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Do you think that there are any positive things that came out of redevelopment, if there are any at all?
That's a question that's come up, and one that I pondered, and I don't want to just be cavalier, but I'll be real honest: the most I can say is they built some nice buildings. I don't know how functional they are for a community, for fostering community. And I don't want to be unduly harsh, I'm not one of those people that says "everything's bad." Because I don't believe that. I believe we got some challenges in our community, I think we have challenges as African-Americans, but baby, there's been some great changes and great improvement and some great strides made. There needs to be more. And we've done a lot of great things socially. We've fallen down horribly in terms of economic parity and those kind of things. But, when you destroy a culture and a way of life, it really doesn't matter much what else you've done. If it's good, it ain't near about good enough to justify what was destroyed. To destroy a situation where you could go up on the street and if you stand there long enough, baby, on Fillmore Street, at a certain intersection, if you stay long enough, you looking for somebody, they're pretty much going to cross that intersection before the day is over. Because, it's hard to go to bed without going up to see what's going on on Fillmore. When you get up on Saturday morning, and you go up on the street, and everybody's out shopping and stopping and talking and finding out what's going on, that's how you build community. Part of this whole resistance to redevelopment got started is because we had a community with life, and people started talking, and I'll run into Courtney and say, "Hey, wait a minute." You know, I'll start telling you something my landlord is doing, you say, "Wait a minute, my landlord did the same thing to me," and you're walking by and you say, "Wait a minute, what did you just say?" Uh oh. Now you got a problem, before long you're going to have a movement going. There's no gathering places anymore.
When you run almost the entire African-American community out of town, and if others have been able to stay, some who were not that distant from us—economically, then, but have improved—and we've had to leave; when you go from about seventeen percent, roughly, of the population when I got here, to some say six, and I've seen numbers as low as four percent, left here; when you end up with a community that went from a community that was achieving great strides through education—education in my house was revered. Here's what I grew up hearing, and you talk to any African-American my age, I bet you eight out of ten of them will tell you they heard this growing up: "Boy, or girl, get yourself a good education, that's the one thing the white man can't take away from you." I grew up on that. To, now, in the latest statistics that came out, African-American students in San Francisco are the lowest achieving in the state of California. And I say that's because redevelopment in this community was more devastating than it was in any other black community in California. The achievements are so low that in language arts, reading and all that stuff, we not only didn't make the minimum of standard, students who have English as a second language scored higher than African-Americans did. Immigrant children scored higher in language than we did. And, in math, in math, we scored so low that right above us—we were the lowest achieving ones again, didn't make the minimum standard—but right above us, who scored higher in math than African-American children in the San Francisco unified school district, were special ed. children. And I got statistics in my bag at home to prove it. The California Legislative Black Caucus just did a study of the seven largest metropolitan areas in California, and in every economic category, San Francisco and Oakland scored dead last. Either San Francisco was last, or Oakland was last, and when Oakland was last San Francisco was next to last, so when San Francisco was last, Oakland was last, except in one category, and in that category, they tied for last. Economically. And it's the devastation. Once again, I believe that started with redevelopment.
I think you also need to know that redevelopment, factor into that Jim Jones, because a great majority of those people that died in Guyana were from the Fillmore. When you factor in those things, what that did also was probably destroy the most politically progressive community perhaps in the United States. Maybe some place in Harlem, but I'm not sure. Just as only Adam Clayton Powell—who you all need to look up, because I know you don't know who he is, but he's a former congressman—just as only Adam Clayton Powell—and he was also the pastor of a Abyssinian Baptist church in Harlem, one of the oldest and most historic black churches in America—just as he could only be elected in Harlem, because he did not apologize for being black way back then, only the Willie Brown that got sent. You know Willie Brown is, by large measure to a lot of people, a conservative guy now. The one that was wearing Nehru jackets and love beads in the Sacramento legislature, which up until that time had pretty much just been all white men, middle-aged white men, at that. For a young, brash, in large measure disrespectful kind of young man to be sent back from this community—he couldn't have been sent from anywhere else. The Black Panther party was founded in Oakland, but its most active, hell-raising chapter was right here on Fillmore Street. Eldridge Cleaver and a whole lot of other very important radical peoples, they had the black house where Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown and Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and people like that came through every time they were in town. White people who did a lot to organize the anti-war movement lived in Fillmore because the rents were cheap. And Haight-Ashbury, they lived here. A whole lot of the planning we did on the floors of some of these Victorian flats that now sell for two million dollars. I can show places where people used to go. I can show you where Elvin Bishop—you all don't know who he is anymore, but those old guys know who he is, he's a rock musician—but I used to hang out in the house and do things with him that I'm glad I survived.
Now that the redevelopment agency is supposedly going to move out of the Fillmore, what do you think will happen? Who will take over?
Well, my fear is that once they're gone, a lot of the control and decision-making about a lot of things that happen in the community and the repository of some of the resources that will exist, sadly will be in the hands of the CBD, Community Benefits District, or the BID—it's interchangeable—the Business Improvement District. And that is made up primarily of owners of property. And I think they have a merchant representative, they have a resident representative, and an organizational representative. But pretty much, the control and the power of that is in the people who own property—that's Fillmore Center and Richard Cedo across the street, and a few other people. And I just think they'll make decisions about what's good for business, but won't help much necessarily a lot to do with community.
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