Darwin BondGraham REN: 3/10/2005 Winddance/Winant

Racial Inequality in the Construction of a Global City

Introduction On July 28,1966 the Economic Development Administration (EDA) convened a meeting of federal agencies in San Franciscos Civic Center Federal Building to discuss the problem of discrimination in the Bay Areas building trades unions. Many of the unions (especially those under the AFL umbrella) had historically excluded Blacks, Latinos, and other racial groups through official policies and overt racism. Union barriers to non-whites were a serious nation-wide problem, more or less acute in different cities and regions (Foner: 1974). By the 1960s many union locals were still excluding minorities from the better paying jobs and apprenticeships offered through their hiring halls. Officials from the Department of Labor, and President Johnsons Equal Employment Opportunities Commission co-facilitated the gathering. Also present were representatives of the Presidents committee on Manpower, the General Services Administration, the Departments of Defense, Justice, Housing and Urban Development, the Twelfth Naval District, Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Public Roads, the Civil Rights Commission, and of note, the General Manager of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), B.R. Stokes. Central to these agencies strategy of opening up the building trades unions to minority workers was the leverage they felt they could exert through their locally procured construction contracts. The EDA had recently approved $23 million in local contracts, as part of the federal governments War on Poverty, including one for the expansion of the Port of Oakland. Combined with the other federal agencies local construction spending, this amounted to nearly $1 billion in contract dollars, much of which would employ local builders and union employees. The Bay Area Rapid Transit District (the only non-federal agency present) accounted for another $1 billion in construction contracts to be bid out over the next seven years. 1

On the street outside of the meeting a group of picketers marched, hoping to pressure those inside to draft solid enforceable policies capable of ending discrimination in the building trades unions. The picket was organized by a community activist organization called JOBART. Amory Bradford, one of the EDA representatives present at the time recalled that: At noon, after the end of our meeting, a delegation of these pickets, followed by a battery of TV cameras, came up to our floor to present to Foley [EDA Administrator and meeting chair] a forty-five-pound watermelon1 as soul food for delivery to President Johnson. Taped to its surface was a message urging the President to use his influence to make sure that Negroes and other Minorities got their fair share of jobs under the huge Rapid Transit construction program. It ended: We hope that our message will become an organic part of you as you eat this watermelon. (Bradford: 1968). Over the next several years community activists from West Oakland and other parts of the Bay Area would continue to organize around issues related to the construction of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. Their early actions like the one described above focused on jobs and approached the huge BART project as a means of leverage to change local union racism and other barriers to employment. Later, these same activists would change the name of their organization from Jobs on BART to Justice on BART better reflecting their multiple developing goals. Still seeking jobs and the promises of economic betterment that BART officials offered, the Black community also increasingly organized around issues of housing demolition and relocation. Black community activists sought justice in the construction and operation of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. This meant inclusion in the work to build it, a broader advancement within the unions and industries that had discriminated against them for so long, fair reimbursements for houses and property seized through eminent domain, adequate help in relocating within their communities after displacement, preventing the system from further ghettoizing the black neighborhoods, and guarantees that the transportation system would work for them.

The watermelon, according to JOBART activist Benjamin Lusk, was a put on, to highlight the old time stereotype of the Negro. (Tribune: 1966a). The watermelon was a symbol of the racists practices of the South, of Jim Crow society, and the stereotyped Negro accepting his or her place below all Whites, even the lowliest white worker. Lusk affirmed that JOBART would combat the Jim Crow practices of certain unions whose men will build BART. (Tribune: 1966b). Blacks in the South did not accept Jim Crow, and neither would Blacks in the North.

Historical Contexts JOBARTs story is part of a larger field of action in the Bay Area from the end of World War II to the early 1970s. This was a time and place characterized by grassroots community organizing and action in response to various transformations, opportunities, and threats. In many ways JOBART was a classic civil rights organization. It sought very clear objectives related to local racial injustices, and it pressured the government to enact policies that would put an end to discrimination and inequality. JOBART members spoke the language of the civil rights movement and made strong critiques of the white power structure, which as they saw it, would not and could not enact legislation and policies that were fair to the black community unless they were pressured, forced to do so. JOBART was part of the larger national effort to break down union racism, and to open up employment opportunities in large corporations, government, and small businesses for non-whites. Inside and outside of the union establishment Blacks pressured for justice. In the Bay Area figures such as C. L. Dellums organizer of the first African American union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters worked diligently to see that California established a Fair Employment Practices Commission, which he then chaired (Vetere: 2000). In 1961 the Alameda Central Labor Council (CLC) endorsed freedom riders busing from California to the South as part of the effort to desegregate interstate transportation. CLC leaders even participated in the March on Selma, which Dick Groulx, the Councils Assistant Secretary called, the most moving experience, of his life (Ibid). Pressured by the Teamsters efforts to organized black barbershops around the East Bay with the help of boxer Joe Louis, the AFL Barbers 134 in Oakland quickly organized 27 black shops. At times this was a period of frantic union activity to accommodate, incorporate, and even push the agenda of the civil rights movement. Actions on the ground level included pickets of the Kress Department store by the Alameda Central Labor Council (CLC) to show solidarity with the southern sit-ins. In 1962, the Oakland and Berkeley chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality won agreement from the Montgomery Ward store to hire black workers. The same year saw

successful sit-ins by black and white activists across the Bay Area at restaurants like Mels Drive-In and the Sheraton San Francisco Hotel resulting in agreements to increase minority employment. The next several years saw a boycott of hundreds of restaurants around the East Bay aimed primarily at ending the discriminatory hiring practices that placed minorities in low-paying low-visibility dirty jobs. Even UC Berkeleys Golden Bear Restaurant was the target of this boycott (Flatlands: 1966a). Some of the nations most powerful corporations were struck locally. CORE [Council On Racial Equality] chapters in Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles began picketing the offices and branches of the [Bank of America]. COREs leaders demanded that bank officials disclose the racial composition of its workforce and enter into a Fair Employment Process Pact that would ensure fairness in all future hiring. (Self: 2003). JOBART fit tightly into the civil rights movement due to its focus on discrimination and justice. At times JOBART would meet with officials from BART, the unions, and the government. Otherwise, when progress along this route was stifled, JOBART would organize marches, pickets, and other public actions to push their agenda. This is not to paint a rosy picture of cooperation between the unions and antiracists activists of this era. The Civil Rights movement and Labor were at odds as often as they were allies (Griffler: 1995) (Honey: 1999). JOBART is a perfect example of the tension that existed (and still exist) between organized labor and racial minorities. Alliances were made when they could be made, and broken when Labor would not address the needs of non-whites. The strategies and actions of Blacks in the Bay Area mirrored those nationwide. Labor was often an ally, often the opponent. Often, the Federal government became the point of leverage to approach and open up unions to multiracial democracy. But always, the ultimate target was the racist establishment, the corporations, and the elites whose interests were furthered whenever organized labor split with or was incorporated to oppose the furtherance of minority workers. The struggles of JOBART and the West Oakland activists of this era can be looked at in another way. Rather than emphasizing the local, regional, or national context of JOBART as a civil rights organization, a perspective which emphasizes the global dynamics at work between West Oaklands black community and transnational capital within the Bay Area can shed further light on how the organization developed,

