Ivy Reid Lewis | Interview 2 | September 14, 2006

WILMOT: And we're recording. Okay. This is Interview #2 with Ivy Reid Lewis. It is September 14, 2006, and good afternoon.

LEWIS: Good afternoon.

WILMOT: I'm glad we found the time today.

LEWIS: Yeah, I am, too.

WILMOT: Just to start -- there was a story I had heard secondhand from someone else and I wanted to ask you about it. This was the story about World War II and how your neighbors responded and talked to you about the influx of African Americans from the south during World War II.

LEWIS: You know, my family moved to Richmond in 1935. And we lived in North Richmond, which was primarily Italian, Portuguese -- it was European mostly -- a 00:01:00few black families and a few Mexican-American families, but predominantly Italian. And we bought a house and our neighbors were the Costas -- Mary Costa. One day she came over to my mother's. Our property adjoined each other. They had a great big garden -- North Richmond was rural. Everybody had a garden. And she said, "Ms. Reid, have you heard that you have to move because all of these black people are coming from the south? Aren't you going to move?" [laughs] And my mother said, "I don't know where I'm going to move to. No," she said, "we don't plan to move."

And unfortunately Mary Costa was one of the first victims. Somebody beat her up at the bus stop and her family did move, but her husband didn't move. He stayed in the house there until he died. But that was a transition that took place in North Richmond. North Richmond was primarily not a black community. I am not 00:02:00sure how many black families there were, but there were not very many in North Richmond, and so the transition took place and most of the white people moved out and black people moved in.

People wanted to rent our garage, chicken houses, any place that they could live. There really wasn't any place for people to live. So, the county part of North Richmond didn't have paved roads. It had all dirt roads. And there was a lot of truck farms. And so these people just moved in with tents and whatever they could put together and overnight it grew up like a little shantytown. And that's when the population in North Richmond grew.

Most of the people that I've been noticing now that used to live in North Richmond lived -- the white people -- live in Lafayette because I've been seeing 00:03:00obituaries, a couple, like Mary [Politich?], whose family really got rich off of black people, but they never mention that. She came from North Richmond. She lived in Lafayette when she died.

WILMOT: What do you mean her family got rich off of black people?

LEWIS: Well, they had the only grocery store. It was Pete [Politich?] Market, North Richmond Grocery. Their family -- that was the only grocery store when you came into North Richmond, so actually it grew -- they became quite wealthy from that store. And then I don't remember when they moved away, but when the kids got bigger, everybody moved out. Like, Nello [Bianco?] just recently died; he was on the BART board. But his family also had a grocery store in North Richmond. The Corteses, Banduccis -- all of those people lived in North Richmond, but now that they're prominent people, they live in Lafayette and 00:04:00other areas. But they never mention that they lived in North Richmond.

WILMOT: And were these like -- did you play with the children of all these families? Were you close with -- ?

LEWIS: I went to school with them. Yeah.

WILMOT: You went to school with them. And you went over to each other's houses?

LEWIS: I went over a few people's houses. Banduccis lived over on the other side of town. There used to be water that came into North Richmond but then people used to come out there and fish and go swimming, but then Chevron cut them off with their settling pond. On the way to school, I'd stop by some kids' houses and wait for them to go to school. And sometimes I'd go down on 10th Street to play with some white kids down there. But mostly, they never came to North Richmond until after we got a park out there and then a lot of people came out to North Richmond.

WILMOT: And you mentioned that one person, Mary Costa, was the first person -- 00:05:00you said she was the first victim?

LEWIS: Well, the only victim -- I guess that she might have not been the first one, but that I knew about, because she was our neighbor. Somebody beat her up at the bus stop and robbed her.

WILMOT: During that transition time, was violence and crime very common?

LEWIS: Yes. Because, before that, you never saw anything -- once in a while, there were some Mexican people and across from our house on the corner, it used to be a beer garden, but people would just go in there after work and have beer and things like that. And there was never any violence. On the weekend, kids would go in there and I remember they used to play the beer barrel polka and all of the kids would dance and stuff. I'm talking about small children. I'm not talking about teenagers.

WILMOT: Beer barrel what?

LEWIS: Beer barrel polka.

WILMOT: What's that?

LEWIS: There was a song that was called the beer barrel polka. And that was really popular in those days. And because the people were mostly European people, that's what they played, a lot of polkas and stuff like that. And sometimes these Mexican guys -- Nacho and his brother, Lalo -- they'd sometimes get into fights with people, but very seldom we saw any fights until World War II, when all of the black people came. They were always fighting and cutting up people and beating up people. A lot of violence.

WILMOT: Amongst themselves? Was this inter- or intra-racial violence?

LEWIS: Among themselves. A lot of violence. And before, we never locked our front door. Sometimes, we'd go to my aunt's house and spend the week. We never locked the front door. Nobody ever came in our house, but after they came, you had to lock your doors.

WILMOT: Where did your aunt live again?

LEWIS: Oakland.

WILMOT: Did she live over in West Oakland? So, what do you think was going on? Why was there so much violence? What was happening? Do you have any thoughts on why that was?

LEWIS: Well, if you go to the South, in some parts it's still that way. [chuckles] When I was living in Louisiana, the black people couldn't have a dance or party unless they were shooting and fighting. Not all black people from the South are violent. However, someone once told me that the majority of blacks who came to work in the shipyards were saw mill people, whatever that meant.

WILMOT: You had mentioned that the real estate agents also had a role in kind of deciding during World War II, kind of talking to people and talking about how the neighborhoods were going to look. You had mentioned there was some red-lining.

LEWIS: There was red-lining -- I took that tour with the state park in Richmond and they went through Atchison Village. Well, Atchison Village didn't allow black people to live there when they first opened it. And during the war years, 00:08:00it was all white. And they were segregated. That's how the neighborhood councils got started with Lucretia because there was a lot of people who -- I could tell you a whole story about that. [chuckling]

WILMOT: Please do.

LEWIS: The people between the whites and the blacks couldn't get along because they were not used to living together or going to school together. We had a lot of fights in school. Between whites and blacks.

WILMOT: This was in 1940s or 1950s?

LEWIS: 1940s. And over in San Pablo, there was a lot of trailers. We called it Okie Village. A lot of people, white, poor white people lived, they migrated to San Pablo and actually, later, I guess, in the '50s, they moved out here to Concord and you go further back out Concord, the farther you go, people are all way back there and had migrated out from World War II out of the shipyards. When 00:09:00they closed the shipyards, they all moved out there. And it wasn't very many blacks at all that moved out here. Some of my neighbors here don't speak to me. I think they're Mexican, next door. And one man across the street. But most of the other people are really friendly.

But, Richmond became really -- North Richmond and parts of South Richmond -- before the war, there was just maybe three black families -- the Petgraves and the Ellisons and the Graves -- the only black people that I knew lived on the South Side.

WILMOT: Of Richmond?

LEWIS: Of Richmond. All the rest of the black people lived in North Richmond. The Malbroughs, Turners, Spencers, Morgans, Robinsons, Freemans, Chase, Bonaparts, Reids, Gordans, and the Blackmans to name a few are the families who 00:10:00lived in North Richmond. Blacks did not live in the Iron Triangle.

WILMOT: And I understand the Petgraves, they were also -- they were Jamaican.

LEWIS: I don't know. I didn't know them. I just knew where they lived -- I knew them if I saw them, but I didn't have any contact with them at all.

My father used to work with Ollie Freeman in downtown Richmond. They had a shoeshine parlor, and when my father would come off work, some evenings he'd work there. .And on the weekends he'd work there -- and I never saw a lot of discrimination in Richmond until after World War II started. Because there were a lot of places where people said, "Well, you can't go in that store," but I never had any of that. I never had a problem. I always was able to go wherever I wanted to go. But I see signs -- some lady once had a sign -- it said, "Whites 00:11:00only" and that was the Jack Newell's store over on Cutting Boulevard -- she showed this picture. We had some things on the south side of Richmond, but I never went over there so I never actually saw that sign. Downtown Richmond, I never had any problems. I always went every place I wanted to go.

WILMOT: And you mentioned that the neighborhood councils grew out of the kind of hostility or the ways that blacks and whites couldn't live together? And I wonder --

LEWIS: That was in the war housing, Harborgate, Seaside, and those areas. It seems like -- I was too young to know about them but since then I have read some of the material -- that's when they started to try to get people together, to work together, but it didn't work out. I know that when I went to Junior High School -- I think I told you this -- about how they were asking to make the school segregated and then Earl Warren was the governor, and he said that he 00:12:00went to school with blacks and his kids did and if they didn't like it, they could go back where they came from. They were not going to have segregated schools in California. So, there was a lot of that. People didn't want to sit next to you on the buses. It was a lot of hostility, but we lived through it all I guess. [laughs] If you have lived out of California, you know that California is probably more liberal than a lot of states. If you go other places, you'll see it still. It hasn't changed that much. People still have their old hostilities. In wartime, Richmond's downtown really grew. There were only two theaters in Richmond, but after World War II, we had about five theaters in downtown Richmond, a lot of stores, a lot of people, it was really strange.

