On this Day – March

Left in the Bay is an archival history project. We research, recover, and retell the history of people’s movements in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

In many places, legacies of radical struggle are simply buried and intentionally forgotten. In the Bay, they’re often reduced to a caricature and put on display. The memory of everything from the general strikes to the Black Panthers to the gay liberation movement is sanitized and made safe for power. Our project hopes to help give this history back its bite.

Since 2021 we’ve been digging up stories in archives, old newspapers, books, and anywhere else we can find scraps of information and posting them on our social media feeds.

For weekly “On This Day” posts, follow us on Instagram at @leftinthebay.

March 6, 1952

74 years ago, a group of volunteers organized by the Communist Party’s East Bay Civil Rights Congress confronted a racist mob in Rollingwood, Contra Costa County, which was attempting to drive a Black family—the Garys—out of the otherwise all-White neighborhood.

Wilbur Gary, Vice-Commander of the local American Legion, had moved his family into a house in the then-segregated area near Richmond. On the night of March 3, a cross was burned on the Garys’ front lawn. The windows of the realtor who negotiated the sale were also smashed.

The Garys refused to move. On March 6, a White mob assembled in front of their home, demanding they leave the neighborhood. Organizers Buddy Green and Decca Treuhaft (Jessica Mitford), both communists, raced to Rollingwood where they joined the Garys in their barricaded house.

As the mob hurled stones at the windows, the East Bay Civil Rights Congress hurriedly organized “a dozen car loads of Black and White volunteers” to protect the house. Over the following days, some 800 people took turns guarding the family from their racist neighbors.

Trade unions such as the Warehouseman’s Local 6 and Marine Cooks & Stewards sent members to the house, as did the local NAACP. The Garys held firm and kept their home.

March 12, 1966

60 years ago, the first issue of The Flatlands was published. The newspaper, edited by a number of early civil rights activists and radicals from various organizations, reported on poverty, segregation, and racism in Oakland.

The paper’s name referenced Oakland’s spatial segregation: Working class people live in the flatlands, and the wealthy live in the hills “where they can keep an eye on you. But far enough away that they can’t hear you.” 

Issues included names and addresses of city councilmen and other officials.

March 13, 1970

56 years ago, members of the Berkeley Tenants Union (BTU), along with members of People’s Architecture and the Berkeley Food Conspiracy, published “And But For the Sky There Are No Fences Facing” in the underground newspaper The Berkeley Tribe.

The essay, also known as “Blueprint for a Communal Society,” was published in the early weeks of BTU’s massive 1970 Berkeley-wide rent strike. A manifesto of sorts, it analyzed housing in Berkeley from a radical social and ecological perspective.

It calls for a number of dramatic changes to the social organization of space in order to “encourage communalism and break down privatization,” such as removing fences, turning backyards and streets into huge communal gardens, and building community “lifehouses.”

BTU was founded in 1969 by a number of activists who had been leaders in the People’s Park movement. It attempted to combine traditional community organizing with revolutionary anti-imperialism, and a cultural politics that aimed to transform everyday life.

The early BTU had strong links to other revolutionary leftist groups and tendencies, including the Black Panther Party (BPP). The BPP lent equipment to BTU to publish their newspaper, Tenants Rising, and also let them publish articles in their own paper, The Black Panther.

While BTU had only limited success, the manifesto is a fascinating document that—in its call to replace “the space-as-commodity system” with “free, cooperative neighborhoods”—goes far beyond the boundaries of traditional tenant organizing.

March 24, 1982

44 years ago, three Salvadoran refugees announced their decision to seek sanctuary at Berkeley’s University Lutheran Chapel, inaugurating what would become the Sanctuary Movement.

Five local churches adopted a “sanctuary covenant,” vowing to defy immigration law by protecting refugees from deportation. This would go on to serve as a model for similar covenants nationwide, and led to Berkeley becoming America’s first “sanctuary city” in 1985.

The roots of the Sanctuary Movement in Berkeley extend to 1971, when—amid the struggle over the USS Coral Sea—the city council passed a resolution to provide sanctuary to soldiers who refused to fight in Vietnam.