what it succeeded in doing, and why it fell short of its main goals. Put simply, JOBART was an organization of local resistance to the economic, demographic, and spatial reorganization of the Bay Area being carried out by transnational capital from roughly the end of World War II to the early 1970s. This larger global perspective on JOBARTs situation will be developed further in this paper. Local Communities, Regional and National Forces The history of JOBART has been told several times before, most notably by Joseph Rodriguez (1999), and Robert Self (2003). Both posit the organization and the community it sprang from in the local and national context of the 1960s to early 1970s. Both accounts stress JOBART as a firmly rooted local organization taking practical action in a larger scene of regional demographic and spatial reorganization. Both accounts also emphasize the roles of racial and class identities throughout struggles involving employment, housing, transportation, and the cityscape. Selfs account stresses the larger national dynamics of regional and municipal economic competition, racial politics, segregation, and the War on Poverty as catalysts for action. Rodriguezs analysis occupies a more localized frame of reference concerned with the political discourses of BART supporters and JOBART activists. His contextualization is one that is still informed by the social and political developments at state and national levels, however. According to Self (2003, p. 196); The JOBART conflict stood at the heart of the second reconstruction in northern urban America. JOBARTs coalition raised a set of questions that tested the black rights movements purchase within both the local and national political culture. How should the African American community make claims on resources on the basis of historic patterns of discrimination and the new spatial reality of the ghetto? Could Oaklands black communities leverage the state either through the California FEPC or the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to facilitate access to resources like jobs and training? Self concludes that; In the mid-1960s the institutional architecture of U.S. labor and civil rights laws and state-level agencies like the California FEPC was underequipped either to answer those questions or to strike a substantial blow against broad patterns of employment discrimination.

This concern with larger national questions including urban renewal, economic development, labor organization, and the civil rights movement connects JOBART to many of the opportunities and limitations that shaped its field of action. These limitations and opportunities ultimately determined the organizations effectiveness in relation to how clearly JOBART activists understood these conditions, and how creatively they maneuvered (or outmaneuvered) these larger structural forces manifest at the local level. Rodriguezs account of JOBART stresses the organizations strong sense of local identity within the Bay Area, its oppositional discourse to the BARTD authorities claims, and its impact as a precursor, a foundation for more successful future organizing efforts on the part of West Oaklanders. According to Rodriguez (1999, p. 213), West Oakland activists focused on loyalty to the local neighborhood partly to criticize the Bay Area Rapid Transits regionalism, partly in response to West Oaklands diversity. This local identity was significantly influenced by the struggle against BART but also by ongoing opposition to urban renewal. JOBART reaffirmed its local identity and needs in order to counter regional (BARTD) and national (urban renewal) threats. Both Self and Rodriguez conclude that JOBART, while inspiring, ultimately had little impact in terms of its stated goals (see Appendices A. and B., JOBART Demands). Its most important legacy was that it brought together West Oakland residents and empowered them to act in an organized political fashion. It inspired later organizations of the poor, and helped to foster a larger somewhat cohesive activist community around the East Bay to address issues of poverty, segregation, racism, and more. By analyzing JOBART and West Oakland in regional and national contexts both Self and Rodriguez allow us to see the organization and the community as part of a larger struggle, part of the civil rights movement, and part of the labor movements history. Both authors are also keen to remind us not to view JOBART as just another civil rights organization, however. JOBART, like many northern urban organizations worked in a markedly different field of opportunity and opposition than organizations and activists in the South. Self (2003, p. 1) explicitly states that, civil rights in places like Oakland were a vibrant and dynamic dimension of postwar metropolitanization that cannot be reduced to an epilogue of the southern movement. Although the struggles of black

activists in the Bay Area of the 1960s and 1970s cannot be extricated from the national movement, they also cannot be conceptually homogenized with movement organizations and actions elsewhere. Rodriguezs emphasis on the locality and identity of JOBART and West Oakland not only implies the same lesson for historians, but also shows the participants of movement activism as agents, aware of, and acting with full knowledge of this reality. Local Communities, Transnational Forces While Self and Rodriguez succeed in reconstructing the history of JOBART in relation to regional and national contexts, both accounts ultimately come up short in interpreting the root causes of West Oaklands predicament. Regional and national frames of reference are an invaluable first step providing adequate references to larger forces that empowered and limited black activists in the field of action, but both lack the ability to interpret the entire story. Linking JOBART back to the civil rights movement, to the decline of Northern inner city economies, regional patterns of segregation, or the War on Poverty, only gets us so far. Questions we are left with include: What were the root causes of West Oaklands troubles? What was propelling the spatial transformation of the Bay Area metropolis, and why did this transformation threaten the homes and communities of certain groups and not others? What was BART? What was the Bay Area economy becoming? More than a contested source of jobs, a people mover, or a bulldozer, what can we make of the BART system in relation to this larger transformation? To build off of Self and Rodriguezs accounts this paper will explain JOBART as a local community based movement resisting a project of transnational capital. There is a tendency in contemporary sociology to focus on the struggles of distant indigenous communities when studying resistance movements against transnationalizing capital. Numerous literatures study transnational capitals reach into the global South, primarily in search of raw resources or labor. Resistance to this hyperexploitation focuses on the work of indigenous local organizations and communities in these far off locales, be it the Zapatistas in Chiapas, or the Ogoni in Nigeria. Studies of local indigenous resistance to transnational capital in the United States have been

DC BG 4/15/06 2:23 PM Comment: See literature on urban restructuring to the post-industrial city: David Ley, Richard Child Hill (Restructuring the City), Dennis Judd, Michael Peter Smith, John Mollenkopf (contested City), Roger Friedlan (Power and Crisis in the City).

