by Steve Early
Refinery Town draws on my own previously published work about Richmond. Little of this freelance reporting and commentary would have seen the light of day, in print or online, without the editorial patronage of Katrina van den Heuvel, Roane Carey, and Lizzy Ratner at the Nation; Joel Bleifuss, Micah Uetricht, and Jessica Stites at In These Times; Randy Shaw at Beyond Chron; Josh Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair at CounterPunch; Michael Albert at Znet and teleSur; Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese at Popular Resistance; Leslie Thatcher at Truthout; Sarah van Gelder and James Trimarco at Yes; Al Bradbury at Labor Notes; Wade Rathke at Social Policy; and the editorial team at Huffington Post.
Among fellow authors of books about neighborhood renewal or municipal reform efforts, I want to recognize the particularly helpful research and writing of Pierre Clavel, Peter Dreier, William Domhoff, Steve Herbert, Randy Shaw, and Mike Rotkin, former mayor of Santa Cruz. Clavel is professor of city planning at Cornell University and author of The Progressive City (1986) and Activists in City Hall (2010). His Progressive Cities and Neighborhood Planning website (http://progressivecities.org/) includes an essential bibliography.
Among current practitioners of progressive urban politics, some of the most promising are part of Local Progress, a network directed by Ady Barkan at the Center for Popular Democracy in New York. For information on Local Progress national meetings and resource materials, see http://localprogress.org/. One of the multistate groups that has helped Local Progress members in New York and nine other states get elected is the Working Families Party network, now recruiting and training more candidates for local office inspired by the Sanders presidential campaign. For details, consult http://workingfamilies.org/states/new-york/.
Left Elect provides similar networking opportunities for people involved in “left/progressive parties, coalitions, and organizations.” Information on its “independent political action” work can be found at https://leftelect.net/.
Family members and friends with political campaign experience provided insights for this book as well. They include Alexandra Early, Jessica Early, Phil Fiermonte, Ellen David Friedman, Rand Wilson, Torie Osborn, Sal Rosselli, Dan Siegel, Dan Hodges, James Haslam, Liz Blum, Karen Smith, and Paul Kumar. On the subject of money in politics, former CWA president Larry Cohen offered key feedback based on his Sanders campaign volunteering as a senior labor advisor and his current service as chair of the Our Revolution board. (For more on OR’s work, see https://ourrevolution.com.) Steve and Karen Kittle gave me a different perspective on Richmond—from the waters of the bay—and their warm welcome to the neighborhood represents Point Richmond at its best.
At Beacon Press, it has been a pleasure working with my editor, Joanna Green; Beacon’s director, Helene Atwan; and their wonderful colleagues Tom Hallock, Pamela MacColl, Alyssa Hassan, Nicholas DiSabatino, Alyson Chu, Susan Lumenello, Beth Collins, Morgan Tuff, Aseem Kulkarni, and Ayla Zuraw-Friedland. Freelance copy editor Chris Dodge caught and corrected many a manuscript error. Without Joanna’s skillful sculpting of the manuscript, the resulting book would have been far longer and much less readable.
Many thanks to my agent, Anne Borchardt, for steering me in the right direction for Refinery Town and for taking me on ten years ago as a second Borchardt Agency author in the same household. Which brings me to my last (but never least) thank-you note. Suzanne Gordon was originally slated to be coauthor of this book. Then she bailed out to complete her own forthcoming study of veteran’s health care in the United States. Her penance for that desertion was enduring my various stages of manuscript-related distress. My symptoms were always alleviated, if not completely cured, by her calm reassurance, reliable advice, and skilled editing help. Suzanne is the rare book doctor who makes house calls (it helps to share the same address with her). She is a prolific journalist, an author, and the non–tiger mother of our two daughters, Alexandra and Jessica. I hope that some future book will be a long overdue joint venture—the ultimate test of marital bonds nearly four decades old!