WILMOT: So, did the real estate agents actually try and scare people out of the area?

LEWIS: Well, they really did redline. If you were black, you could not buy anything out of North Richmond. You couldn't move anyplace. And I think that later, about in the 50s, it changed, and people started moving. And I remember this -- maybe I shouldn't call by name -- but this guy used to go to school with me and they lived over at Iron Triangle, and they lived in a little shack of a house. Their house was -- they were poor, white people. They were not rich working-class white people, but they all had little houses. But after the blacks moved in there, the neighborhoods all start running down, and he was saying, what a shame, but their house wasn't any good anyway to begin with. [laughs] So I mean, it didn't take much for it to run down. After that, the Iron Triangle started to become all black.

And you know, Tom [Butt?] recently had an article in his newsletter, which is 00:14:00not true. He said that the Hilltop Mall Shopping Center closed up Downtown Richmond and that's not true at all. The Redevelopment Agency and Napoleon Britt closed up downtown Richmond. The Redevelopment Agency essentially moved whites from downtown Richmond.

WILMOT: Tell me about that.

LEWIS: All of the neighborhoods surrounding downtown Richmond in the Iron Triangle were white. There were really nice homes. From Lucas Avenue and from 5th Street over to 14th Street, north of MacDonald Avenue, Richmond's Redevelopment Project. I don't remember the boundaries of the project, but it 00:15:00was white removal. They bought all of these homes and businesses, and tore them down. The redevelopment agency and Napoleon Britt closed up downtown Richmond. Hilltop Mall might nailed the lid on the coffin, but it was already dead.

On 10th and Barrett, there was a big Episcopal Church. There were apartment buildings, nice homes. All those things were torn down. And so downtown Richmond, people started moving out. Businesses started just leaving. They moved the population that supported downtown Richmond away. But Tom Butt hasn't been here that long, so he doesn't know that. I don't know where he got that information, but it's wrong. And sometimes I read stuff where people say they 00:16:00were historians for Richmond, and they don't have it right at all.

WILMOT: I wonder who you're thinking of --

LEWIS: I don't know. I don't know their names. I know I read a book once, or I read an excerpt from a book, about North Richmond, talked about the cabbage patches. I never saw any cabbage in North Richmond, so I don't know what they were talking about. But people get it all wrong. But North Richmond, you'd have to live there and see how it evolved after it became an all-black ghetto. There were some Spanish-speaking people. A few white people lived in North Richmond. Not very many.

But then, during World War II, they started to have nightclubs and everything going on and I can remember, down at the Dew Drop Inn, and the Savoy Club, and I 00:17:00can't think of the other names. Jimmy McCracklin's. All people would always come to Richmond, to North Richmond, to go to all these nightclubs and I guess it was an era of the blues that really evolved in North Richmond.

WILMOT: Was it blues?

LEWIS: It was blues and -- I don't think it was rhythm and blues, but just maybe blues. And down at Tapper's Inn, everybody, I mean, people would come from all over to go down there, and they'd have Hedda Brooks and Louis Jordan and all those people that got to be important in those days. Of course, you don't know anything about them. [laughs]

WILMOT: Well, you know, actually there was a project that came out of where I 00:18:00work at ROHO which is focused on the blues and the musicians in West Oakland and Richmond, so Jimmy McCracklin was interviewed as part of that.

LEWIS: He had a club in Richmond.

WILMOT: Yeah, so he was interviewed. I mean, it was -- so I have heard some of these names, but of course there are a lot of people I don't know of. And it's not my specialty, my area either, so --

LEWIS: I have a newspaper someplace if I find it, and it talks about all the different blues, you know, the different nightspots and different things in Richmond. Like, on Sunday afternoon, they would have like blues festivals and people would just jam out to North Richmond, and go to all those things. It was really kind of exciting.

WILMOT: Did you used to go out and dance?

LEWIS: No. I wasn't old enough, really, but I used to go sometimes and watch.

WILMOT: And what do you remember seeing?

LEWIS: [chuckles] People dancing and drinking -- but it was really -- the atmosphere. You know, North Richmond before, it was like nothing. There was never anything there. Not even streetlights. It was just an old country place. People had chickens and cows. So to see all these things, it was cool for a kid. It was really quite interesting.

WILMOT: Were people beautifully dressed? Did they wear gorgeous clothing?

LEWIS: My father worked at Mare Island and he would invite people over on Sunday for dinner and they came dressed up. Yeah. But a lot of people were really poor, 00:20:00you know.

I can tell you one thing I remember about World War II. Most of the people who came here, they had rotten teeth. Their teeth were really in bad shape. I mean, not taken care of at all. And you could see how poor some people were. I'm talking from a child's perspective, there were just a lot of poor people. Both white and black poor people and some people used to sleep in theaters.

And my father always had a ball team. My father had two or three ball teams and on Sundays he used to play games out in North Richmond Ballpark, and people would come from all over to see the games. We had the Spiders and the Spiderettes, the girl's team, and they had a lot of stuff. I mean, you just 00:21:00would have had to have been there. Richmond changed completely overnight.

WILMOT: Where did you go to get your hair done when you were little?

LEWIS: I never.

WILMOT: You never did?

LEWIS: I did it myself.

WILMOT: You did it yourself. Like your mom did it or -- ?

LEWIS: We all had long hair and we had to wear braids. We didn't go to the beauty parlor. But they had them. I remember when Miss Norveline [Harris] came to North Richmond.

WILMOT: Tell me about her.

LEWIS: Miss Norvaline and her family, they moved to North Richmond, and then she opened up a beauty shop and people used to go over there all of the time. Once in a while, I would get to go to Norveline but they never did my hair right because I have natural, curly hair, and they'd always wanted to straighten my hair out. My mother didn't let us go. We could do our own hair. But once in a while, like if I was in somebody's wedding or something, I would get to go to Miss Norveline.

WILMOT: What was it like going to Miss Norveline's house? Was it her house or 00:22:00was it a shop or --

LEWIS: She had her shop in her house. It was on 4th Street across from Davis Chapel, and then she moved down on 7th Street, which became a redevelopment area, and then she relocated to the south side.

In fact, Davis Chapel, that's an interesting story because my best friend was Gloria -- her name was Gloria Harris, but her name is Gloria Spearman now -- and my other friend, Jeannie Surlock, we all used to go down and play with Reverend Davis' daughters, he had two daughters and they came to Richmond. At the time, I didn't know that they were planning to build a church or anything -- but I was at the first meeting they had to plan to build Davis Chapel Church. But Gloria and her mother were Methodist -- I was Episcopalian at that time, and I didn't 00:23:00go to the Methodist Church, but later I joined the Methodist Church and I still belong. But I was there when they planned at the first meeting to build Davis Chapel, and I remember Reverend Davis -- there's a film -- I don't know who has the film, but I saw it once, and he was on the corner of 10th and McDonald when all the shipyard workers were getting off. You have no idea how downtown Richmond looked. I mean, people were walking all over. It was always jam-packed full of people. And he would be asking people to help him build the church, and he was passing his hat. I don't remember if he had something that he put the money in, but he was always asking people to help him build a church.

And I remember Richard Granzella. And Richard Granzella and Nelson Carter used 00:24:00to walk -- I think I told you this before -- and he became the owner of Richmond's Sanitary District.

WILMOT: Is he Alfred Granzella's--?

LEWIS: Yeah. He's Alfred Granzella's brother, but I went to school with Alfred. Alfred Granzella's -- Richard Granzella is older than I, but I used to watch him -- that's what a lot of people used to do. They'd dump trash and garbage, and just go out there and just dump stuff and then a lot of people would go out and -- I don't know what they'd collect, but a whole bunch of junk from out of there and sell it. But then Richie used to go out there all the time, him and Nelson, and then he became the owner of it. I don't know how it went, but anyway, I know that he became rich.

I brought this book to show you. This is a book of Jocelyn Elders, and here on 00:25:00this page, if you'll read it, I don't have my glasses --

WILMOT: Hold on one second. Would you say that one more time? This is the book of Joycelyn Elders?

LEWIS: "When we moved to California," read that part right there.

WILMOT: Okay. I'm going to move this. Hold on. Just read the first part?

LEWIS: When we said, when we moved to California. Right down there in that paragraph?