somewhat neglected or misunderstood as movements reacting to regional and national forces. JOBART is an early example of a local organization resisting a project of transnational capital: BART2. The Bay Area experienced radical spatial and demographic reorganization at the hands of transnational capital from the end of World War II into the early 1970s. It was the epicenter of the technologies that would facilitate the spatial reorganization of American transnational corporations. It would also become the headquarters for many of these firms. During World War II federally sponsored research at Stanford and Berkeley, and the numerous industrial research labs dotting the South Bay created the basis for the semiconductor, software, computer, and telecommunications industries.3 These technologies made the transnational corporation a reality. Through near instantaneous communications, new logistical and transportation capabilities, and new production processes aided by these developments, corporate entities spread their various operations (manufacturing, services, administration) throughout the world. It made it more than possible to site a textile or computer chip factory in East Asia while locating the administrative and financial center in a U.S. city; it made it highly profitable. For the transnational corporations headquartered in the Bay Area the new production zones were in Asia. The production process would begin with research and design operations in the urban and suburban centers of San Francisco, Oakland, and Silicon Valley. Manufacturing of the product or components would occur in Japan, Singapore, China, Indonesia, India, etc. Consumption would occur in domestic and foreign markets reached through containerized shipping and the emerging mega-ports.4 The whole system was to be run on the new communications, transport, and information technologies administered in the metropolitan core.
2 JOBART was not the only episode of indigenous community resistance to the BART system project. Oaklands affluent Rockridge neighborhood the site of a BART station successfully organized against attempts by real estate developers, city planners, and the BARTD to rezone several blocks surrounding the station to accommodate high rise apartment complexes and intensive commercial properties (Skaburskis: 1976). San Franciscos Mission district carried out a similarly successful campaign against even more intensive plans for real estate surrounding their BART station. As a comparison to the largely unsuccessful agenda of West Oaklanders, race and class had enormous impacts on each local communitys ability to organize against and respond to BARTs plans with their own alternative (Dvett: 1980). All topics for further comparative studies. 3 Among the South Bay/Silicon Valley corporations and research institutions that would have a hand in the construction of BART, as well as creating the technologies enabling the transnational corporation, were IBM, Stanford Research Institute, Lockheed Martin, among others. 4 Mega-ports, although often financed by state capital are also projects of transnationalizing capital. The Port of Oakland was expanded in the late 1960s making it one of the largest ports in the world. It was one of the earliest to adopt the new technologies of containerized shipping. Interestingly, the Port of Oakland expansion project was carried out with landfill from the subway tunnels of BARTs downtown Oakland lines and stations. One spatial transformation filled in another, both carrying out new roles in the globalizing economy of the Bay Area.

From the end of World War II into the 1970s the Bay Area metropolitan region quickly developed the economy, infrastructure, and demographics of a global city. It was during this period that the physical infrastructure was laid, the post-industrial workforce trained, and the new technologies fielded and refined. This was a process of construction that was paralleled by the construction (or formation, if you will) of new racial inequalities within the globalizing city. The concept, global city, is drawn broadly from the works of Saskia Sassen (2004) and Manuel Castells (1999). The global city denotes a new type of urban community and economy that is linked to global processes in ways that most cities and towns are still not. Both Sassen and Castells relate the global aspect of the new city primarily to the economic activities concentrated in these urban areas, activities that are aimed outward through spokes of global currency markets, foreign stock exchanges, offshore production zones, and networks of outsourced services. All of this economic activity is coordinated through the hub of the global city with historically unprecedented speed and efficiency. Technologic innovation is prime in both interpretations. Sassen (2001) defines global cities primarily as new kinds of economic units. A globalizing city is a de-industrializing city. It is also an urban habitat traversed by new configurations of more concentrated workforces with increasingly specialized skills. The key workforces in the global city are managers and white-collar paper pushers, scientists, programmers, technicians, and the lower level service sector workers who serve their meals, repair their goods, and clean up after them. Sassen, like Castells, puts much emphasis on the rapid technological advances of the past sixty years in defining the global city. Both show how advances in nearly every area of science have produced a seemingly contradictory outcome: the decentralization of economic activities on a global scale, alongside the further concentration of managerial coordination and intellectual production activities in the global city. Sassens studies on the global city are certainly unrivaled in their exposition of aggregate economic forces, but as Zukin (1992) points out, the agents of change in the global city described by Sassen, the new classes and communities themselves, remain obscured behind the larger abstracted movements of capital and labor. To be fair, it is not really Sassens goal to dig so deep and narrowly. Even so, the most recent edition of

Global City remains for the most part a macro-sociological analysis of the global city with very little insight into the real people who inhabit or work in these places. Castellss (1999) insights into the agents of change have more depth (especially his earliest works on la question urbaine) (Castells: 1972), but his latest works covering globalization and the city remain predominantly occupied with the same focus on grand movements and forces (especially economics and network technologies) rather than the grassroots of change. Nevertheless, both Sassen and Castellss show how certain metropolitan regions have acquired new roles in global capitalism, roles that require new configurations of workforce, infrastructure, and transport. The emergence of the transnational corporation ran parallel to deindustrialization and the rise of an information economy. In the case of the Bay Area a region never seriously based on industrial manufacturing like many mid-Western cities this shift had fewer deleterious impacts. In cities like Chicago or Detroit the change was devastating. Nevertheless, even for the Bay Area this shift meant that a new white-collar workforce would come to replace large segments of the blue-collar workforce. The deindustrialization of major American cities in this period is bound with the processes of suburbanization, and re-segregation. Suburbanization has roots deeper than the latter half of the 20th century (Jackson: 1985). However, as a large-scale phenomenon, suburbanization is really a story of the 20th century U.S. Numerous causes drove the suburban developments of the latter half of the century. Chief amongst these were economics, aesthetics, and racism. The economic and aesthetic causes were varied and contingent. Kenneth Jacksons history of the suburban transformation traces the causes principally back to the low price and availability of land on the edges (and further outside) of major cities. In terms of aesthetics, he argues that the frontier ideal, the garden or ranch was an integral part of the American psyche, and that the move toward the suburbs reflected a move back to the land (Ibid). In terms of racism, suburbanization was about white flight and the exclusion of racial minorities, exclusion of upwardly mobile Black or Brown flight into the new suburban zones. The northern migration of Blacks during World Wars I and II, along with increasing immigration from Latin America and Asia coincided first with racists pogroms against blacks and minorities in the city (Rudwick: 1964) (Madigan: 2001), (Chicago Commission on Race Relations:

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1922), and later, with the mass migrations of Whites out of the central cities and into the sprawling suburban tracts (Meyer: 2000). BART was the keystone of the spatial reorganization of the Bay Area global metropolis. The increased headquartering of transnational corporations in San Franciscos financial district put an increased demand on the regions already overextended transportation infrastructure. Moving workers had been a major problem since World War II, and things were only getting worse. The original study advocating an undersea tube linking San Francisco and the East Bay via rail was carried out by a joint Army-Navy commission (Army-Navy: 1947). The commission recommended a BART-like concept to ease the flow of workers in the industrial, wartime city. The report concluded that a new transportation system was vital not only for the regions economic future, but also for national security. The theme of national security and military superiority would recur throughout the construction of BART.5 It was not until the deindustrialization of the region began that BART became a serious concept, however. What made BART a reality were the emerging needs of transnational capital based in the central business districts of the Bay Area, especially San Francisco. The history of BART as told by the agency itself is rather revealing: The BART story began in 1946. It began not by governmental fiat, but as a concept gradually evolving at informal gatherings of business and civic leaders on both sides of the San Francisco Bay (BART: 2005). Who were these business and civic leaders spearheading the BART concept and shaping it at its earliest most critical points? According to J. Allen Whitt, the work in planning and promoting the BART system was carried out by an organization called the Bay Area Council (BAC):

5 BARTDs quarterly report Rapid Transit carried numerous stories in the late 1960s touting the BART systems many contributions to national security, as well as the space-age technology incorporated into the Rapid Transit systems equipment. BARTDs March 1965 issue of Rapid Transit touted that space-age lab equipment was being used to monitor rail cars at the Diablo Test Track. The equipment, according to BART, is normally used in satellite tests. The January 1966 issue of Rapid Transit notes that, many of the same techniques employed by the space and aircraft industries are being adapted for use in the new BART system. The same issue lauds BART as a rapid transit system which is completely automatically controlled, the smoothest and quietest in the world, free of vibration, sudden movements and sway, offering guaranteed travel schedules during peak traffic hours at speed up to 80 miles per hour. (BARTD: 3/1965) Could the authors description of such a smooth functioning system, free of vibration or sudden movements emanate from latent desires to describe the superiority not only of US technology, but the whole US social system? In the context of the Cold War one can almost hear BARTD press materials speaking directly to the hopes and fears of Washington and the Pentagon. BARTD Superintendent D.W. Halligan took the Cold War rhetoric over the top with his descriptions of BART technologies that will use the same principles utilized in modern industrial processes and in-flight control of space capsules, and guided radar systems and diagnostic equipment similar to concepts used to checkout space vehicles before takeoff. It should be noted that prior to working on the BART project, Halligan was a consultant for the U.S. Air Forces Minuteman Nuclear Missile project during its early test stages. (BARTD: 1/1966).

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[T]he BAC was a business organization. As a former BAC chairman and head of the Bank of America explained, the larger business-industrial firms with interests extending throughout the Bay Area region were the moving spirits in forming the Council. . Bank of America, American Trust Company, Standard Oil of California, Pacific Gas and Electric, U.S. Steel, and Bechtel Corporation each pledged $10,000 annually to support the BAC. (Whitt: 1982, p. 43)) Whitt makes it clear that the BAC was an organization of businesses, not business leaders. As an organization of businesses, it is important to point out what kinds of businesses these were. They were transnational concerns with visions of things far grander than local or even national scenery: the BAC appears to be an organization of corporations rather than an organization of corporate executives. For instance, when one compares the membership of the BAC board of trustees in 1972-1973 with the membership in 1974-1975, one discovers that nine people who are listed on the 1972-1973 board do no appear on the later list. Analysis indicates, however, that these drop-outs reflect the departure only of individuals, not of corporations. Of the nine corporations represented by these men, seven are still represented, but by new faces, on the 1974-1975 board. Corporate links tend to be maintained even though people come and go. (Ibid: p. 43) Whitt concludes that the primary purpose of BART was to preserve and extend the economic development of downtown San Francisco. Stephen Zwerlings analysis of BART draws similar conclusions as to the proactive forces behind the BART system. BART was the project of powerful business interests. The BART system was designed to shuttle the new white-collar (predominantly White) workforce from the expanding (almost exclusively White) suburban hinterlands of the Bay Area metro region on their daily commutes into the quickly Manhatanizing financial district of San Francisco. The final result to be achieved by BART was famously described by Roger Lapham president of a San Francisco insurance and brokerage firm and son of a former mayor6 - who trumpeted in a 1968 interview with the SF Bay Guardian:

6 Roger Lapham Sr., Mayor of San Francisco from 1944 to 1948 asked Thomas Fleming, an editor of the SF Sun Reporter a major black Bay Area newspaper during the war how long he expected the citys rapidly expanding black population to stay before heading back to their homes in the South. Fleming responded with restraint,: Mr. Mayor, you know how permanent the Golden Gate is out there? Well the Black population is just as permanent as the Golden Gate. We are American citizens like you. We dont need no passport to come here. The city of San Francisco may as well make up its mind right now, that were going to find jobs for these people, because they aint going back down south. (Carlsson: 1999).

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the end result of BARTD is that San Francisco will be just like Manhattan. Its not a question of whether its desirable, but whats a practical matter. As a practical matter, you just cant have 18 different banking and insurance centers. You have to concentrate them with all the various services around them. The people who run these centers want all their services, the people they work with advertisers, attorneys, accountants around them. (Zwerling: 1974, p.p. 30-31) The construction of the BART system was a project of transnational capital centered in San Francisco. The first conception was the brainchild of geopolitical U.S. military war-production planning. It was finally made a reality by the BAC, a planning body of representatives from some of the worlds largest corporations headquartered in the Bay Area. It became the keystone of the regions new transportation infrastructure, its primary purpose to shuttle workers from outlying areas in Contra Costa and Alameda counties suburban bedroom communities into the intensive new cityscape of San Franciscos financial district. JOBART If BART was to serve the new spatial needs of transnational capital in the Bay Area, it was not altogether clear how it would serve the minority communities living in and around the urban cores, especially the black neighborhood of West Oakland. Bayview/Hunters Point in San Francisco, and the Iron Triangle of Richmond, both overwhelmingly black neighborhoods would also be severely impacted by the outcomes of BART. In the case of Bayview/Hunters Point, questions were raised as to the entire absence of service. No station or line was planned for the community, leaving it relatively isolated from much of the region. For Richmond the problem was the presence of the rail line planned to serve the city. Black Richmond residents and members of JOBART complained that the line, planned at ground level, would constitute a wall between the already segregated black neighborhood and the downtown and white sections of the city. Realization of what BART was, and who it was to serve led black Bay Area activists to found JOBART and develop strategies to counter negative aspects of the project.