NOTES
MUCH INFORMATION IN THIS book comes from interviews that were conducted between 2013 and 2016 in person, by phone, or via e-mail with residents of Richmond or others involved in its affairs. Among them are Nat Bates, Jovanka Beckles, Lorie Fridell, John Goia, John Knox, Marilyn Langlois, Bill Lindsay, Chris Magnus, Malcolm Marshall, Eduardo Martinez, Gayle McLaughlin, Byron Miller, Jessica Monteil, Jael Myrick, Mike Parker, Jim Payne, Richard Perez, Charles Ramsey, Juan Reardon, Melissa Ritchie, Jeff Ritterman, Jim Rogers, Robert Rogers, Bernie Sanders, Marilaine Savard, Tracy Scott, David Sharples, Mike Smith, Betty Reid Soskin, Andres Soto, Kathleen Sullivan, Ben Therriault, Tamisha Walker, Mark Wassberg, Zak Wear, Vernon Whitmore, Kathleen Wimer, and Melvin Willis.
Unless otherwise noted below, any quotes from those individuals came from those personal interviews, their remarks at public events I attended, their e-mail or other written communication with me or other Richmond residents, or their recorded statements on local cable TV and/or in Richmond-related documentary films.
INTRODUCTION: FROM COMPANY TOWN TO PROGRESSIVE CITY
1. Former San Francisco supervisor Scott Wiener, as quoted in Claire Cain Miller, “Liberals Turn to Cities to Pass Laws Others Won’t,” New York Times, January 26, 2016.
2. James Fallows, “Why Cities Work Even When Washington Doesn’t: The Case for Strong Mayors,” Atlantic, April 2014.
3. Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley, The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013).
4. Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
5. Carla Marinucci and Lizzie Johnson, “Star US Mayors Poised to Rocket Up the Political Ladder,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 12, 2015.
6. Quoted in ibid.
7. As Jane Mayer reports, the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission overturned “a century of restrictions banning corporations from spending all they wanted to elect candidates.” The court gave “outside groups that were supporting or opposing candidates and were technically independent of the campaigns” the right to “spend unlimited amounts to promote whatever candidates they choose. To reach that verdict, the court accepted the argument that corporations had the same rights of free speech as citizens.” See Mayer’s invaluable Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016), 227.
8. For more on the smear campaign against Sinclair, see Kathryn Olmsted, Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (New York: New Press, 2016); Lauren Coodley, Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013); and Anthony Arthur, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair (New York: Random House, 2006).
9. The term “lie factory” was Sinclair’s own. For more on the role of Campaigns, Inc., in defeating him, see Jill Lepore, “The Lie Factory,” New Yorker, September 24, 2012.
10. Sinclair’s I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked was self-published and, according to Sinclair’s most comprehensive biographer, helped “pay off his personal campaign debts.” See Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (New York: Random House, 1992), 544–55.
11. Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no 3. (September 2014): 580.
12. See http://www.beacon.org/Refinery-Town-P1229.aspx.
13. As quoted by Emilie Stigliani and Aki Soga, “Bernie Sanders Appears After Burlington Confab,” Burlington Free Press, June 12, 2016. Several days after these comments, Sanders gave several hundred thousand supporters a video update on his campaign that included an appeal to visit berniesanders.com/win and “learn more about how y
ou can run for office or get involved in politics at the local or state level.” About twenty thousand people responded, two-thirds of them expressing interest in becoming local candidates themselves. For more on the former presidential candidate’s post-election agenda, see Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In (New York: Thomas Dunne, forthcoming).
CHAPTER 1: A REFINER’S FIRE
1. Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 272–74.
2. See “Trade Excursion to Richmond,” San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Journal 1, no. 9 (July 1912): 11, quoted in ibid., 39.
3. Quoted in “San Francisco Bay Trail,” NBC Bay Area, June 27, 2015, http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Bay-Trail-310357431.html.
4. O. A. Knight, president of the Oil Workers International Union, in his introduction to Harvey O’Connor, History of the Oil Workers International Union-CIO (Denver: Hirschfield Press, 1950), v.
