like Macy’s and J. C. Penney, smaller shops, and a bowling alley. But what was left of Richmond’s once-vibrant business district in the late 1960s never recovered from this second uprising and its aftermath.
Downtown businesses that reopened soon faced fatal competition from the city’s shiny new Hilltop Mall. Built in the early 1970s on the site of a former Standard Oil storage tank farm, the mall offered chain store shopping far from the newly perceived dangers of downtown Richmond. Its one hundred acres lay in close proximity to new residential development along the corridor of Interstate 80, on the safe, secure, predominantly white outskirts of the city.24 The project was sold to the city council and the Richmond Planning Commission as a big job creator. Both rejected a competing plan for downtown renewal favored by the Richmond Redevelopment Agency.
Chevron was positively “giddy over the opportunity to jump into the real estate game,” planning at the time to build more than a thousand luxury housing units. “The idea,” explained Chevron spokesman Robert Brooks, “is to have a self-contained community where people can live, work, and play without leaving Hilltop.” For many residents, even Hilltop wasn’t far enough away from downtown. Working-class whites left Richmond in growing numbers for more racially homogenous communities like San Pablo, El Sobrante, and Pinole. In November 1968, San Pablo gave Alabama governor George Wallace his greatest presidential-campaign support anywhere in California—21.7 percent of the vote. Support for Wallace in Pinole and El Sobrante wasn’t far behind at 19.1 and 15.1 percent respectively.
RADICAL RICHMOND
While this political polarization was occurring, the same radical currents flowing through the rest of the Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s also affected Richmond. The Bay Area Revolutionary Union (RU), a group created by students opposed to the Vietnam War, sent “cadre” to Richmond because its leader, the son of a prominent East Bay judge, much admired its “proletarian character.” “When I was at Berkeley High,” RU founder Bob Avakian recalls, “people would say, ‘Richmond High! Even the white guys are tough over there.’” In his memoir From Ike to Mao and Beyond, Avakian describes how Richmond young people aiding the United Farm Workers “went down to the local Safeway, which was being boycotted by the union, and trashed it,” resulting in “dozens of them being busted.” In October 1969, RU members worked with local Black Panthers to organize a Richmond High School walkout timed to coincide with a national campus “moratorium” against the Vietnam War.
Avakian describes this “very militant demonstration” as “one of the high points of our work in Richmond.” It did not lead to any local electoral engagement, however, a path to “state power” rejected by the RU as insufficiently revolutionary. The Richmond branch of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) had more indigenous roots and greater staying power. The BPP did its first local organizing in the spring of 1967, just six months after the party’s founding in Oakland. The Panthers soon became nationally known for their public display of loaded weapons during a lobbying visit to the California State Capitol in Sacramento when Ronald Reagan was governor. The BPP delegation was protesting a bill that soon restricted open gun-toting, a dramatic form of street theater premiered in North Richmond in late April 1967.
Earlier that same month, North Richmond resident Denzil Dowell, a twenty-two-year-old construction worker, was fatally shot by a deputy sheriff while allegedly fleeing a burglary. In a sequence of events still familiar in major US cities nearly fifty years later, Dowell’s death was quickly deemed “justifiable homicide” by the authorities. “I believe the police murdered my son,” his mother told the Panthers. Seeing an opportunity to organize against police brutality, the Panthers called for a street rally at the corner of Third and Chesley in North Richmond. Fifteen BPP activists showed up in their signature black berets and leather jackets, armed with twelve-gauge shotguns, M1 rifles, and various sidearms.
In its prime, the BPP operated first in a church on Bissell Avenue and then out of a North Richmond home that functioned as a community center. There, twenty-five to forty-five kids were fed every day as part of the free breakfast program that was an organizational hallmark of the Panthers everywhere. Bobby Bowens, a new Panther recruit and recently returned military veteran, helped organize the free distribution of twenty-five hundred pairs of shoes to people in need. Panther volunteers did testing, door-to
-door, for sickle cell anemia and hypertension. They also started a “liberation school” that held classes on Saturdays, because, as Panther Bill Jennings recalls, “African American history was just not taught in Contra Costa County public schools.”25
In 1969, after heavy rain, much of North Richmond’s one and a half square miles was badly flooded. Panther volunteers waded through its streets to help people stranded at home and on their front porches reach a Red Cross evacuation center. This latest misery, inflicted on an unincorporated residential area long neglected by local and county officials, illustrated why, in the Panthers’ view, North Richmond needed to become an independent city. Neighborhood people would then be in “control of their own police force, their own school system, and they will have the power to tax the businesses in the area, like Standard Oil.”26 To this end, the party registered hundreds of new voters to insure that residents could sign petitions, vote on ballot measures, and serve on what would otherwise be all-white juries. In four cities—Richmond, Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley—the party gathered signatures to trigger a citywide vote on “community control of the police.”