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Job Opportunities on BART, as it was originally known, was founded by Bay Area civil rights activists in 1965. In August of that year, JOBART members passed a resolution containing the organizations original demands (see Appendix A.). Arthur Lathan, Chairman of JOBART sent the resolution to Adrien J. Falk, Chairman of BARTD, enclosed with a letter requesting a meeting between JOBART and BARTD to discuss minority employment. In essence JOBART was requesting that BART employees be recruited solely from BARTD counties (Alameda, San Francisco, Contra Costa); that a significant number of employees be minorities; that employers actively promote minority workers from lower classified muddy trades to higher paying skilled trades; that there be on the job bilingual training; and that BARTs contracting employers and unions keep statistical data on employees regarding race and job types. (Lathan: 8/9/1965). BARTDs response (two months later) categorically rejected JOBARTs resolutions. BARTD General Manager B.R. Stokes, responding for Chairman Falk retorted that: The proposals would result in virtually excluding contractors with union contracts from bidding for BART jobs. A systematic exclusion of these contractors would raise a serious question whether BART has exercised its discretion reasonably because such exclusions would make the construction of the system incalculably more difficult if not impossible. In response to JOBARTs request for a meeting, Stokes blithely responded; we would be delighted to show you our offices at a mutually agreeable time. (Stokes: 10/20/1965). Gene Bernardi, an analyst with the Oakland Department of Human Resources identified the second incarnation of JOBART as consisting of representatives from C.O.R.E., East Bay Ministerial Alliance, N.A.A.C.P., Council for Civic Unity, and various other neighborhood and interest groups, not only from Oakland but from San Francisco and Richmond. (Bernardi: 1966). The initial impetus for JOBART was to make sure that the construction of the BART system did not reproduce or exacerbate racism in the unions, and racial inequalities in the building trades professions. JOBART activists saw openings to deconstruct these barriers, and opportunities to build upon legal gains being made through the civil rights movement.

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These initial goals receded beyond the horizon of action when in 1966 BARTD officials signed a three-year no strike agreement with the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters, guaranteeing a stable labor pact for the construction of the system, but dashing the hopes JOBART activists had of using BART as a lever to open up job opportunities. The no strike agreement among other things allowed builders to draw in laborers from outside of BARTs three county district, thus enabling unions to ignore recruiting, hiring, and training black workers for the jobs required to build the system. The agreement allowed racist unions and builders to do as they wished. Thus JOBART changed its name to reflect the developing situation; Jobs opportunities on BART became Justice on BART (Ibid). It was also at this time that JOBART members, and the black neighborhoods through which the system would run, became acutely aware that not only was BART a source of contested labor, but that it was a project about to radically reshape their neighborhoods. A JOBART letter addressed Jeffery Cohelan, US Congressional Representative for Oakland, laid out the organizations evolving goals in relation to the urban upheaval of Watts barely one year earlier. The letter made reference to the riots of LA and the increasingly frustrated mood of many northern black communities to accentuate the new justice orientation of the organization: We see BART as a major opportunity to use public works projects as a positive weapon in the fight against discrimination in employment and housing. Events throughout the nation in recent months have shown that we can no longer afford the luxury of neutral or negative governmental policies in this area. The events show the terrible price of governmental action which follows rather than proceeds the development of a crisis situation. (Fike, Thomas L. & Eugene Drew: 8/1966). Attached was a list of proposals including recommendations that Rep. Cohelan neither approve nor support further federal appropriations for the BART project unless provisions for mandatory local hiring, and quotas for minority employees (25% of the long term unemployed), be included in any bill. JOBART also proposed that Cohelan support any legislation that would make relocation payments retroactive for all residents displaced by BART. According to JOBART, only 34 of 400 displaced householders in

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the City of Oakland will be able to take advantage of its provisions. (Ibid). And the for the third pillar of JOBARTs agenda, segregation, the organization requested that Rep. Cohelan use the influence of your office with the Directors of BART to insure that Rapid Transit tracks will not be routed in such a way as to reinforce existent housing segregation. [Y]ou will refuse to support any legislation supplying further financing for BART which will contribute to such racial divisions. (Ibid). In a later exchange between BART and JOBART, Co-Chairman Thomas Fike, JOBART set forth its concerns and demands regarding the rail system, while BART manager B.R. Stokes simultaneously attempted to accommodate, incorporate, and mostly evade these various responsibilities. Fikes letter to BARTD authorities requested another meeting between the two organizations. Employment, relocation, eminent domain, and the Richmond Track plan were on JOBARTs agenda. Fike echoed the understanding of many Bay Area residents saying that, it is our conviction that solutions to the human problems created by the construction of the Transit System can be solved only after BART meets directly with the citizens affected by the project. Fike also requested that BART cease its condemnation of real estate and its awarding of construction contracts for the system until a JOBART-BART meeting could take place (Fike: 3/16/1966). Included in Fikes letter was a copy of Justice on BARTs demands (see Appendix B.). Stokess response was quick and to the point, a meeting would be had between JOBART and BART. Stokes also agreed to hold back contract grants and demolitions for the time being (Stokes: 3/18/1966). JOBART representatives met with BART representatives on March 25, March 31, and again on April 6, 1966. JOBART emphasized employment and housing as fundamental problems that BART needed to address. According to the Flatlands7, JOBART representatives made it clear that they would hold BART accountable for any negative impacts the system might have on their communities. JOBARTs demands
7 The Flatlands was a grassroots publication serving the minority communities of Oakland, the West Oakland neighborhood in particular. The paper got its namesake from the geography of segregation in the East Bay. From Richmond in the North, through Berkeley and Oakland, and down toward the South East Bay, racial segregation is largely delineated along altitudinal boundaries. Poor Blacks, Latinos, and other minorities live in the flatlands adjacent to the Bay, while the predominantly White upper class lives in the hills that begin to rise several miles inland. Neighborhoods in the hills are quiet, garden-like enclaves reached by narrow winding tree-lined roads. The flatlands, by comparison, are heavy industrial zones traversed by wide streets, numerous rail-road tracks, and dense housing conditions.