5. Harvey O’Connor, The Empire of Oil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1955), 14.
6. Ray Davidson, Challenging the Giants: A History of Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International Union (Denver: OCAW, 1988), 10.
7. Peter Dreier, “Radicals in City Hall: An American Tradition,” Dissent, December 19, 2013, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/radicals-in-city-hall-an-american-tradition.
8. Richard Gendron and G. William Domhoff, The Leftmost City: Power and Progressive Politics in Santa Cruz (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009), 103. Business interests also sought, wherever possible, to replace district elections with at-large city council votes. According to the authors, the latter “made it more difficult for neighborhood leaders, whether Democrats, Socialists, or ethnic and racial minorities, to hold their seats on city councils because they did not have the money and name recognition to win citywide elections.” In 2015, some Richmond residents unhappy about the success of the Richmond Progressive Alliance in city-wide races proposed that at-large election of city councilors be replaced by a system of geographical representation based on smaller electoral districts.
9. O’Connor, History of the Oil Workers International Union-CIO, 327.
10. Muriel Clausen, “This Old House,” reprinted in This Point in Time [Point Richmond History Association] 33, no. 2 (September/October 2014): 17.
11. O’Connor, History of the Oil Workers International Union-CIO, 63. See also Davidson, Challenging the Giants, 183–91, on the 1948 strike and its aftermath, in terms of expanded contracting out.
12. Jim Payne, financial secretary of USW Local 5, quoted in David Bacon, “An Oil Worker and a Union Staffer Explain Why 1000s of Oil Workers Across the Country Are on Strike,” In These Times, February 12, 2015, http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17631/oil_workers_on_strike.
13. Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910–1963 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 16.
14. Ibid., 45.
15. Quoted in Richard Rothstein, “How African-Americans in Richmond Came to Be Segregated and Impoverished,” draft paper presented at Richmond Housing Summit, January 27, 2015. Copy in possession of the author.
16. Alvin Bernstine, A Ministry That Saves Lives: Sermons and Thoughts on Ministry in a Challenging Context (Richmond, CA: ACB Ministry, 2012).
17. Lucretia Edwards, “A Short History of How the Neighborhood Councils Started in the City of Richmond, California.” Undated document in possession of the author.
18. Rothstein, “How African-Americans in Richmond Came to Be Segregated and Impoverished,” 21.
19. Jessica Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1977), 128–29.
20. Jovanka Beckles, “The Gary Family of Richmond Fighting for Equality and Standing for Their Rights,” Radio Free Richmond, February 23, 2015, http://www.radiofreerichmond.com/.
21. Moore, To Place Our Deeds, 96.
22. Quoted in Rothstein, “How African-Americans in Richmond Came to Be Segregated and Impoverished,” 29.
23. See Lillian Rubin, Busing & Backlash: White Against White in an Urban School District (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 93–94.
24. Tom Corcoran, the Richmond mayor who approved the transfer of refinery property so the Hilltop area could become a shopping center, also voted on a number of other Chevron-related matters. He was a retired executive of the company who owned $300,000 worth of its stock but, as current mayor Tom Butt notes, “did not understand that he could no longer represent Chevron.” Corcoran’s repeated conflicts of interest on the council led the California Fair Political Practices Commission to fine him $15,000—about $40,000 in today’s dollars.
25. Jennings’s quote is from his remarks at the August 11, 2013, ceremony renaming the Richmond Progressive Alliance office as the Bobby Bowens Progressive Center. For a longer interview with him, see Steve Early, “Q & A: Bill Jennings on Black Panther Party’s Place in Richmond’s History,” Richmond Pulse, September 8, 2015, http://richmondpulse.org/2015/09/08/q-a-bill-jennings-on-black-panther-partys-place-in-richmonds-history/.
26. “Panthers Demand Independence for North Richmond Area,” Black Panther 1, no. 3 (June 20, 1967).
27. Bobby Seale, “Community Control of the Police Was on Berkeley Ballot in 1969,” San Francisco Bay View, September 2015.
