On any given workday in downtown Oakland, thousands of commuters enter and exit the 12th Street City Center station of the Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, rushing past a large bronze bust of John B. Williams. The statue, like many memorials, fails to meet its mission: to remind Oakland’s residents who John B. Williams was and what role he played in the city that named its downtown plaza and part of its intercity highway for him. The charismatic director of the Oakland Redevelopment Agency from 1964 to 1976, Williams was once called the most “powerful and effective Black man in city government.” 1 Lionel Wilson, Oakland’s first Black mayor, has noted that before his own election in 1977, Williams had been considered a potential mayoral candidate. 2 He is now difficult to locate in the public record and in the public imagination. But like the bust at City Center Plaza, his legacies hide in plain sight. Williams’s story is central to the history not only of this particular place but also of many communities upended by the urban renewal programs of the mid-20th century.
John B. Williams, the charismatic director of the Oakland Redevelopment Agency, was once called the most ‘powerful and effective Black man in city government.’
In 1949, the federal government passed the Housing Act, making funds for urban renewal projects available to many American city governments. Oakland undertook a program of aggressive redevelopment, redlining vulnerable working-class communities to make way for new infrastructure and industry. 3 The city’s African-American community, which had tripled in population in the decades before and after World War II, was disproportionately affected. 4 Racialized housing restrictions confined the majority of this growing community to overcrowded West Oakland — just west of downtown — where the housing stock was increasingly becoming derelict.
A postwar housing crisis brought on by the influx of migrants and loss of wartime jobs resulted in deeply segregated residential neighborhoods across the East Bay. 5 Traditionally multi-ethnic communities (including Mexican, Asian, Portuguese, and Irish families) were transformed as white Oaklanders took advantage of federal loan and mortgage programs — subsidized by the Federal Housing Administration and the Veteran’s Administration — to purchase new homes in the suburbs. Meanwhile, due to discriminatory lending practices, racist zoning laws that restricted African Americans to neighborhoods west of Oakland’s Adeline Street, and low owner-occupancy rates, homes in and around downtown fell into disrepair. This devaluation of property — specifically in West Oakland — coupled with the decline of the city’s commercial district, created anxiety for local officials, who felt especially threatened by the commercial pull of San Francisco following the completion of the Bay Bridge in 1936. In 1959, a sweeping redevelopment plan for West Oakland was unanimously approved by the city council.
KTVU News footage featuring an interview with Oakland’s Mayor John Reading and Oakland Redevelopment Agency director John B. Williams, 1966. [Courtesy Bay Area TV Archive, San Francisco State University]
Phase I of Oakland’s program, The General Neighborhood Renewal Plan, or GNRP, called for “extensive renewal” in the Acorn neighborhood. The area had been home to an estimated 500 primarily low-income families (78 percent African American, 20 percent Mexican American, and 2 percent White) living in some 600 dwellings. 6 According to a report by the redevelopment agency, 80 percent of Acorn’s 4,300 residents were housed in substandard conditions. In 1962, despite protest from residents, the entire 34-acre neighborhood was bulldozed. Then, for more than five years, the site sat empty, overgrown with weeds. 7
Oakland undertook a program of aggressive redevelopment, and residents organized to oppose the razing of their community. Then Williams arrived.
“City administrators spoke as if renewal and redevelopment were synonymous,” writes Robert Self in American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. “But local residents knew the difference between low-interest loans and bulldozers: the former meant restoration and community improvement, the latter symbolized what became widely known nationwide as ‘Negro Removal.’” 8 With Acorn being demolished just blocks away, residents of nearby Oak Center, which was slated for Phase II of the GNRP, organized to oppose the destruction of their community. A 50-block area north of Acorn, Oak Center had more middle-class homeowners than Acorn, and less degraded housing stock than the adjacent neighborhood. 9 It also had Lillian Q. Love, a long-time West Oaklander whose father had unsuccessfully fought his family’s displacement in the 1930s, during the construction of the Peralta Villa public housing complex. In 1963, Love co-founded the Oak Center Neighborhood Association, a homeowners’ organization that lobbied the city to fund housing rehabilitation rather than demolition and redevelopment; in 1966 she was named a commissioner of the Oakland Redevelopment Agency. Meanwhile the neighborhood association accused the first director of the Redevelopment Agency, Thomas Bell, of purposely misleading Oak Center residents regarding the agency’s plans, and Bell resigned under pressure from the federal Urban Renewal Administration. It was in these heated political circumstances, in the devastating aftermath of Acorn’s destruction, that John B. Williams arrived in Oakland.