As BPP cofounder Bobby Seale described this plan forty-five years later, members of an elected civilian review board would investigate shootings by officers, reports of unnecessary force, and other misconduct allegations instead of leaving that task to the police themselves and county prosecutors. But only in Berkeley did this controversial plan even make it onto the ballot.27 In Richmond, local Panther activity petered out, as the national organization splintered and fell victim to widespread police repression. Other black activists, like the late Fred Jackson—whose name now adorns North Richmond’s main street—continued the work of advocating for the poor, the imprisoned, and those unfairly treated by the police.
To this day, North Richmond remains a troubled, crime-ridden, unincorporated neighborhood of thirty-seven hundred. It has no municipal voting rights and even less community control over the police than residents of Richmond (which also lacks the authority to run its own public schools or set property tax rates for Chevron). North Richmond law enforcement is still handled—with inadequate staffing and many unsolved homicides—by the county sheriff, based in Martinez, twenty miles away.28
In Richmond overall, “liberal coalition politics” emerged in the 1960s. This was shaped, according to Shirley Ann Moore, by “the optimism of the civil rights movement and a rising tide of Democratic voter registration.” The city’s white political establishment was challenged by George Livingston, a thirty-one-year-old shipyard worker and Richmond Planning Commission member, and lawyer George Carroll, a local NAACP leader. Both won city council seats, and in 1964, the council unanimously chose Carroll to be Richmond’s mayor, the first black person to hold that office.
With Democrats controlling the city council after 1963 and Republicans on the run, it appeared, writes Moore, “that black Richmondites had finally won a place on the civic agenda and would now be in a position to shape it.” In other cities with large minority populations, sixties social movements and subsequent community organizing led to what Pierre Clavel calls “progressive urban politics.” Insurgent Democrats in Gary, Cleveland, Chicago, Hartford, and other cities challenged machine politicians. After they gained city hall influence, as Clavel describes in several books, “these cities experimented with radically new forms of participation, public enterprise, property regulation, service structure, and neighborhood involvement. Many of their programs had a populist tone reminiscent of the great democratizing movements around the turn of the century.”29
This was not the political trajectory of Richmond, despite African Americans there achieving near majority status by 1980. By the turn of the century, Richmond did have a black mayor (and city manager) of its own, every department head in the city was black, and so was the city council majority. “But, unfortunately, it turned out to be a bust,” one community leader told me.30 A corporate-backed African American political machine, aligned with conservative, self-serving, and predominantly white police and firefighter unions, dominated city government. Cronyism, corruption, and bureaucratic incompetence became deeply entrenched and much intertwined. “The city was pretty much run by the business interests Chevron cultivated,” says Tom Butt, a liberal reformer from Point Richmond first elected to the council in 1995. “That was the reality of it.”
STRIKING BIG OIL AGAIN
After the strike setbacks of 1948, oil workers in Richmond and other refinery towns had to confront another reality—namely that their “industry had learned how to operate, at least to a partial extent, with the use of supervisors, contractors, and other non-union personnel.”31 Just setting up a picket line no longer meant that an oil refinery would be shut down. So, in 1969, the Richmond refinery union then known as Local 1-561 of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW) tried a different approach when its members struck for a new contract.
Management responded, like it did twenty years before, by getting a court order that severely limited worker picketing. G. T. (“Jake”) Jacobs, the elected leader of the local, issued a call for outside help from UC-Berkeley, San Francisco State, and other local campuses, an overture that was controversial with some fellow officers and members. Radical students from Berkeley and other Bay Area campuses trooped to Richmond to join oil worker picket lines. The national office of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) expressed its solidarity by declaring a nationwide boycott of Standard Oil. The strikers were featured in publications like the Guardian and New Left Notes. Jacobs hailed this worker-student fraternization as “the dawning of a new era.”
