A Community History of Civil Rights in San Francisco's Bayview Hunters Point

San Francisco is often viewed as one of the most liberal cities in the world, but the history of African Americans, and their struggle for civil rights in Bay Area reveals an alternative narrative. By the mid-20^th century, black San Franciscans had made significant social and political gains through hard-fought grassroots efforts; however, a violent three-day uprising after the shooting of an unarmed, 16-year-old, youth in San Francisco’s lesser-known, Bayview-Hunters Point community in 1966 exposed the complex ways that racial inequality continued to disproportionately distribute both power and urban space. This paper will examine how those disparities are historically perpetuated through the building of urban infrastructure in San Francisco's Bayview-Hunters Point and how community members renegotiated the terms of San Francisco politics through movements for improved public housing conditions. San Francisco’s black community history offers a window into the ways that civil rights struggles continued in Northern and Western cities and came to encompass issues of environmental and racial inequality in the ever-changing urban landscape of one of the nation’s most innovative, yet simultaneously unequal cities.