John Bentley Williams was born in 1917 in Covington, Georgia, the son of a Baptist minister. He earned a bachelor’s degree in fine art at the Cleveland Institute of Art, served in the U.S. Army from 1946 to 1948, and worked as a graphic artist for the Pittsburgh Courier before being hired as a planner for the city of Cleveland. He remained there nine years, eventually heading the Division of Urban Renewal. He also ran his own advertising and public relations firm.
Williams believed in Oakland’s unique potential — in the city’s capacity to reshape itself into a 21st-century metropolis.
Williams assumed his position as the director of the Oakland Redevelopment Agency on September 1, 1964, and remained in the job until his death from an aggressive cancer at age 59. “I do not pretend to come before you as the Messiah with a glib promise that urban renewal and Redevelopment is the cure-all for the problems and ills of Oakland,” he told constituents at his first public presentation, three months after his arrival. “We will either move forward or slide backwards — there is no standing still.” 10 Williams was a bureaucrat, but he was also an ambitious urbanist. He believed in Oakland’s unique potential — in the city’s capacity to reshape itself into a 21st-century metropolis, as well as to support his own pursuits. His wife Valena, a public radio producer and broadcaster, observed that her husband had left Cleveland “because it was becoming clear that he was not going to become the top person there,” despite the fact that “he was doing all the work, all the dreaming and all the planning.” 11 A forceful champion for affirmative action policies, Williams was the first city official to enforce minority training-and-hiring policies, requiring that ORA employ laborers and award contracts proportionate to city demographics. He was also a leading member of the New Oakland Committee, which brought labor, business, and minority groups together to found First Enterprise Bank, the first minority-owned bank in Northern California.
Urban renewal has become synonymous with racist zoning and lending practices of the sort that Oakland witnessed, and which, nationwide, led to white flight and targeted inner-city communities that remained economically weak and politically disenfranchised despite the country’s postwar boom. Perhaps it is this ugly history that has prevented Williams’s name and legacy from carrying forward into the 21st century. We have inherited a polarized historical narrative that pits heartless redevelopment agencies against the helpless residents of the communities they destroyed. But Williams’s efforts as director of ORA — and the copious documentation his administration left behind — give us an opportunity to complicate that story.
The ORA invested heavily in the power of images to communicate with city residents.
With his fine-art training, Williams invested heavily in the power of images to communicate with city residents regarding the treatment of dilapidated buildings and the status of neighborhood development projects. His staff included full-time photographers and a graphic designer, who worked in tandem to document neighborhoods designated as “in decay,” and to present those communities with visual materials — brochures, pamphlets, models, and traveling displays — that explicated and promoted relocation and redevelopment programs.
The Acorn and Oak Center projects were not ORA’s only large-scale undertakings during Williams’s tenure. Entire blocks in downtown Oakland were demolished and rebuilt; residential hotels in Chinatown were rehabilitated; Laney College was erected; and swathes of West Oakland beyond Acorn were torn down to make way for industrial buildings, highways, a U.S. Post Office processing center, and the lines and stations of the new BART. All these changes were diligently documented by William’s staff, resulting in a photographic archive of about 30,000 images that depict Oakland before, during, and after its most intense period of transformation. Even after Williams’s death, the agency maintained a staff photographer to catalogue ongoing projects. It wasn’t until 2012, when Governor Jerry Brown dissolved the redevelopment agencies statewide, that the documentation ceased.
In 2016, I was introduced to a public information officer in the Oakland Planning and Zoning department, which had inherited the ORA materials. City Hall was being renovated, and Planning and Zoning personnel were under pressure to remove the photographs from the building. As an archivist, I immediately recognized the value of the collection, and volunteered to organize the photographs and shepherd the archive through its relocation to the History Room in the main branch of the Oakland Public Library.
As the photographs show, the blight was real. Yet we should be wary of narratives that strip agency from local residents.