WILMOT: Okay. [reads] "When we arrived in California, we stayed with our cousins in Richmond at 1361 Kelsey Street. Our cousins had a large place they'd renovated into a rooming house with apartments for rent to the many relatives who were leaving the farm and moving to California to work in the shipyards during World War II. The cousins with whom we lived were Beryl and Charlie Reid and their children Ivy, Florence and Charlie Junior. They had moved to California with the first wave of sharecroppers who had left the south during the Depression. Beryl and Charlie, in particular, had been able to find work, and for Negroes at that time, were doing quite well economically. They had work in the shipyards and factories, pooled their money, and purchased a large 00:26:00rooming house located on the edge of the city limits of Richmond."

LEWIS: Yeah. Well we -- Chester Ray wrote that [laughs] and Chester Ray was a baby when his mother was in California so he doesn't really know our history, but that's his view of how we got to move together.

WILMOT: I didn't know she was your cousin.

LEWIS: They're not really my cousins, but we got to be very good friends. In 1996 when I was living in Louisiana and I had to go to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and I called him up and told him I was there, and I hadn't seen him since he was a baby, and he came over, he and his wife. He's a minister in a Methodist Church, United Methodist Church, and we had got to talk and that was really nice. But he, I guess someone told him that we were there cousins. They stayed with us, 00:27:00and my mother and his mother got to be very good friends.

WILMOT: It's interesting, too. They said that you were -- your family came from the first wave of sharecroppers to come from the south, which also was not your story.

LEWIS: Was not true, but that's what probably he thought because they were sharecroppers and they came and I had not realized how hard she had -- Minnie had to work. When we were children, I was two years older than she, and she would always tell me, "When I get to be grown, I'm going to change my name to Joycelyn," because she didn't like Minnie Lee. She was named after her mother's mother. Her grandmother. And she didn't like that name. But she turned out to be the Surgeon General under the Clinton administration. But they were always smart. The kids were really smart. I think one of her brothers was a veterinarian and they all did very well after growing up.

WILMOT: So, what year did the neighborhood councils begin?

LEWIS: The neighborhood councils, probably somewhere about in the -- maybe in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Probably the early 1950s, when there was a lot of people after the war was over and there were not a lot of jobs, but people were still living in war-time housing. And I don't remember, I can't tell you when they started to tear down the war-time housing, but that's when a lot of people started moving out here, to Concord, white people moving, and the black people were sort of -- just like in Oakland, all of East Oakland never was black until after World War II. And then all of the people started migrating back that way. 00:29:00Because San Leandro, Hayward, all those places were farms. You could go out there on Sunday and people would go out to buy produce. Like you would go to the farmer's market. I remember San Leandro, you could buy peaches and plums and different kinds of things like that. And also, when I was a kid, after World War II, a lot of people worked in the harvest, so we would go in the summertime and work in the harvest. In Walnut Creek, you could pick walnuts here. They had all kinds of walnut trees and peaches, plums, let's see, tomatoes -- a lot of people worked in the harvest. That area was mostly agricultural. My aunt got married in maybe 1943 or 1944, and she lived out on A Street. We would say, "Oh, you're 00:30:00going to go way out to A Street in East Oakland." Her family was maybe one of the first blacks who moved out there. There were no black people out there, and that's the same thing that happened in Richmond.

WILMOT: Was she very fair?

LEWIS: Mm hmm. Yeah. You know Betty Reid Soskin? My aunt was Maybelle Allen, and she was fair skinned. So was her husband.

WILMOT: That's who gave me your name.

LEWIS: I think my uncle, my aunt's husband was Betty's cousin. They're related in some kind of way. But she has it on her Web site, so if you want to look at the Web site, you can see it there.

But that's the same thing that happened in Richmond, San Pablo -- all of the white people start moving this way --

WILMOT: Over the mountains?

LEWIS: Over the mountains, and the black people sort of grew in Oakland and Richmond. Just -- Berkeley was always kind of integrated a little bit. It wasn't as -- it wasn't as separated by race as Richmond and Oakland. But Oakland hills, all of the black people moved all over there. There was never any before that. And San Francisco, I can't tell you about, but I knew that in San Francisco, like the Fillmore, they used to be black, but now it's gone. I have a magazine that talks about the black population, about it leaving San Francisco.

WILMOT: Well, I think the black population left San Francisco a while back, if we're thinking about Fillmore. But --

LEWIS: No, I have a book that's a San Franciscan --

WILMOT: Are they talking about the Bayview Hunter's Point now?

LEWIS: No, they're not talking about that. I haven't been reading it but it just gives you statistics on how many blacks used to live in San Francisco, but now 00:32:00they don't. Another thing that happened in Richmond that made a big change, too -- after World War II, Ford Motor Company moved to Milpitas.

WILMOT: I'm sorry. Would you say that one more time?

LEWIS: The Ford Motor Company moved to Milpitas.

WILMOT: After World War II?

LEWIS: And a lot of people moved down to East Palo Alto. That's actually how East Palo Alto grew up into being a black neighborhood. A lot of black people migrated down there. They bought new homes in East Palo Alto and they worked in Milpitas.

WILMOT: And Milpitas was --

LEWIS: The Ford Motor Company --

WILMOT: The Ford Motor Company --

LEWIS: -- moved to Milpitas. It used to be down on Tenth Street in Richmond.

WILMOT: So you would just cross over the Dumbarton Bridge, take it to Milpitas --

LEWIS: The reason I think that they had to move -- you know, I always wondered why they moved to East Palo Alto, and in those days, they advertised a lot of 00:33:00new homes out there, and I don't think they had homes for sale in Milpitas. Milpitas was like a big open field. I mean, there was nothing there. All that area -- San Leandro, San Lorenzo, Hayward, Freemont -- all that was just open fields. I mean, a few people had farms and stuff, but it's not -- like now you can go out and look at new housing, but they didn't have that then in those days. I remember people moving down to East Palo Alto to buy a new home, and they worked at Ford Motor Company. So that was another migration out of Richmond.

But Richmond and Oakland sort of became the center for all of these people coming from the south, white and black, so that's how a lot of these areas just 00:34:00grew up, grew out of that. And I remember people saying that -- because since I've been back to the south, a lot of people would talk about how their families came, but some of them didn't come and most of the people that stayed back there were more black professional people because the poorer people came here. We got most of the poor people that came out of the south, came to the shipyards to work. So.But the red-lining went on until about the '50s, and then people started spilling over into the Iron Triangle, if I can remember dates but I can't -- I can just remember things happening. It must have been sometime in the '50s, the late '50s, Coronado School was built and that was supposed to be a junior high school, but the white people refused to send their children there 00:35:00because Coronado was turning black, so they turned it into a grammar school, which it is today, but it was supposed to be a junior high school.

But the neighborhood -- now Coronado was really a nice area. And it started becoming all black and then the Southside became all black. For instance, when they built Easter Hill, it was on the cover of Look Magazine as one of the new modern developments after World War II, a lot of veterans lived there. Mostly white. No blacks. They lived there while they went to school on the GI Bill. And then after they moved out, the wave turned again and blacks started moving in and it became public housing. It was low-cost housing. And the Welfare Rights 00:36:00Organization started over there, thriving, really going great, doing all kinds of things. So, if you look at the history, you can see different transitions taking place, and now I understand that North Richmond is in transition again. And our church is going to build a $1.5 million dollar church there, back in our old spot where it burnt down on Fourth and Chesley. So we just got our building permits, so we should start building soon, and new housing is being built in North Richmond -- and the populating is turning Hispanic.

WILMOT: Let me ask you this question while I adjust this -- where do most of the members of your church live?

LEWIS: Oh, well most of them grew up in North Richmond and now live in Hercules and Oakland, different areas out here. Some live in Suison, Fairfield, Vallejo, 00:37:00but most of them do not live in North Richmond. My sister still lives in North Richmond, but few families still live in North Richmond. But they wanted to go back to their old spot where their church was before, so that's why they're building it there.

WILMOT: On that neighborhood where the old site and the new church will be, what's in that neighborhood now?

LEWIS: It's basically the same as it was, but a lot more Mexicans live there now.

WILMOT: Interesting.

LEWIS: My family, my father, in 1947 was a playground director in North Richmond, and he was always buying kids something. You know, people would go to 00:38:00work and leave their kids at the park and my father would take care of them. [laughs] Most of the kids would tell you -- if they are in their '50s now, they would say, "Well, Mr. Reid raised us in the park." But he started, because the kids didn't have a lot, and after World War II, people had a lot of hard times, you know, working and not making much money and trying hard to find jobs, but he was always buying stuff for kids. So he started a Christmas party with California Highway Patrol, Inspector Lieber and Captain Brooks came out and they wanted to do something for the kids of North Richmond, so my father started this Christmas party with them.