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required that BART [recognize] the social inequalities which many people, such as Negroes and Mexican-Americans suffer as members of minority groups. BART has not considered this inequity in its payments for their property. (Flatlands 1966c). JOBART co-chair Tom Fike demanded that BART find a solution to displaced residents, refusing to allow BART to pass the buck to the City of Oakland or the Federal government: IF the state law is holding back BART from relocating these people, then, Mr. Stokes, ..the state law is your problem, not ours (Ibid). The overall outcome of the meetings can be summarized in Stokess follow up letter to Fike several weeks later: Regardless of the personal convictions BARTD staff members hold concerning the moral imperatives and social needs of todays urban life, the District as a public body must operate within the governmental and legal framework that prevails today. Arbitrary action, no matter how moral such action may appear to be, is frequently inequitable action. It can also be wasteful duplication of effort. (Stokes: 4/21/1966). Stokes absolved BART of any moral responsibility by portraying the agency as a mere means to achieve a larger public good. By calling it arbitrary action, Stokes completely ignored the numerous inequalities bound up in the construction of the BART system. Labor union discrimination against minorities, seizure and destruction of homes and entire neighborhoods, and the construction of the Richmond wall were all either purposeful actions toward specific goals, or founded on the structures of past actions toward purposeful goals. Nothing was arbitrary about JOBARTs demands. Union racism was a practice that purposefully sought (and succeeded) in excluding minorities from decent jobs. JOBARTs demands sought to attack these practices head on. The BART Systems demolition of East Bay black neighborhoods was anything but arbitrary. The African American communities of Oakland, South Berkeley, and Richmond were by and large the result of a racial project: segregation, redlining, and racial covenants on property titles (Self: 2003). There was absolutely nothing arbitrary about the circumstances in which local black communities found themselves. Nevertheless, BART deemed JOBARTs demands arbitrary and inequitable, apologizing that, principles of both law and equity restrain special purpose districts like BARTD from initiating unauthorized functions, no matter how socially redeeming those functions are. (Ibid).

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What is most interesting about Stokess definition of BARTDs responsibilities is that it is almost entirely amnesiac as to the single most significant reason for the construction of BART: transporting the new suburban white-collar working class into the hungry office-lands of transnational capital. The BART project was designed for this purpose above all else, not to provide new dimensions in expanded job opportunities and urban cultural experiences for all citizens, as BARTDs general manager put it (Ibid [underlined in original]). Stokes painted the systems purpose with brush strokes of generality and utilitarian good, such that any action to remedy any of the systems shortcomings would be out of line. BARTD was nothing more than a special purpose district created to develop and operate a transit system. (Ibid). It was not and could not address the needs of JOBARTs constituency. BART asserted that these needs could only be addressed by city and state governments and the labor unions directly. BARTD authorities pressed these points to the full extent by publishing a twelve page report entitled, BART & the ghettos in March of 1969. The booklet quotes the Websters Dictionary definition of the word ghetto on the cover, and begins with a letter from BARTDs General Manager B.R. Stokes. Over the years it has been suggested by some that BART neglects to poor that it is designed to serve only the white-collar, middle-class suburban commuter. This is not the case. (BARTD: 1969). The case made by BART and the ghettos is that ghettos are the product of geographic isolation. Ghettos can be opened up and ghetto residents can be aided through increased transportation. Ghetto residents would be empowered by BART through increased employment opportunities outside of the ghettos, and access to schools and other institutions previously inaccessible, argued BARTD. Many black ghetto residents rejected such a strict technocratic interpretation of their situation, If we have jobs at all, theyre right here. Its only the rich go into the city. I dont see what you need rapid transit for. It aint nothin but a big mess, said one West Oakland tenant in response to BARTs claims (Flatlands 1966b). As authorities pushed forward with construction of the system, BARTs impacts began to materialize in demolitions, relocations, re-segregation, and continuing poverty. JOBARTs attempts to deal directly with BARTD administrators, and City, State, and Federal authorities, had been relatively unproductive. The Flatlands, chronicled the

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impacts of BART construction as houses were leveled and persons displaced. Some of the earliest interactions between West Oaklanders and BARTD officials were described by Mrs. Sneed, a local resident and organizer writing in the Flatlands March issue: When we were contacted by officials of BART and informed our homes were to be purchased we decided to give up our homes in good faith; not to condemn or condone or evade the issue of this moving project, Rapid Transit Construction. But the negotiators were not fair in their negotiations. (Flatlands: 1966b). Sneed and other local residents asked specifically; Why arent home owners getting fair market value for their property? Since we live in an industrial area, why arent we getting industrial prices for our property? Both questions struck at the unjust compensation and aid afforded to displaced residents. BART plans to establish a station and parking area in our neighborhood. Why cant the property owners share in the profits? (Ibid). This question flagged the largest issue of all: who would benefit from BART? Who would profit from the system? Transnational capital located in San Franciscos financial district would reap enormous profits from the systems reorganization of space and transportation. BART was designed for this. West Oakland residents asked why they were being barred from benefiting from BART as a means of capital accumulation in their neighborhood. Flatlands reprinted excerpts from Secretary of the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Robert C. Weavers letter responding to Mrs. Sneed and other JOBART activists who had made an earlier appeal to the Johnson Administration. While sympathetic to their concerns, Weaver restated the same claim made by almost every agency, government, district, and union involved in the BART project: we have no power to help you. The Bay Area Rapid Transit System is being built with funds secured by the Transit System through a bond issue. The federal government therefore has no authority with respect to the prices offered for properties or over relocation assistance to the affected families. (Ibid). HUD passed the buck to the City of Oakland. The City would pass the buck numerous times back to the federal government, to the unions, to BART, all of whom would do the same. No agency with any power would address JOBARTs proposals.

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Meanwhile evictions and demolition continued and initial construction began. JOBART succeeded in making an issue out of evictions, fair compensation, and relocation, but failed to win any concrete gains from BART, the unions, or the state. With regard to minority employment, JOBART succeeded in making an issue of it, and forcing BART, its contractors, and the unions to at least address the issue publicly. JOBART succeeded in prompting BARTD administrators to hold pre-bid conferences to inform contractors of BARTs affirmative action requirements (non-binding requirements, of course); endorsed FEPC requests that contractors and unions collect ethnic data at jobsites; required that engineers monitor contractor compliance with affirmative action policies contained in contracts; and finally, BARTD requested that contractors adopt a formal policy to publicize apprenticeship openings in various crafts to civil rights groups and other interested parties (Mahoney: 1966). According to Patrick Mahoney who studied minority employment in the early construction phase of BART, it did not appear that JOBART made any gains during these meetings [BARTDJOBART meetings during March and April of 1966], in reality they did. Since the meetings, the District has taken steps to attempt to improve some of the housing problems. However, in the area of employment, the meetings did not change anything. (Ibid). JOBART also successfully initiated a California Fair Employment Practices Commission meeting on discrimination among BART contractors and unions, but for whatever reason, failed to participate in the hearings, and failed to make a strong case for their organizations goals. Outside of official channels JOBART held numerous protests, large and small, to publicize the issues and build pressure on the power structure. JOBARTs most successful action culminated in a march and rally on June 5, 1966. Led by West Oaklands McClymond High School Drum Corps, over 1000 people walked from 37th and Telegraph, the First A.M.E. Church, to Lakeside Park on the shore of Lake Merritt in Downtown Oakland (Flatlands: 1966d). Another thousand persons gathered with them to listen to JOBART representatives make their case for jobs, housing assistance, against the Richmond wall, and for justice in general. Reverend W. Haziah Williams, a JOBART organizer told the audience, they (BART) demand trains be beautiful and speedy. Now we demand that they (BART) be JUST. (Ibid). Another JOBART organizer, Elijah