I live in West Oakland and every day travel the streets that were remade by John B. Williams’s agency. In fact, while cataloguing the photographs, I came across a shot of my own house, and was surprised to see an empty lot beside it — where a condominium now stands — and a large home on the far side of my neighbor’s house, where there is now an empty lot. Peering into the image, I see a woman standing below my front steps and a small child in a fur-lined coat looking expectantly around the corner.
As the photographs show, the blight was real. Yet I have grown wary of declension narratives that strip agency from the people whose lived experience these photographs document. Racial inequality has long been pervasive in the United States, and redevelopment projects purposefully and disproportionately affected non-white, and particularly African-American, communities. Misdirected efforts to remake cities were met mostly with resistance, though collaboration happened sometimes too. These struggles led to complex interactions that in turn reshaped cities and formed new urban identities. The painful legacy of urban renewal era consists of more than ruined neighborhoods and bad architecture. Resistance movements, public-service programs, non-profit agencies, and community-advocacy groups like Lillian Q. Love’s Oak Center Neighborhood Association belong to this history too.
Oakland, today, of course remains contested space. Tech-industry expansion pushing north from Silicon Valley has extended the San Francisco real estate market into the East Bay, and cries of foul regarding gentrification — that overused term encompassing physical displacement, cultural dilution, financial disenfranchisement — are heard daily. On my first pass through the photo collection, I spent months in the offices of the Oakland Planning Department. This period witnessed two major fires in the city: one, the probable result of arson at a construction site, dislocated more than 100 people; the other, at an underground performance space in a warehouse rife with code violations, killed 36. From the 3rd floor of the Oakland Public Library, where I continue to sort the thousands of images, I can now count at least four construction cranes looming over the skyline. Homelessness in the Bay Area is visible in unprecedented ways and, according to U.S. Census data, Oakland’s African-American population has decreased 25 percent since 2000.
What might we learn about the present, and the future it portends, from examination of the recent past?
What might we learn about this present, and the future it portends, from examination of the recent past? The following gallery of photographs is culled from the first 400 rolls of film in the Oakland Redevelopment Agency archive, all black-and-white 35mm shot between 1965 and 1970, most likely by the agency’s first staff photographer, Harry Wade. One of the agency’s subsequent photographers, Marcia Nowak (who retired in 2005), graciously helped to identify some of these images. As she explained, “We took pictures of everything.” The agency selected photos to use in its promotional materials, but it did not limit what its photographers captured. 12 Many of the projects documented in this collection failed. But the photographs presented here are not an attempt to indict the Oakland Redevelopment Agency. The rich photographic record allows us to explore myriad visual narratives, including those that did not serve the city’s interests at the time. It is up to us to revisit these images, and to see what else they have to say.
John B. Williams with City Center model, 1964.*
Early in his tenure at the Oakland Redevelopment Agency, John B. Williams was photographed by an ORA staff photographer with a highly speculative model for a possible “new Oakland.” The Oakland-based California Voice quoted Williams as inviting city officials and residents to “take your imagination and stretch it with me to see the Oakland of the future.”**
* Note: In captioning these images, I have kept as close as possible to the original language in the archive.
** Williams quoted in Brian C. Gitta, III, “John B. Williams’ Vision for Oakland,” California Voice (Oakland), March 4, 1988.
Signing of Plan for the Acorn Housing Project, April 4, 1966.
John B. Williams, agency staff, and commissioners look on as an unidentified official signs orders for construction of the first redevelopment project under the General Neighborhood Renewal Plan. This was the Acorn Project, which had already entailed removal of more than 500 low-income families and the total demolition of 50 city blocks. The razed housing, the agency decided, would be replaced by moderate-cost units, though it was understood that these would likely be too expensive for original residents.* Much of the land was turned over to private industrial developers, as well as to an extension of the Cypress Freeway that cut the West Oakland neighborhood in half.
* Chris Rhomberg, No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 130.Acorn Housing Project model, April 7, 1966.
The Acorn Housing Project promised sleek, modern architecture — concrete-block units with sharp angles and crisp white exteriors — as an antidote to the clutter of derelict single-family Victorians documented throughout the ORA archive. Historian James C. Scott has criticized such architecture of the urban-renewal era — what he calls “high-modernist authoritarianism” — as a governmental attempt to impose legibility and order on an unruly society.*
* James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 111, 115.West Grand GNRP area, September 13, 1966.