And this year, I think it's going to be our 59th anniversary. We still do it every year. After my father died, some of the ministers in the community came to me -- I wasn't going to have the Christmas party and asked me to "Please have the Christmas party." My father died in 1979. And so I started giving the 00:39:00Christmas party myself and then my children started helping -- and then my nieces and nephews started helping and so now they mostly take over. I'm still the president of the Charles Reid Foundation, but last year, my daughter died. She was the person who made the party happen. It has become a family tradition and an annual event for the children in North Richmond.

So we have noticed, now, most of the children who come are Spanish-speaking. But we see two generations; we have people who came when they were children and now they're bringing their grandchildren and now their grandchildren are bringing their children. So it's sort of like a homecoming. People will come back and 00:40:00say, "We came to this party when we were kids." And now we have one person -- I've known his mother since I was four years old. When we moved to North Richmond, they were here. Their name was [Nzunzas?] and Danny comes every year. He brings bicycles and everything for the kids at Christmastime. And people just come out and bring all kinds of things. And last year we held two Christmas parties last year. We had 1,500 children.

WILMOT: Did you have 1,500 gifts?

LEWIS: Oh, we have gifts galore. People donate everything and our business also gives money to purchase toys. We have a family business, we have one business in San Francisco and one in Richmond, and the San Francisco Fire Department gave us 00:41:00a lot of toys last year. And a couple of years ago, my son, when he got out of college, he was drafted by the 49ers to come and try out, but they had the football strike so he never got to play. And after that he went into business so a couple of years ago the Retired NFL Player's Association to come in with us and every year we have retired football players. We have Benny Barnes from the Dallas Cowboys and Honor Jackson, I think he's of the Baltimore Colts, and Charlie Weaver from the Detroit Lions. We have all kinds of guys come out and play Santa Claus. And it's really touching because if you see the kids, who are really poor, sometimes those men cry. And they really fight over who gets to be Santa Claus. [laughs] We have a lot of gifts, so you know. My father didn't 00:42:00distinguish between anybody. He always wanted to help children, so it doesn't matter that our population is changing. We still want to help children, so it's really rewarding.

WILMOT: Your church, is the congregation starting to change, too, in terms of -- are there more Spanish-speaking folks?

LEWIS: No.

WILMOT: Is it primarily African American?

LEWIS: It's primarily African American. I think before we had a few white families that belonged to our church, like inter-marriage, we had a few Filipinos in our church, but mostly primarily African Americans.

WILMOT: Is there a generational transfer happening so that there are young people who are members in the church? Is that --

LEWIS: You know the problem we've been having -- we do have young people in our church but we have a serious problem because our church has been burned down 00:43:00about four years now. We're just now getting able to build a new church, and so we have to share a church with another church.

WILMOT: Which one?

LEWIS: We share with St. Peter's in El Cerrito, so we have early-morning services at 8 o'clock, so we don't get a lot of young children -- sometimes, we get a lot of children, but not often. I think it's too early. Like I have to get up at 5:30 because I sing in the choir, and I have to get there at 8 o'clock. I must leave here no later than 7:10 or so I think people don't wake their children up that early. Hopefully, when we get our new church, will go back to 10:30, 11 o'clock services, and we'll have more children.

WILMOT: But there are like young people?

LEWIS: Oh, yeah. There are a lot of young people in our church.

WILMOT: That's great. So, your father is a very well known figure in Richmond, 00:44:00and I wanted to ask you what it was like to be the daughter of this very well known person in Richmond.

LEWIS: Well, you know, when you're growing up you don't realize that, but I could never do anything or anything bad because everybody knew I was Mr. Reid's daughter so that was a kind of disadvantage, but people see me now, you know, I was in Los Angeles getting on a bus one day and a lady said, "Aren't you Mr. Reid's daughter?" and I said, "Yeah." See, a lot of people knew my father because he used to have those ballgames, but then before that, when he lived in Oakland and he was a semi-pro professional baseball player and he played for the Oakland Pierce Giants, he was well known then. And then when we moved to Richmond -- he went to a ballgame out at Nichol's Park, and those games used to be really big in Richmond. I mean everybody came out to those games, and the 00:45:00Richmond Merchants were playing and somebody recognized my father sitting in the stands and they asked him to come and umpire the game. And then he started umpiring all of the games at Nichol's Park. He even umpired when we would play -- we had a girl's league. We'd play softball.

My father was a person who always wanted to help people. You know, he grew up, and he was one of the best pitchers around in the Bay Area, but he could never get to the big leagues because he was black. And he had a lot of friends who were white who would say, "Charlie, if you were white, you'd be in the big leagues," you know. He was just a really excellent pitcher. So, because of that, he really tried to help -- I mean, I don't know how many young men he helped get into college. The coaches from other states would call him and ask him--I don't know how they knew about him -- but they would ask him if he had any good 00:46:00players, baseball or basketball, he'd want to send to their schools, and he got a lot of scholarships for kids to go out of state schools. He had a lifetime membership in the PTA and he was just really involved with kids and sports. And so, that's how most of the people knew him. When he died, I don't know -- we had maybe 500, 600 people at his funeral. I mean, he was just well known from the work he did with children.

WILMOT: Did he ever talk to you about what that was like? To be so talented and yet unable to pursue his career due to racial discrimination? Did he ever talk to you about that?

LEWIS: About -- because he was --

WILMOT: Being such a brilliant pitcher but being black and not being able to go forward.

LEWIS: I think that it really bothered him, because he talked about it, and -- he talked about it a lot, how he grew up in Berkeley and how it was in the 00:47:00neighborhoods, and you know, they had 13 children in their family and he said, I remember my father telling me this in 1919 when they had the epidemic, influenza they called it. And my father had to go to work -- I think he was only 16 years old -- and he had to drive a truck, delivering coal to people to burn in their stove. And he would drive up in the hills because, he said, nobody else could work in the family, they all had the flu. And he used to go down to San Pablo Park, in Berkeley, and play ball and he'd play with Chick [Haffie?], which -- I don't know who these people are, but I remember him calling their names -- Chick 00:48:00[Haffie?], some more guys who, eventually, went to the big leagues. And I think he really felt bad because he was discriminated against. I remember my mother said that he used to pitch in the Negro League, semi-professional league, and some days, I guess back in those days, he would make $100 on a Sunday, pitching. The best game he told me he played up in Ukiah, probably in Ukiah, and it was like a 1-0 game. That's what the score was. 1-0. But, he talked about that a lot. That's why he always encouraged young people to go to school and get a good education. If they could get a scholarship using sports, that was fine. And I remember a lot of times kids would graduate and their parents couldn't afford to 00:49:00buy them clothes and he would buy them suits. When he died, the biggest bill we had to pay was a sports because he kept buying kids school, spikes, and mitts and stuff, for kids. He really pushed them into sports.

WILMOT: And you found that debt after he passed?

LEWIS: Oh, no. We knew that he did that, but I'm just saying, my mother would say that was the biggest bill we had to pay after he died. Yep. He was really into--[laughter] our house was always full of people, ball teams, all kinds of things. Before they built the playground over on Kelsey Street, we had a big house and we had a big yard and we'd have wiener roasts and kids would come in our house and dance and have all kinds of parties and stuff. We always had something going on.

WILMOT: Sounds like fun.

LEWIS: Yeah, it was busy. I mean, we were always doing something. Every Sunday we had ballgames and we used to travel to ballgames. I remember we'd come down to Pittsburg and play. They had a big park in Pittsburg. We'd go over, up to Ukiah, all over playing ball. That was his whole life.

WILMOT: Okay. I want to stop and change my recording media. And then we'll move on.

LEWIS: -- about World War II, I remember the time when there was nothing. You couldn't buy leather shoes. [chuckling] I remember I had some shoes, once, that my mother bought me. They were made of canvas and they had wooden soles. And the wood, you know those little popsicle sticks? They were like a lot of little popsicle sticks so they actually bent in like this, but they were not good to 00:51:00walk in. So most of the people started buying huaraches you know what huaraches are -- and that was one of the things that teenagers -- we wore huaraches because that was the only place you could get leather shoes. You couldn't buy them in the United States. They all went to the war effort. You couldn't buy sugar, butter, anything like that. You had to have stamps. You had a book of stamps and everything was rationed. So, if you didn't have a stamp, you couldn't buy it.

WILMOT: I think it was you talking about somehow you had enough stamps all of the time. I think you had a system set up.