28. David DeBolt and Robert Rogers, “North Richmond: Most Killings Go Unsolved in Tiny Enclave,” Contra Costa Times, April 5, 2015. As DeBolt and Rogers report, between 2010 and 2014, nineteen people, almost all African American males under the age of fifty, were killed in the 1.5-square-mile area of North Richmond; charges were filed in five of those homicide cases.
29. Pierre Clavel, The Progressive City: Planning and Participation, 1969–1984 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 1. For more on the Chicago and Boston experience, see Clavel’s later book, Activists in City Hall: The Progressive Response to the Reagan Era in Boston and Chicago (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).
30. For a perceptive insider’s account of the challenges facing black mayors during this period and more recently, see J. Phillip Thompson, Double Trouble: Black Mayors, Black Communities and the Struggle for Deep Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). As political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. argues, newly elected municipal officials are unlikely to pursue bolder, more progressive policy agendas in the absence of sustained grassroots pressure generated from outside city hall. See “The Black Urban Regime: Structural Origins and Constraints,” in Reed’s essay collection, Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
31. Davidson, Challenging the Giants, 10.
32. Quoted by Antonia Juhasz, The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry—and What We Must Do to Stop It (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 194.
33. Quoted in Paul Rauber, “Oiltown,” East Bay Express, September 30, 1988.
34. For more on Clark’s long career of Richmond environmental activism, see Sara Bernard, “Henry Clark and Three Decades of Environmental Justice,” Richmond Confidential, December 6, 2012, http://richmondconfidential.org/2012/12/06/henry-clark-and-three-decades-of-environmental-justice/.
35. Quoted in Rauber, “Oiltown.”
36. Juhasz, Tyranny of Oil, 193.
37. Ibid., 192.
38. For this summary of Chevron’s past environmental law breaking, I am indebted to the editors of the Dispatcher, the national newspaper of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). See “Working with Allies to Protect the Union, Community, and Environment,” Dispatcher, July/August 2015.
39. Quoted in Dying at Work in California: The Hidden Stories Behind the Numbers (Oakland, CA: WorkSafe, 2013), http://www.worksafe.org/2013/Dying_at_Work_in_CA_2013_web.pdf.
40. Joe Eskenazi, “Trust Me: Who Are You Gonna Believe, Sam Singer or Your Own Eyes?” SF Weekly, August 26, 2014.
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41. Quoted in James North, “Ecuador’s Battle for Environmental Justice Against Chevron,” Nation, June 22/29, 2015.
CHAPTER 2: THE GREENING OF CITY HALL
1. Ian Stewart, “Years Later, Chemical Company Lot Still a Toxic Stew,” Richmond Confidential, November 9, 2009.
2. Chris Thompson, “Burning Richmond’s Race Card,” East Bay Express, October 7, 2005.
3. In 2004, Thurmond ran and lost as an “independent” but ended up joining the council later, when he was appointed to fill a vacancy. After serving as a Richmond city councilor, he ran for the Contra Costa County school board and then gained his current state assembly seat. Later, in their own 2004 campaigns, Soto and McLaughlin also diverged over the issue of accepting business donations. Each received five hundred dollars from a local manufacturer. Soto accepted the money, while McLaughlin publicly rejected and returned her check, to uphold the RPA’s policy of refusing corporate funding.
4. Rebecca Rosen Lum, “McLaughlin Proves a Pragmatist,” Contra Costa Times, July 24, 2005.
5. Unfortunately, Richmond’s municipal ID program does not currently have the backing of a financial institution, so the card obtained by undocumented workers could also be used to make bank deposits and withdrawals. This would reduce their need to carry cash, which has made some in Richmond a target for street robberies.
6. One-stop access to city services and programs is now also available to users of the City of Richmond’s mobile-phone app. Via this, residents can even report streets that need to be repaired, attaching a picture of their most hated potholes if they wish. See http://4richmond.org/city-of-richmond-mobile-app-offers-one-stop-shopping-for-city-services.