As American city cores declined in the postwar decades, an aesthetic emerged that in recent years has been crudely labeled “ruin porn.” Wayne State University art historian Dora Apel observes that ruin imagery serves to make urban blight the problem of specific racial or geographic communities.* Such images have shaped national public opinion and policy regarding housing, welfare, labor, and education at least since Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine used their cameras to document the horrors of inner-city slums and child labor at the turn of the last century, with exposés that heavily influenced the establishment of housing and labor laws. At the ORA, photographs such as this were used to emphasize the dire condition of West Oakland’s housing stock, making way for redlining and demolition.
* Dora Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).West Oakland school children and street scenes, September 19, 1966.
Much of the ORA archive centers on blight. Yet photographers were also attentive to scenes of vibrant community life — here, young crossing guards on duty at Cole Middle School, and a busy commercial strip in Oak Center.West Grand GNRP area, September 12, 1966.
Photographs of children feature prominently in the ORA archive, perhaps because adults were working when the photographers were out and about during the day, or because children were more receptive to having their pictures taken.Acorn site, September 19, 1966.
When Williams arrived at the ORA and hired his photographers, the Acorn area had already been flattened almost entirely, with the result that the archive’s Acorn-related images show only a vast vacant lot. By the time this picture was taken, 90 percent of the Acorn project-area had been “cleared,” and 86 percent of residents had relocated — many to the neighborhood of East Oakland and the northern East Bay city of Richmond.*
* Acorn: Bright Success Story, Redevelopment Agency of The City of Oakland (1969).Groundbreaking ceremony for Acorn construction, November 10, 1967.
John B. Williams (kneeling) holds a sign for the Acorn Urban Renewal Project as it is hammered into the ground by Robert C. Weaver, Secretary of the newly founded Department of Housing and Urban Development. Appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, Weaver was the first African American to serve in a cabinet position in the United States government. According to Weaver’s biographer Wendell E. Pritchett, Johnson initially hesitated to appoint him, but was pressured by Martin Luther King and NAACP president Roy Wilkins to name an African American to the post. “Johnson’s tortuous path to Weaver,” writes Pritchett, “illuminated many of the contradictions of Weaver’s career and the complexities of racial liberalism and urban policy in the mid-1960s.”*
* Wendell E. Pritchett, Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer (University of Chicago Press, 2014), 262.Acorn project site, November 10, 1967.
In other images from the Acorn groundbreaking ceremony, two nuns look on, or stand in conversation with Williams. While the sisters are not identified, they probably came from St. Vincent’s Day Home, a convent and daycare center at the heart of Acorn that was one of just three buildings spared from destruction. St. Vincent’s Day Home opened in 1911 and continues operations today. Other cornerstones of the community, such as Fannie Wall Children’s Home, Beth Eden Church, and the Linden Street Branch YWCA, were torn down.*
* Marta Gutman, A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscape of Oakland, 1850-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 326.Public hearing, May 5, 1967.
With demolition in progress at Acorn, residents of Oak Center, led by Lillian Q. Love, organized to oppose the bulldozing of their community. The initial redevelopment proposal had assured the preservation of no more than 20 percent of area homes. But Love’s Oak Center Neighborhood Association won a stunning victory when Williams announced in 1967 that the city would preserve up to 70 percent of Oak Center dwellings, some of which were moved at city expense to make way for the Grove Shafter freeway expansion.Swearing in of Mrs. Love as Redevelopment Agency commissioner, October 24, 1966.
The remarkable success of the OCNA in protecting their neighborhood led to cancellation of Phase III of the General Neighborhood Renewal Plan — which would have affected three additional areas in West Oakland — though many more projects would be spearheaded by the ORA in coming years. “The Oak Center protest highlighted several features in the emerging formation of the black community as a collective actor,” writes historian Chris Rhomberg. “The emphasis on the defense of neighborhood and the role of indigenous organization within majority black areas prefigured future political mobilization in West Oakland.”* When the Black Panther Party began publishing its own newspaper The Black Panther in 1972, its critique of the City of Oakland and federal officials was grounded in examination of the destructive effects of urban renewal programs on African-American communities across the country.