LEWIS: Well, my mother -- yeah. I mean, you could buy stuff on the black market. They had a black market where you could buy butter and stuff like that. We never. Not that I know of, we didn't buy it from there, but it was really 00:52:00interesting that people take everything for granted, but when you really have a big war, like they talk about the Iraq War, that's not really a big war. I mean, it's some little war, although it's killing people and it's a tragedy. But when your country really goes to war, you don't have a lot of things. You have to really live differently. You had to have black shades on your windows and stuff like that. Of course, if we had another war, it wouldn't be the same. That war was a minor war, I guess, actually, in terms of having it, because now we have atomic bombs and stuff like that.

Then, they thought, if they bombed your house you could put the fire out -- they went around and gave people sand and another thing you could pump water with. They gave that to all the people in their homes, Richmond really came like from 00:53:00a sleeping little town to a big -- to almost like a big city, I guess, in World War II. The population in 1940 was something like 20,000 and in a matter of months it grew to over 100,000.

I want to donate some things to the Richmond Museum. I have pictures of the school before World War II and how the classes looked, and how many black children were in the schools and how, at that time, Peres School was mostly an all-white school. So it all changed.

And then, I remember, Hercules, Pinole, Crockett, I think it was -- Crockett was in another school district but Hercules, Pinole, everybody had to go to Richmond High School because they really didn't have any schools out there. It has really 00:54:00changed. And Parchester Village and all out there, it was all vacant land, the Atlas Foundry or Powder Plant was out there, and it was another little city. But all those things are all gone now. It's all changed.

I was just thinking that that might have been important in terms of how -- even in North Richmond, all of the people that lived out there had big farms. And now -- have you been out in North Richmond lately? They are changing all of the streets and they're remodeling everything and they're going to build real expensive homes. It's all really changing. It may become an all-white community again.

WILMOT: Will that be a good thing or -- ?

LEWIS: Well, I don't know if that would 00:55:00be a good thing, but it just shows how towns and cities and things go through different transitions.

WILMOT: I know that was kind of a simple question. Sorry. Thank you for giving me a complicated answer. I wanted to ask when did you started to work for the City of Richmond?

LEWIS: I was one of the first people hired when they had model cities program. I had been involved with the neighborhood councils. And I was hired in February of 1967 by the City of RichmondWILMOT: Tell me about the Model Cities program.

LEWIS: The Model Cities program is quite interesting. I had worked at Neighborhood House for a while and then when the model cities program started, they advertised for jobs and so I applied for the position as a Citizen 00:56:00Participation Coordinator, because I thought that my background with the neighborhood councils would be good for the City of. In fact, one of the planners with the City of Richmond had asked me to come out with them and do neighborhood counting. You know, you count the houses and look at the quality of housing and that sort of thing. And we did North Richmond. So anyway, I applied for that position and I think there was about 300 people that applied for that position and then it got down to 60 people and then it got down to three people, and I was one of the three people that they were going to talk to and interview. So I got that position. I really didn't have a lot of expertise in working in an office because most of my work I had done was working in the neighborhoods and 00:57:00organizing projects for different kinds of things, for people. But I had worked with social services and getting women who were on welfare to get involved in, like, activities outside of the home.

WILMOT: Clubs like women clubs? Or social clubs or --

LEWIS: Like social clubs. Like we would take them bowling, you know, try to get them out of the house. Some people really had, I'd say, mental problems from being home with a lot of kids, and I guess they didn't have hope, you know, how you have expectations that your life is going to change? Well, I don't think they had any expectations. They were sort of like in a dead-end street.

But anyway, so one of the things we talked about -- in order to make our program 00:58:00good in Richmond -- let's go back. The first neighborhood council they had was the North Richmond Neighborhood Council, which was the county of North Richmond not the city, and the Iron Triangle neighborhood council, Point Richmond, Coronado, and Santa Fe. There were five neighborhood councils.

WILMOT: Did you work with all of them or just one?

LEWIS: No, I worked with all of them. But the model cities program was a much bigger area and so I had to organize neighborhood councils where there had never been any before. Recent when I was back east, my sister-in-law showed me a news article that I had sent to her. You know, I used to be quite popular. In this article my photograph as on the front page of the paper. In the article I was talking about the councils and listed them in three categories: action oriented, 00:59:00social clubs, and issue oriented. Neighborhood councils were difficult to work with because it depended on who the president was. If the president was really a go-getter and wanted to do things, the neighborhood council was really great. But some neighborhood organizations did not have good leadership and they were hard to work with. Even though I organized new councils, I was constantly having to rebuild them. When I retired, I had organized 35 neighborhood councils. Someone asked me, what's the best way to organize a neighborhood council? The old fashioned way, you walk door to door. [laughs]

WILMOT: And that's what you did?

LEWIS: I walked all over. Up hills. Down hills. All over.

WILMOT: All over Richmond and --

LEWIS: All over Richmond, El Sobrante Hills was a new housing development. 01:00:00Fairmeade Hilltop, Richmond Annex. I walked door to door.

WILMOT: What was the idea behind the neighborhood council? What was the point?

LEWIS: Well, the point is that you wanted to involve as many people as you could in the Model Cities Program, and the best way to do it was to set up the neighborhood councils, and it truly proved to be the best way because Richmond was the third city in the United States to get funded for a Model Cities Program. And basically it was built on neighborhood councils.

WILMOT: What were the other two cities do you know?

LEWIS: I don't remember. Back east.

WILMOT: I think I could look it up, too.

LEWIS: Yeah. But, anyway, so we went on this whole thing of the neighborhood councils and I sort of -- when I originally got the material from Lucretia and 01:01:00we sort of patterned it in her style but it changed because the neighborhoods were different -- different conditions for different reasons. People were meeting. People wanted to secure their neighborhoods, and some of them were concerned about crime, and we worked with the police departments, and the same thing the next police chief is doing -- Magnus -- he's trying to get more people out, more officers in the community. And that's what we did in the neighborhood councils during the model cities years, is that we got the beat officers to meet with the neighborhood groups and he got to know the people in the community. So, because Richmond went through a period, and you'll probably know about it, and I don't remember the dates, but the police officers kept killing black men. 01:02:00Whatever their crime was, they'd just shoot them and kill them. And so the community sort of got really disenchanted with the police department so they came to me and they asked me could I work with them -- because they would try to have meetings with the community and nobody would come out to the meetings. [laughs] So I said sure, I'd work with them. And I did. And we got the beat officers to come out to the neighborhood groups and everybody got to know one another. Things got to be much better.

But it's a hard job because you can't stop. You know, you can't miss a beat. You have to constantly keep going. So what I did was I encouraged every neighborhood organization to write a newsletter and the city printed them and we did the mailing for them. So they would bring me down the articles that they wanted to go out and everything and I'd put it together for them and then we had a 01:03:00citywide newsletter with everything in it.

But part of the problem was originally, when they hired me, they wanted me to be a liaison, between the community, or a citizen's advocate for the community. But as the city council changed -- I retired like three or four months shy of 25 years. As we got new people, they began to see me as a problem because they thought that I had more power than the city council had. And so around in the -- let's see -- my husband died in 1985 -- shortly after that, I began to get a lot of problems with the city council. Some city councilmen didn't like it that -- 01:04:00because the mayor called me in and said to me, "We don't want you to be introduced when we're introduced," you know, and all kinds of crazy stuff.

But anyhow -- I fell out of grace with the city, with the city council, because they thought that I was too powerful. So they -- sometime in 19 -- let's see. When was it? '92? No. Before that. Maybe it was in 1990, '91, they moved me out of that job and put me into the parks and recreation doing special services.

WILMOT: How could they move you out of that job?

LEWIS: They did.

WILMOT: They just did?

LEWIS: They just did. And they treated me rather badly there, so I retired in 01:05:001992 after that. I was just -- it was unbearable to stay there. It was really bad.

Most of the neighborhood councils in the city I organized, a lot of people see me now and they say, Oh, they're telling me what their neighborhood councils are doing, and I'm still as ex-officio member of the Annex Neighborhood Council because I lived in the Annex. But, the neighborhood councils were really a viable part of the City of Richmond. And if they utilized the neighborhood councils, they could get more participation and more impact, you know, on what happens within the community. I still think that they're going pretty good.

One of the areas that -- see, some of the neighborhood councils were non-profit 01:06:00organizations and they had a lot of money. But some of the neighborhood councils were poor and they had small neighborhoods and they didn't have a lot of money and they didn't have a lot of political power. They didn't have a lot of muscle. So when things happened at the city, they were not able to go down to the city and really make an impact because the city council always counts votes. They see potential voters when the citizens come to council meetings.