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Turner called for direct action against BARTs seizure of West Oaklanders homes: Weve been bulldozed around one time too many its going to take a little bit more than marching. I want you to be down in West Oakland when they (BART) take these ladies homes and be down there sitting down just as you are sitting down here today. (Ibid). Protest actions continued alongside JOBARTs attempts to officially engage and work with BARTD, the city governments, State, and Federal government. JOBART activists became common sights at BARTD board meetings, Richmond and Oakland City Council meetings, at construction sites, and elsewhere. JOBART was rather effective at getting the publics attention, at disturbing the routines and expectations of authorities, and engaging every possible agency involved in the construction of BART. So why did JOBART fail to open up the unions, stop the further segregation of black neighborhoods, and win fair compensations for seized property? Using a regional or national frame of reference we would be inclined to look primarily at what JOBART did in relation to BARTD, the unions, contractors, and state and federal government. Were these actions adequate to open up these institutions, were they tactful enough to pressure governments? Did JOBART build the necessary alliances to impact institutions at this level? Recounting the history of JOBART, it seems that they did most everything they could to approach their predicament from this angle. So why did they fail? Perhaps the failure of this movement organization was due less to what they did do, and more to what they did not do. JOBART approached their problem in a local, regional, and national way. They approached BART as a regional project. JOBART activists saw BART as a transportation project determined by city, county, and state government. They saw the federal government as a key point of influence in the BART system. Because BART was financed by tax dollars they perceived BART as a project of the public at large (along many of the same lines that BARTD authorities described the project). JOBART activists were ultimately unable to outmaneuver the tactic employed by BARTD, the City of Oakland, county governments, the State and Federal government, the unions, and the contractors, which was to simply pass the buck. Each agency denied the power and

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responsibility to work with JOBART in crafting concrete solutions to the problems expressed by the Bay Areas urban minorities. This inability to act on JOBARTs proposals was certainly due in large part to BARTDs, the unions, and the States unwillingness to act. As it became clear to those in positions of power to initiate JOBART demands that JOBART was simply not a powerful enough political organization, the usual reticence set in. But JOBART may have failed for another important reason. As a project of transnational capital BART was designed primarily to benefit the corporations, banks, and institutions located in San Franciscos financial district. It was these agents that originally conceived of and carried out the campaign to make BART a reality. Transnational capital financed the public bond initiative, promoted the BART idea, and shaped the systems overall design at its earliest most critical junctures. Had JOBART targeted these institutions at some point the outcomes may have been different. Equally, because BART was initiated and propelled as a fixed project with finite financing and a permanent physical infrastructure, the supposed inability of agencies like the State and Federal governments, like the unions and contractors, and even BARTD itself to act on JOBARTs demands may have contained more truth than obfuscation. BART, as planned by and benefiting transnational capital was a project of enormous proportions with equally enormous consequences for the new racial inequalities of the Bay Area. JOBARTs attempts to use the construction of the new global metropolitan regions infrastructure as a vehicle for civil rights and social justice ran into two barriers; some local and nationally comprehensible, but others entirely unintelligible and unknown. As an early precursor to present local struggles against transnationalizing capital, JOBARTs successes and failures offer important lessons.

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Appendix A. Resolution Adopted by Job Opportunities Bay Area Rapid Transit District (JOBART), August 5, 1965. Whereas the Bay Area Rapid Transit District is being built and supported by taxes from San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa Counties and Whereas, the unemployment rate in the Bay Area has been consistently higher than in the nation as a whole, and Whereas, the three counties have many current residents, especially members of minority groups, who are unemployed or under-employed and who can be trained to fill these jobs, Whereas, it is well known that members of minority groups have had little opportunity to enter the local building and construction trades through Norman channels, and Whereas, BARTD will employ at least 8,000 people during peak periods of construction, and Whereas, shortages will develop in some occupations which local unions cannot fill from their current lists, and Whereas, on-the-job training can and should be provided in the skilled trades required in BARTD construction, THEREFORE LET IT BE RESOLVED, that the following provision be incorporated in BARTDs labor agreements with its contractors: 1. BARTD employees shall be recruited solely from current residents of the three Transit District Counties; 2. Those employed shall include significant numbers of minority group members; 3. Employers and unions shall actively promote upgrading of workers, particularly among minority groups, who are already employed in the construction industry in the lower classifications; 4. On-the-Job training, including bilingual instruction where needed will be given such employees where necessary to meet labor needs of the contractors; 5. Trainees shall be given full union membership rights during the training period; 6. BART will advise this group and any other interested parties of contract being awarded, including names of employers, job classifications required and other pertinent information; 7. BARTs contracting employers and unions shall keep statistical records of employees by job classification and minority group membership and shall make these statistics publicly available. (JOBART: 1965)

Appendix B. Justice on Bay Area Rapid Transit JOBART Demands to BART No BART contracts are valid which do not include the negotiated conditions of the JOBART proposals. 1) 2) 3) BART employees shall be recruited solely from current residents of the three Transit District Counties. Those employed shall include significant numbers of minority groups members. Every effort must be made to provide employment for local residents who have previously received skilled trade training and have been unable to find employment in their trades because of historic patters of discrimination. (b) Employers and unions shall actively promote upgrading of workers who are already employed in the construction industry in the lower classifications. (c) Utilizing resources, such as the Manpower Development Training Act, BART will take the initiative in promoting on-the-job training programs to quickly establish journeymen skill levels among minority groups. Bilingual instruction must be provided where needed. Trainees shall be given full union membership rights. (a) BART will advise this group and any other interested parties of contracts being awarded, including names of employers, job classifications and specifications required and other pertinent information. BART will also affirm that a full complement of apprentices and trainees is being provided for by participating contractors on a non-discriminatory basis. BARTs contracting employers and unions shall keep statistical records of employees including all trainees by job classification and minority groups membership, and shall make these statistics publicly available and ART shall be given these statistics.

