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Coming to the Fillmore
And you brought this philosophy to San Francisco?
I grew up with it. I think I verbalized it and crystallized it, obviously, since I've been in San Francisco.
When did you come to San Francisco?
I came to San Francisco when I got drafted in the army. I was in college in Southern California, and I didn't like the way I was treated on the baseball team in my second year there, and I quit college. I was going to try to sign a pro contract and play ball, you know. In those days if you had enough money for a car when you got a bonus, you were lucky. And before I could get signed I got drafted in the army. Why? Because I quit college, you know? Wasn't the smartest thing I ever done. And so I got out of the army I went to Colorado and then Korea. And after I came back from Korea, I came back and I was exited out of the army, honorably, in Fort Lewis, Washington. So, I had to fly this way.
So, my flight was going to San Francisco and I had a buddy that I had met in the army who was a graduate student at S.F. State. He had sent me newspapers from the campus. Literary magazines and newspapers that the students had put out. And the kind of stuff that was in it made me really consider that school. And I came here to see him. I was supposed to catch a flight later that day to go home. I stayed. Haight Ashbury was jumping off. You know, this was 1967. Flower child, the Black Panther party: everything was happening.
I stayed for thirty days, kind of commuted back and forth between here and L.A. for six months. So, I really moved here in sixty-seven, but I was permanently here by February of sixty-eight and have been here ever since. Came here to go back to school. The idea was that I was going to go to school and then go back home to LA, and I just never left.
What was it that first made you want to get involved in the Fillmore community?
Well, the conditions that existed in this country at that time was that if you weren't active in something, something was wrong with you somewhere. That's the way I thought, and quite frankly still do. Especially if you were young. There was a lot to be dissatisfied. Still is, which kind of makes me wonder what's the problem with activism? Just as an aside, I think our country has gotten the system so down now that it's so hard for us to live. It takes so much money and so much day in and day out hustle, that it really takes away from our reflective time. Between all of the stuff we've got. We do a lot of communicating with the blogs and all of that and all of the technology. But we don't reflect much anymore. We don't think about things. There is much difference between the four or five of us talking on a blog, then there is for us to sit down in a room like this and confront each other's ideas and try to get to what's right and what's wrong, what ought we to be doing? And I think that the system has effectively removed that out of our lives, and I think that's why there is not the activism there was.
But anyway, I end up in Fillmore. I was going to San Francisco State. I was in the BSU: Black Student Union. One of the things that the BSU required was that if you were in the BSU, we were very critical of the Ivory Tower-type existence of universities where they were disassociated from real life, especially from inner city life, from the lives of African Americans and other people of color. We didn't want to be those kinds of students.
If we grew up to be professionals or even academics we didn't want to be those kind of people. Because we thought that a university with all of its research and all of its resources should be benefiting people who are hurting, people who are suffering, in its communities certainly. So what we did, is we assigned people to various campus activities and departments as well as assigning people to communities to work.
Now some of that I think kind of came out because we were also at those times studying things like the Cultural Revolution of China and quite frankly, there was a lot of that that we liked. We thought there was a problem with culture that was manufactured but had no connection with the people. As I've gotten older I think there may be some place for experimentation, certainly.
So that was why people were assigned. I don't know why. I think we may have thought that we were like thought police, but I don't think that it worked out that way. But I always jokingly make the comment, the contrast, that Danny Glover, who was a member of the BSU at that time, was assigned to the art department, the drama department. I was assigned to the Fillmore.
Was that assignment just a coincidence?
Well, that's where they told me to go, the leadership, and so I went. I've always said a switch in assignments and who knows? You might not be talking to me; you might be talking to Danny Glover about his work in the Fillmore all these years. And I would be rich and famous. If I could have acted. I don't know if I could act, but I tried once, it didn't work.
Anyway, so I went there. I had worked in South Park. I don't know if any of you know where South Park is, but it's a really beautiful little community. It circles a little park down around Second off of Bryant, between Bryant and maybe Brannan. On Second street, but from Second to Third or something like that. Second to First, rather. When I was at state college in sixty-eight, sixty-nine, it was black. It was for many years, it was an African-American community. Some Samoans, but predominantly African-American. Like most places in San Francisco that were once African-American, it no longer is. One of my friends who is deceased now said: "You know what? One day white people are going to come through here. They are going to buy these places up and rehab them and they are ultimately going to put in some gates and some gaslights and they may even put some horse drawn carriages through there, because it's just a beautiful little place."
One summer, I taught there. They would have summer programs and we would go from BSU into these programs and teach and work with the kids during the summer. And so I did that for one summer and I think I worked in maybe what they call Dogpatch, which used to be in Little Hollywood. Dogpatch, that used to be an African-American community too, by the way. So many. So many there used to be. Then I ended up in the Fillmore community. I was invited to a meeting one night, a WACO meeting and I started going to Western Addition community organizations. All the organizations in the Fillmore coming together. I started going to those meetings. They did a lot of things. They worked with every issue in the community. But the big issue that overwhelmed them and everything that they were doing at that time was redevelopment.
I got interested in that and then WAPAC was formed and I went to the first big meeting to vote on would be on the board. I didn't go back for a while and then I went back a few years later and ended up on the board and everything else is history, which we can get into.
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