Some neighborhoods were not getting the kind of recognition they should have. We had an issue in the Annex where a lady wanted to open a daycare center in a residential neighborhood and the people were really upset about it. Well, her husband was a retired colonel, and he knew some of the city council members, so they approved it to give her -- 47 children in a three bedroom house. And so 01:07:00people were really upset. So, then it got to be a pattern. All over the city, people who were living out of Richmond and they were coming in and wanting to put in daycare centers, so I organized the Richmond Neighborhood Coordinating Council and each neighborhood council would send a delegate to the coordinating council and an alternate. And whenever there was an issue regarding something like the daycare centers, which was a citywide problem, the neighborhood councils would all come to the city council meetings and the city council got confused.

They really got mad at me then because, "Who are all these people? This is not their neighborhood. Why are they up here talking about it?" So that's when the Richmond Neighborhood Coordinating Council was born. And it's still functioning 01:08:00today and it's really a good vehicle because it helps smaller neighborhoods and it helps the neighborhoods know what's going on citywide, what their concerns are.

WILMOT: Why daycare? Why daycare centers? Why were they all coming to Richmond? Why was that?

LEWIS: Because people were moving out of Richmond and they worked here, this area, and they didn't have a place to put their children. There was like one advertisement for a daycare center in Fairmeade Hilltop, was that it was close to the freeway, so people coming from Vallejo could just drive off and drop their children and go on to work here. Maybe not in Richmond, but maybe in Oakland or San Francisco. I don't know why. But anyway, for a while, you know how things go through phases, it went through that phase of putting daycare centers all over the city. And not that people didn't want daycare centers, but they didn't want the traffic and the congestion in their neighborhoods, the smog 01:09:00-- for instance, the house that was in the Annex was on a corner but it was a really narrow street. And most of the houses along there were residential so people just felt that that was going to be too much traffic and too many problems there.

But let me just tell you some of the things that we were able to accomplish, though. One of the most important things that I think I did when I was the Citizen Participation Coordinator -- we had the North Richmond Wildcat Creek Flood Control project and I was sent to Washington to testify before Congress and the Army Corp of Engineers to get the project and we were funded for, I think it was, in those days, was a $3 million or $4 million dollar flood-control project, which was, I thought, was really good. Plus, it was a good experience for me. And I was able to go to Washington several times and visit different 01:10:00congress men and women, and I was able to travel mostly all over the country looking at different programs and projects and got involved in a lot of things, so it was really rewarding.

WILMOT: So can you tell me some of your favorite interactions that you remember from organizing the neighborhood councils?

LEWIS: I can't think off-hand but -- I don't know what I talked about then, but I don't know. Favorite interactions with the neighborhood councils?

WILMOT: Yeah, or just organizing like going to people's houses or --

LEWIS: Oh. Okay. Well, you know, for instance, when they built Shields Reid Facility, I was involved in all of those -- Nevin facility, Parchester, Martin Luther King, all of those were built either with model cities money or they were built with urban park money. Getting people to come out to meetings, I would get 01:11:00flyers and I would put things -- it wasn't a lie. It was like -- if you don't come to the meeting, your home may be moved or something -- and people would say, Why am I getting this? So actually what happened, in North Richmond people really came out because we had two blocks and the people who came to the meeting who lived on this block and didn't want to move had voted to tear down the other block. So the people who lived on that other block didn't come to the meeting. They had to move because that block was destroyed, you know, demolished, so they could put in a community center.

WILMOT: Here I was just thinking free cupcakes, you know.

LEWIS: Let me tell you, I did develop a technique. If I went to a new 01:12:00neighborhood and I wanted to start a neighborhood council, at that first meeting, I always gave people something to do. "Next meeting, you bring the coffee or the cookies," and this sort of thing, and we chose officers, and we chose a person to call people to remind them to come to the meeting. If you give people a job to do, then they're sort of committed. If you don't give them anything to do, they may not show up again. So I always made sure I gave people something to do. And for instance the Annex Neighborhood, when I organized that neighborhood council, I met at a school -- it was the Bayview School -- and nobody came. So, there was another school on the other side of Carlson Boulevard, Alvarado School. and the next meeting I held it at Alvarado School. 01:13:00And it was packed. So people saw themselves in that neighborhood as wanting to organize rather than the other neighborhood, people didn't care about it. So we started the Annex Neighborhood Council in that area.

El Sobrante Hills, I see signs on the Dam Road. It says, "Save ElSobranteHills.Org." I don't know if that's something, if you put it into your computer and you get a message or if they're really trying to save the neighborhood. I don't know what it means, but in order to do that neighborhood council, I had to walk up all those hills out there, and it took me five or six times to really get them started. Finally, we got a few people interested and 01:14:00they started. Once people get interested and they want to do things in their community, it was good. And it really helped because, in model cities, the city council we had at that time was committed to working with the citizen's groups to get things done. So what happened was that even though I was supposed to organize the model cities area, I organized all of the neighborhood councils on a citywide basis.

WILMOT: Who was the city council at that time who was interested in working with the groups?

LEWIS: I can't think of their names. I know Nate Bates got elected during that time. Al Silva. I can't think of all of them.

WILMOT: Yeah, well this was a long time ago.

LEWIS: It was a long time ago. But we did have a working relationship with the city council so that made it really good. And we worked out of the planning department and I worked with one of the city planners, Ann Copperman. We had one of the best model cities programs in the nation. And when we went over to community development, I worked for the Citizen Actions Committee. I did this on a part-time basis where we had the new guidelines and the regulations for community development, and I went over to, let's see, Washington, Utah, Oregon, California, and Arizona to talk to people about how to set up their citizen participation plan.

WILMOT: That's excellent. And who was Lucretia?

LEWIS: Lucretia Edwards, there is a park named after her in Richmond. Lucretia 01:16:00was a Quaker. She came from Pennsylvania and lived in Point Richmond and I worked with her years ago before I worked with the City of Richmond in North Richmond, you know, that was started by the Quakers. And she was trying to do daycare and work with parents. Well, some of the young black people didn't speak to her and I kind of felt sorry for her and so I adopted her and we became very good friends. Lucretia and Barbara Vincent and the other lady just died recently. I can't think of her name. But they worked to save the shoreline. Their whole thing was that citizens should have access to the bay. And they wanted parks. I mean, I know that Barbara Vincent worked on the San Pablo dam 01:17:00project, you know, to get people to go down there and fish. They just sort of opened up the shoreline for the residents. And there is a park named for Barbara and her husband, Jay Vincent, at Marina Bay. Then there is a park named after Lucretia down there also. Lucretia bought Nichol Nob and then she donated it to the East Bay Regional Park District.

WILMOT: Nob Hill in San Francisco?

LEWIS: That's that hill that's right across from Miller Shoreline Park. Lucretia, she donated that to East Bay Regional Parks District.

WILMOT: So she kind of started the neighborhood councils and then you came in and took them over from her?

LEWIS: Well, I didn't take them over from her. She did this during World War II, the neighborhood councils were there -- because they had some clashes with the neighborhoods, race relations and things like that. They were defunct when I 01:18:00took them over. North Richmond was going -- Iron Triangle -- just barely existing -- because I belonged to the neighborhood councils after I got grown. I worked with them but they weren't really functioning really well. Point Richmond. Doug Corbin, I think, was the president. Rosemary Corbin, who used to be the mayor, her husband -- I knew him before I knew her, and I worked with him in the neighborhood councils. So the neighborhood councils were like there but they were not really functioning well, and so somebody made a remark, and it might have been Lucretia, when that news article I was telling you about said that the neighborhood councils were not the same as the old neighborhood councils and they weren't, because it was a different time and a different reason for having a neighborhood council. But it did bring people closer together.

WILMOT: Do you feel like it was a good way to have a livelihood? Was it a good way to make a livelihood?

LEWIS: It was a good job. I really enjoyed it. I went to work everyday. I really enjoyed what I was doing.

WILMOT: And when you moved out here, did you just drive back and forth a lot?

LEWIS: I never moved out here when I was working at the city. I lived in Richmond. I lived at Marina Bay. At the beach.

WILMOT: You mentioned that 01:20:00Lucretia was an environmentalist and she had worked a lot on the shoreline, and I wanted to ask you about the settling ponds, the Chevron settling ponds that you mentioned earlier on. When was that built and what was the effect on the community around it?

LEWIS: If you go to North Richmond, when you cross on the tracks, the first street you come to is York Street. Straight down York Street, at the end of York Street, there used to be an inlet. And when the tide would come in, that would fill up with water and we used to go swimming out there. But now if you go out there, Chevron has cut the tide out from coming into North Richmond and they put in a settling pond where they -- I don't know what they use the settling ponds for. They also covered over some Indian burial grounds with their settling ponds.

WILMOT: What do you know about -- like, what has Chevron been like in Richmond?