Four years later, OCAW’s daring cultivation of new allies became the hallmark of its nationwide strike against Shell Oil. In January 1973, four thousand Shell workers walked out because their employer would not agree to workplace health and safety committees, newly created in the rest of the industry. With help from other unions and consumer organizations, the strikers called for a nationwide boycott of Shell products. Virtually all the nation’s environmental groups backed the struggle, which generated much favorable publicity about the connection between worker and community exposure to the same refinery hazards.
Tony Mazzocchi, the visionary labor environmentalist who led the Shell strike, continued to promote this “blue-green alliance” in the 1980s and 1990s. Among OCAW-represented refinery workers, Mazzocchi recruited and trained a national network of health and safety coordinators. At Chevron, local union activists were encouraged to work, whenever possible, with the environmental justice movement, led in Richmond by the West County Toxics Coalition (WCTC). As Antonia Juhasz recounts in The Tyranny of Oil, lifelong resident Henry Clark helped form the WCTC in 1986. Its goal, Clark told her, was to “get Chevron to invest their profits in pollution prevention equipment and to reduce its impact on our community. There’s asthma in our community, skin rashes, there’s cancer, and this company makes a profit at our expense.”32
In its public jousting with Chevron, the Toxics Coalition got the company to admit it would “like nothing better than massive buffer zones,” as opposed to increasingly restive downwind neighbors in North Richmond, Parchester Village, and the Iron Triangle section of the city (so named for its rail lines on three sides). But refinery spokesperson Hal Holt was fatalistic about the possibility of improving “process safety,” as it is called today. “We’re working in an industry that has a lot of machinery, a lot of people,” he explained. “Occasionally, machines break down, and occasionally people make mistakes.”33
In 1988, Henry Clark ran for Chevron’s board of directors at a shareholders meeting in San Francisco. Clark’s campaign enabled him to press WCTW’s demand for direct negotiations between the company and the community on health and safety issues in Richmond.34 “We don’t negotiate with community groups,” Holt responded. “That’s not what we do. There are duly constituted agencies that represent the public, and that’s who we deal with.”35
Over the years, those “du
ly constituted agencies” had their hands full at Chevron in Richmond. From 1989 to 1995, Juhasz notes, “there were more than three hundred reported accidents at the refinery, including major fires, spills, leaks, explosions, toxic gas releases, flaring, and air contamination.” In her muckraking account of Big Oil misbehavior, Juhasz also describes several local mishaps that gave our August 2012 fire the feeling of déjà vu all over again. In March 1999, a leaking valve installed more than thirty years before ignited a massive explosion, releasing a huge plume of sulfur dioxide smoke.
Ten thousand residents were told to remain inside for several hours, while those in the closest neighborhoods were evacuated. A column of thick, acrid, foul-smelling smoke rose high in the air, cloaked the refinery and then began to drift slowly to the southeast. . . . Hundreds of people flooded local hospitals complaining of breathing difficulties and vomiting.36
Eight years later, in January 2007, the refinery erupted again with a boom that could be heard and flames that could be seen all the way across the bay in San Francisco. The cause this time was a leaking corroded pipe that, investigators later found, should have been replaced a decade earlier. Two workers were injured and “the five alarm fire burned for nine hours. . . . Almost three thousand people in nearby neighborhoods received phone calls instructing them to stay inside with their doors and windows shut to avoid breathing the toxic fumes.”37
After its very similar August 2012 event, Chevron was clearly on the defensive, dealing with multiple investigative agencies, pesky reporters, and angry neighbors. Its past Clean Air and Environmental Protection Act violations and troubling Cal-OSHA inspection results added up to quite a record of California recidivism. In Richmond alone, previous fires and explosions had resulted in $877,000 worth of penalties for “willfully failing to provide protective equipment for employees,” eight of whom were injured, along with local firefighters. Between 1988 and 1999, the company paid $2.6 million to settle litigation over toxic emissions or wastewater releases, such as its practice of bypassing the Richmond refinery’s wastewater treatment system and dumping directly into San Pablo Bay, a practice long protested by Greenpeace.