4) 5) 6)

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Housing and Relocation JOBART demands that the following conditions be incorporated into a BART housing-policy statement. This statement is to be sent to each affected resident and copies are to be made available to the general public. 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) The actual cost of moving for all tenants and property owners affected by BART shall be secured by BART Replacement cost shall be the criteria in purchase of all properties by BART Prior to any eviction BART shall secure housing comparable to that from which the tenant or property owner is to be removed. A letter must be sent by BART to all tenants and homeowners for use in applying for public housing which explains that these residents are being removed by BART. A uniform method must be used by BART in contacting local residents in the affected areas. (a) BART representatives must make appointments by phone of mail before visiting residents. (b) BART representatives must present proper identification. (c) BART must use the same representative in its dealings with any individual affected by BART. Richmond Wall 1) 2) 3) BART will not construct a ground level system in the City of Richmond. BART will not construct a system in the City of Richmond which will restrain, restrict or imprison the Negro ghetto, nor reinforce the present division along racial lines within the city. BART shall insure that neither vehicular, pedestrian or visual communication across the line of construction will be significantly restricted as a result of the BART system.

(JOBART: 1966)

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Bibliography BARTD. History of BART: 1946-1972. http://www.bart.gov/about/history/history_1.asp BARTD. BART and the ghettos. Bay Area Rapid Transit District. San Francisco, 1969. BARTD. Rapid Transit. March-May, 1965. V. 7, No. 4. BARTD. Rapid Transit. January-February, 1966. V. 8, No. 2. Bernardi, Gene. Evaluation analysis of the Council of Social Planning's neighborhood organization program. Oakland, Calif., Dept. of Human Resources, 1966. Burrowoy, Michael et al. Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. UC Press, c.2000. Carlsson, Chris. Tom Fleming on Mayor Lapham and Blacks in SF Shaping San Francisco, 1999. http://www.archive.org/movies/movieslisting-browse.php?collection=shaping_sf&cat=Mayor%20Lapham Castells, Manuel. The informational city : information technology, economic restructuring, and the urbanregional process. Massachusetts: B. Blackwell, 1999. La Question Urbaine. Paris, F. Maspero, 1972. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford ; Malden, Mass. : Blackwell Publishers, 2000 (2001 printing) Chicago Commission on Race Relations. The Negro in Chicago; a study of race relations and a race riot by the Chicago commission on race relations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922. Dvett, Michael et al. The impact of BART on land use and urban development : interpretive summary of the final report. BART Impact Program. Springfield, Virginia: Dept. of Transportation, 1980. Fike, Thomas L. Letter to Mr. Adrien J. Falk, cc. Mr. B.R. Stokes. March 16, 1966. Contained in: Bernardi, Gene. Evaluation analysis of the Council of Social Planning's neighborhood organization program. Oakland, Calif., Dept. of Human Resources, 1966. Fike, Thomas L. & Eugene Drew. Letter to Honorable Jeffery Cohelan. August 31, 1966. Contained in: Bernardi, Gene. Evaluation analysis of the Council of Social Planning's neighborhood organization program. Oakland, Calif., Dept. of Human Resources, 1966. Flatlands 1966a. Flatlands 1966b. Flatlands 1966c. Flatlands 1966d. May 21 to June4. March 12. April 9. June 18 to July 1, 1966.

Foner, Philip S. Organized Labor and the Black Worker. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974. Griffler, Keith P. What Price Alliance?: Black Radicals Confront White Labor. New York: Garland, c1995. Honey, Michael K. Black workers remember : an oral history of segregation, unionism, and the freedom struggle. Berkeley : University of California Press, c1999. JOBART. Resolution Adopted by Job Opportunities Bay Area Rapid Transit District (JOBART). August 5, 1965. Contained in, Lathan, Arthur. Letter to Mr. Adrien J. Falk. August 9, 1965. Courtesy of

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the Carl Albert Center Congressional Research and Studies Center Congressional Archives. University of Okalahoma. JOBART. JOBART Demands to BART. March 16, 1966. Contained in, Bernardi, Gene. Evaluation analysis of the Council of Social Planning's neighborhood organization program. Oakland, Calif., Dept. of Human Resources, 1966. Joint Army-Navy Board on an Additional Crossing of San Francisco Bay. Report of Joint Army-Navy Board on an Additional Crossing of San Francisco Bay. San Francisco: January 25, 1947. Lathan, Arthur. Letter to Mr. Adrien J. Falk. August 9, 1965. Courtesy of the Carl Albert Center Congressional Research and Studies Center Congressional Archives, University of Okalahoma. Madigan, Tim. The burning : massacre, destruction, and the Tulsa race riot of 1921. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2001. Mahoney, Patrick J. Minority Employment in the Construction of BART. July 1966. Meyer, Stephen G. As long as they don't move next door : segregation and racial conflict in American neighborhoods. Rowman & Littlefield, c2000 Oakland Tribune. Protestors Stage Watermelon Eat-In. July 21, 1966a. Oakland Tribune. Job Rights Asked in BART Project. August 23, 1966. Rodriguez, Joseph A. Rapid Transit and Community Power: West Oakland Residents Confront BART. Antipode 31:2, 1999. Rudwick, Elliot M. Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press [1964] Saskia Sassen. Global City. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2001. Self, Robert O. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton University Press, 2003. Skaburskis, Andrejs. The Impacts of BART on Property Values: A Case Study of the Rockridge Neighborhood. BART Impact Program. BARTD: January, 1976. Stokes, B.R. Letter to Mr. Thomas L. Fike. March 18, 1966. Contained in: Bernardi, Gene. Evaluation analysis of the Council of Social Planning's neighborhood organization program. Oakland, Calif., Dept. of Human Resources, 1966. Letter to Mr. Thomas L. Fike. April 21, 1966. Contained in: Bernardi, Gene. Evaluation analysis of the Council of Social Planning's neighborhood organization program. Oakland, Calif., Dept. of Human Resources, 1966. Letter to Mr. Arthur Lathan. October 20, 1965. Vetere, Albert L. Fight or Be Slaves. University Press of America, 2000. Whitt, J. Allen. Urban Elites and Mass Transportation. Princeton University Press, 1982. Zukin, Sharon. The Best and Worst of Cities: A Review of Global City. Contemporary Sociology. Vol. 21, No. 4 (Jul., 1992), pp. 481-484.

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