LEWIS: A lot of pollution. [chuckles] You know, it used to be terrible. I 01:21:00remember it used to smell a lot and it still does, and a lot of people move from North Richmond because they said it smells, and you can still smell it sometimes in Parchester. It has an odor. It comes from Chevron. We had American Standards, CertainT -- all of those things used to pollute North Richmond terribly. And I remember once CertainT had some junk or something out there in a field and the kids would walk by and they would get sores all on their legs.

WILMOT: This was when -- around what time period?

LEWIS: That was in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

WILMOT: So they had a presence out there in the 1950s, but not in the 1940s? Or in the 1940s as well? Yeah.

LEWIS: Oh yeah. The '40s -- we would always see big flames shooting up out there, but you know North Richmond was different in the '40s. If you went out, 01:22:00like I say, down that York Street, but if you went out Gertrude Street, the bay used to come all in out there. People lived out there in little shanties and they had like little walkways to their houses, and they were actually living in the marshlands. And water would be under their houses. So, it's really -- I don't know what happened to all of them. I know Chevron stopped all of the water from coming into North Richmond.

WILMOT: So then people didn't get to go, which is interesting, too, because so many people were from the south, and from Louisiana, which was kind of the place where there was a lot of shoreline access.

LEWIS: Well, they used to go to -- well, there's not a lot shoreline access in Louisiana unless you live in South Louisiana -- but there's a lot of swamps and bayous in Louisiana that people fish in. But a lady used to take care of me from 01:23:00Louisiana when I was a little girl when my mother worked --

WILMOT: What was her name?

LEWIS: Mrs. Malbrough, we called her Nana though. And she would take me -- she and her husband had a big old Buick and they would take me out to Point Richmond, to the end down there, where the shoreline park is. You'd go in there and there was a pier and they'd tie me up, they'd put a rope around me and tie me to the pier so they could fish so I wouldn't fall -- I think I was like three-years-old -- so I didn't fall in the water. But they'd go fishing everyday. They could have fished in North Richmond. And they probably did. I remember the people when we first moved to North Richmond, Mr. Nappy -- their name was Nappy, Joe Nappy -- and they would go fishing. And also in Point 01:24:00Richmond, the herring used to come in to spawn on the beach at certain times of the year. You could go out there and people would have barrels and just scoop up all kinds of fish. I remember that. A lot of fish would just be flopping all over the place. [laughing] They don't come anymore I don't think.

WILMOT: The birds or the fish? The birds?

LEWIS: The birds eat them all up. No. You know they had a spawning season. I think it was in February. I'm not sure. But all these fish would wash up on the shore and people would be out there picking them up. They were herrings. And people would make pickled herring.

WILMOT: Okay. That's why there was a cannery over there, too.

LEWIS: Well, I used to work at the cannery when I was a teenager. Red Rock Fisheries. Well, we'd do a lot of mackerel. That's the kind of fish that came 01:25:00into the cannery, mackerel.

WILMOT: What was it like to work at that cannery?

LEWIS: Really nice.

WILMOT: Tell me about it.

LEWIS: I don't know. I think I was about 13. I used to put my age up to 16 [laughs] and go to work at the cannery, we leave at two o'clock. The bus would come into North Richmond and pick us up. Get on the bus and take us out to Red Rock and we would get off at 11:30 at night, I think, and bring us back to the community. But they had three or four stations, upstairs, I didn't like to work upstairs. I liked to work downstairs where the fish came by on a conveyor belt and went into the cooker. All you had to do was make sure that the cans were straight before they went into the cooker. Upstairs you had to pick up the fish and put them on a conveyor belt and the machinery would chop off their heads, gut them, and remove the scales. The fish were then put in cans and sent down to 01:26:00the cooker where I worked. After, they went through a process where tomato sauce or mustard was put in the cans and then sent through a steamer where the cans were sealed.

WILMOT: Why'd you go to work so young? At 13?

LEWIS: All the kids would work in those days. Nobody stayed at home. It was war time. They took anyone they could find to work.

WILMOT: Was that just a summer job?

LEWIS: Yeah. It was just a summer job. When school was out.

WILMOT: And with your money, did you have your own money or did you give it to your mom and your dad?

LEWIS: My mother let us buy school clothes. We kept -- I don't know how much money -- I don't even know if we made a lot of money. I don't think so. In fact, I don't even remember how much we made an hour, but I know my brother, he worked 01:27:00out at the nursery for Mr. Abbe, he worked out there in a florist, where they had the nursery, the roses. And then in the summer, if we didn't work in the cannery, we worked in the harvest. Before the war, people didn't make a lot of money in those days. I think my father made $15 a week working at the Pullman Yards, so people didn't have a lot of money. I guess in those days you could buy a lot of stuff for $15, but I think we paid $10 a month rent when we moved to North Richmond. [laughing] I remember my mother used to take us shopping in downtown Richmond -- we'd go to Safeway -- and we'd buy a big box of groceries that cost $5 and we'd go home in a taxi. I remember that before World War II.

WILMOT: Because you can't carry a big box of groceries?

LEWIS: Not for $5. Bread was ten cents. You could get a loaf of bread for ten 01:28:00cents. And I don't know how much milk cost. Maybe not more than that, much more. So you could buy things much cheaper. And every Saturday we always got $1 to go to the movies. So all of the kids would go -- we'd all leave -- a bunch of kids would come from North Richmond and this was before World War II, and there'd be Mexican kids and a few black kids and white kids and we would come down to downtown Richmond to go to the movies. It cost ten cents to go to the movie. I remember when we all got mad when it got to be eleven cents because they made us pay another penny for some kind of tax. [laughing] But every Saturday we would go to the movies and look at -- what do you call them -- serials would come on Fu Man Chu and all that. Charlie Chan. [laughing] It was really fun. And you didn't want to miss a serial because then you miss what happened. Everybody would say, Oh, we've got to get our work done, so we would go to the movies. It 01:29:00was -- Richmond was kind of a dull place then before World War II.

WILMOT: Did you have friends at the cannery when you worked there?

LEWIS: I had a couple of friends because mostly it would be women. We were just kids. But we would put our age up to go. And I was always tall so nobody ever asked me if I was really 16 or 17 -- I forget which age I said I was -- but I wasn't. [laughs] You know? I didn't know -- some of those women -- I remember this one woman, she got sick because she couldn't stand to smell the fish so she had to go home. But most of the girls that went were my neighbors. Like, three of us came off of the same street.

WILMOT: How did you get the smell off of you when you got home?

LEWIS: I guess we took a bath. I don't remember that I ever -- someone would tie your hair -- and maybe we would wash our clothes. But I didn't think -- it just 01:30:00smelled funny out there because -- I don't think the fish got on any one -- at least where I worked, the fish didn't get on me. The smell was the fish cooking, and she didn't like to smell the fish cooking. They would put them in a big machine. And I remember that machine had a lot of steam in it and they would come out and I think that's what she smelled, the steam.

WILMOT: One question I had from early on was when there was the migration of black people from the south, and you were telling me how your white neighbors were reacting, was there a way where you had to continue to remind them that you were still you, the same person you'd always been? Or did they mistake and confuse you and put you all in the same category?

LEWIS: I don't think so. I don't think they confused us. We lived there. I know recently I went to Carol's Restaurant in El Cerrito and I met some people that I 01:31:00knew when I was a child, they were Italian people. And they were telling everybody in the whole restaurant that they knew me when I was three-years-old. I don't think -- when people grow up with people, they don't really see them as different. The same thing happens to me when I go to the south, when I lived in the south. I was telling somebody the other day -- I didn't have a problem that the other black people had. They always thought that they didn't belong anywhere. They always thought that they couldn't go there because it was only for white people. I never had that hang-up. I just went where I wanted to go. So I would go in places and I'd be the only black person. And I remember this judge, a Caucasian judge in Homer, Louisiana, someone asked her, "Does Ivy come to all these things?" She said, "Well, she's here if you expect her or if you don't expect her you might see her." She wouldn't say if I'm supposed to be 01:32:00there or wasn't supposed to be there because a lot of places I would go -- there wouldn't be other black people. It would be a city function. It would be in the newspaper, but black people did not go because they felt that they couldn't -- that it was for white people only. I never felt that way. And I remember when I went back recently my neighbor across the street -- I was the only black person who lived on the lake, and she came over, hugged me, I went down to talk to a lady at the newspaper. They hugged me. Everybody was glad to see me. I had been really civic minded. I helped start a boys and girls club in Louisiana, and I did a lot of work in the community, so -- and then I was the Housing Authority Director for a while, and I just think that -- for instance, in North Richmond, Mr. and Mrs. Costa, they were our next-door neighbor for years, so I guess they 01:33:00just saw us as being people. I don't know. But they wanted to know if we were going to move, though. So I can't answer your question. I don't know the reason.

WILMOT: It's a question that is outside of you. Okay. Well --

LEWIS: Do you think we've got enough?

WILMOT: I think I have more than enough. Do you want to -- should we call it a day today?

LEWIS: Yeah, fine.

WILMOT: Okay. I'll stop here.

[interview interruption]

WILMOT: Now we're both on.

LEWIS: My great-great grandfather, William Henry Gault was buried in the New Halvania Cemetery in Napa California. And when I did a research paper for Mary Ellen Pleasant, when I went to Cal, she was also buried there. She buried a lot of people in New Halvania Cemetery. And we found out last year that it's no longer in Napa. We could not find out where my great great grandfather was 01:34:00buried anymore because now they don't know where they moved the bodies to.

WILMOT: So the New Halvania Cemetery, which was -- it was formerly all for black people?

LEWIS: Well, I'm not sure that it was all for black people, but I knew that Mary Ellen Pleasant lived in San Francisco and she buried a lot of people in New Halvania Cemetery so I assume that that was the only place where they could bury black people in those days. Because when my grandfather was buried he looked like he was white. He was buried in Sunset View Cemetery in Albany -- I think that's in Albany, California -- but when my grandmother died in 1944, she couldn't be buried there. She's buried in Golden Gate Cemetery because they didn't allow black people to be buried there. So I assume that New Halvania was a cemetery where they could bury blacks.

WILMOT: So they were buried in separate places? Your grandmother and your grandfather because he looked different than she did? Our country.

LEWIS: It was terrible, huh.

WILMOT: That was just the very recent past. It's very close to us.

LEWIS: Oh yes, it's not long ago. Yeah. That's true.

WILMOT: And Mary Ellen Pleasant, she knew your great-great grandfather?

LEWIS: She knew my grandmother's mother in San Francisco. My grandmother's mother -- you know, there are sketchy stories. I never talked to my grandmother about it. I was 12-years-old when my grandmother died. But I heard my father talk about it. That, they either helped start the first Baptist Church in San Francisco -- and I talked to the minister there recently to find out. And I need to do more research. I just need to do a lot of research, but as you get older, you don't feel like doing all that work, all that driving all over and asking questions and stuff.

WILMOT: Even though you're in the good time of your life to do it because you don't have to work.

LEWIS: Yeah, but the traffic is worse than it used to be. And parking is 01:36:00non-existent in Sacramento so I don't, you know, I just don't feel like being bothered with that. But there's a lot of research that needs to be done. Mary Ellen Pleasant was a really important figure in the state of California. People don't realize it because she came here from the south and she -- I think her mother was from the Dominican Republican -- and she was a mixture of white and South American -- and she would go back periodically to the south -- well, a whole long story about her. When her mother died, her father sent her back east and she lived with Quakers. And then she married this guy who was named Pleasant, and that's where she got that name from. But he was an abolitionist, so she was involved in that movement -- she would dress up like a jockey and go 01:37:00down south and recruit black people to run away from the south, and when she came to California in 1849, she had a rooming house. And then she would go down south and get a lot of black people to come out here and work, and she would put them in all these affluent homes -- can't think of their name right offhand, but he found silver in the Comstocks in Nevada -- not gold, silver, in the silver mines. And she was a very wealthy woman and she believed in voodoo and things like that. Her mother was from the Dominican Republic. That's where she was from. And she had one gray eye and one blue eye. And she was known to put spells on people and all these kinds of things. And she brought all these slaves out here and put them in different rich people's homes and they would tell her about what was going on and I think she blackmailed people. And then she had a house 01:38:00of assemination -- of prostitution. And then she got into one business where she had these prostitutes working for her, but when they had babies, she would sell them to Chinese people because the Chinese people really coveted Caucasian children. And then she had one lady who had a baby by the guy who became the governor of California and she blackmailed him. I mean, Mary Ellen Pleasant was a really interesting figure, and if somebody could really find out more about her, there would be a good movie because she was really a formidable figure in the state of California. She actually controlled the governor of California.

WILMOT: Interesting. Well, let's close for today for a second time. How's that?

LEWIS: Fine.

[interview interruption]

WILMOT: So what did you major in at UC Berkeley?

LEWIS: I majored in political science, but I graduated in sociology. And I took some classes -- they were really, really racist. Once, I was in this class [laughs] and they asked a question and I gave the answer, and there was a TA -- it wasn't a professor -- who said to me, "I bet you don't know how you got that answer." I said, "Well, I read it just like anybody else." But it was really -- I thought it was terrible. I thought it was very racist.

WILMOT: The whole school or just the political science department?

LEWIS: Well, probably not the whole school, but I meant certain people in the school. For instance, I was a good writer and a lot of black guys would go to Cal --

WILMOT: You told me about this.

LEWIS: -- and I would write their papers for them and they would get better 01:40:00grades than I would.

WILMOT: So it was sexist, too. And what years did you go?

LEWIS: When did I first start? I can't remember. I know I graduated in '74 and I only went there two years so --

WILMOT: And you shifted from political science to sociology? And why did you leave political science?

LEWIS: Because I was always arguing with people. I mean, I'm pretty outspoken so I kind of -- I guess maybe that's why I felt like I was being discriminated against because maybe I was too outspoken. But I got a A-plus from one TA because he said I was outspoken. So I thought that was good.

WILMOT: Were you married already when you were at Cal?

LEWIS: Yeah.

WILMOT: So you didn't have like the whole dating life and social life in school?

LEWIS: No. No.

WILMOT: You were done with that part of your life/

LEWIS: I was working too. Full-time.

WILMOT: Where were you working?

LEWIS: I was working for the city of Richmond. But I told them that I was going to school and so they allowed me to take the time off to go to school.

WILMOT: And you had children by that time?

LEWIS: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

WILMOT: Did you have all of your kids already or --

LEWIS: Yes.

WILMOT: So you were a working full-time mother of three kids? And --

LEWIS: Five boys and one girl.

WILMOT: Six children. And you were in school full-time, so your husband must have been really helping you out. Must have been supportive.

LEWIS: My kids were pretty good but I used to get up early, like four o'clock in the morning, and study if I had a test or something like that. I did pretty good.

WILMOT: How did you get back and forth?

LEWIS: I drove.

WILMOT: You just drove? Wow. Did you have a good, you know, did you have a good place to leave your children during the day? Did you have a good daycare center 01:42:00that you liked?

LEWIS: At that time, I only had one who needed to go to daycare and my mother took care of him.

WILMOT: And your mom took care of the rest of them?

LEWIS: I was just talking to him last night and he was telling me that my father -- he said, you know, how people have lost -- he thinks that since the grandfathers have died, the children are going downhill instead of keeping the same practice, Because he remembered my father used to come out to the Peres School and get him on bicycle. There was a daycare at Peres School. And he would bring him home. Riding his bicycle, he would take him home. The school was really good. I had started going to college at Contra-Costa, a two-year college, before I went to Cal, and most of the people I worked with, sort of all went to 01:43:00college. They let a lot of people go to school. And the school district did too. I would see a lot of people from the Richmond School District at Cal.

WILMOT: Now, this was before 1974. Do you remember when the black studies department was created at Berkeley and Ethnic studies and all that?

LEWIS: I was in ethnic studies, in black studies. Doctor Arabho. And she was married to an African. I remember that. But I don't know when it started. It was there when I got there. It was controversial at that time.

WILMOT: Yeah. I think it was. Well, maybe we should -- do you have everything else you want to say about your time at Cal and about juggling being a mama, being a student, being a worker full-time, a wife -- everything you were doing.

LEWIS: The only problem I had was getting my paper -- I didn't type -- getting my papers typed. And I got people to type my papers who made a lot of mistakes. I could have probably got better grades if I could have did my own homework, did my own typing. But no. I really enjoyed it. It was really great. Except that I was sort of a -- what -- not an innocent but --

WILMOT: Naïve?

LEWIS: -- a naïve person. When I went to Cal, in those days, I don't know if they still do it, so many of the professors were cursing all of the time.

WILMOT: It was the times.

LEWIS: I had one of these classes and this professor was using all these filthy words and this lady was sitting behind me and she tapped me on the shoulder and 01:45:00she said, "I want you to know, I'm his mother and I didn't teach him to use those words. We never allowed those kinds of words. Why do you students put up with it?" And I said, "I don't like it either, but it doesn't seem to bother anybody else." [laughs]

WILMOT: In sociology, did you work with Troy Duster or Harry Edwards?

LEWIS: I worked with Harry Edwards. I brought him a lot of old newspaper clippings that my father had that showed black people, calling them coons and this sort of thing, pickaninnies and stuff like that, in The Oakland Tribune.

WILMOT: Interesting. Listen, thank you again. This has been such a pleasure for me.

LEWIS: Okay. Thank you.

[End of Interview]