* Chris Rhomberg, No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 133.Lillian Q. Love interviewed for television in Oak Village, August 23, 1967.*
Love was a staunch Republican, who credited her father, Earl Meneweather, with instilling her belief in self-reliance. Meneweather had unsuccessfully fought development of the Peralta Village public-housing complex in West Oakland in the 1930s, which forced the relocation of the Meneweather family. Several of the Meneweather children followed their father’s footsteps into community organizing — including Love’s brother Earl Jr. and sister Dolores, who co-founded the OCNA with Love and others. In the 1960s, Love vigorously challenged the federal government’s War on Poverty programs — which, she argued, created lucrative bureaucratic jobs but neglected the poor. Love believed that public housing was “degrading to the individual.”**
* The interview was conducted during a tour of Oakland by Mayor John H. Reading on August 23, 1967, though it is not clear what station produced the footage or who the interviewer is. Oak Village, where the interview took place, is an apartment complex in the Oak Center neighborhood.
** David Alcott, “West Oakland Activist Lillian Love Dead at 74,” Oakland Tribune, February 21, 1987.Oak Center tour with Mayor Reading and agency commissioners, August 23, 1967.
Children growing up in and around downtown Oakland in the years of urban renewal played in demolition sites, gathered to watch as bulldozers tore through their neighbors’ homes and leveled their schools, and got used to seeing photographers on their streets. Many families eventually — and permanently — relocated to other parts of the East Bay. It is estimated that between seven and ten thousand housing units were lost in Oakland in the 1960s, and more than ten thousand residents displaced.*
* Chris Rhomberg, No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 236.Oak Center parcels, June 19, 1968.
Despite the agreement to save a percentage of Oak Center houses, many were demolished or moved to make way for the Grove Shafter freeway. Eminent-domain provisions forced owners to sell, and entire blocks were boarded up.Oak Center survey contact sheets, no date.
The archive documents individual houses in detail, including those slated for rehabilitation as well as for demolition, with addresses and parcel numbers handwritten on the back of each frame on the contact sheets.House-moving in progress, November 14, 1968.
Oak Center homes deemed “architecturally significant” were moved to make way for the Grove Shafter freeway. The building being relocated here is framed by the newly completed Acorn Residence on the left and, on the right, a traditional home which appears to have escaped the bulldozer. A workman perches on the roof of the house in transit, to lift power lines as the load moves down the street.John B. Williams and the Walker family, Oak Center, June 14, 1967.
Following the OCNA protest, some Oak Center homeowners — such as the couple in this staged photo —received funds to restore their houses. Owning one’s home was not the only criterion for qualification in the program; according to an explanatory pamphlet, an annual income of less than $3,000 (just under $23,000 in 2019 dollars) was required as well. “The dream of the residents of Oak Center has always been to see West Oakland restored to the status of its former glory,” said Lillian Love. “It is our strong belief that restoration of homes in Oaks Center will serve as an example to individuals living in adjoining areas and will motivate them to seek comparable means of improving their houses and surroundings.”*
* Lillian Q. Love quoted in REDEVELOPMENT: Oakland, CA, Annual Report of the Redevelopment Agency of the City of Oakland (1966), 14.Hoover Junior High School students viewing ORA maquette for proposed downtown Oakland development, June 7, 1967.
In addition to posters, pamphlets, and billboards, the ORA developed informational exhibitions that traveled to display locations around the city. Here students from Hoover Junior High School meet with agency officials for a presentation on the proposal to redevelop downtown Oakland. Originally named “The Corridor,” this project focused initially on connecting the downtown to Acorn and Oak Center, but later transformed into the development known as City Center Plaza — a commercial pedestrian complex which included a community gallery.BART meeting in John B. Williams’s office, October 17, 1967.
The ORA was also involved in planning for the new Bay Area Rapid Transit system, which further decimated West Oakland when its thriving commercial district was all but demolished to make way for an above-ground train station and segment of elevated track. In this photograph, a redevelopment officer presents an architectural rendering of the proposed West Oakland station.Broadway under construction, February 6, 1969.
Residents of Oakland had to navigate construction throughout downtown for the better part of a decade. Here two women make their way down Broadway near 14th Street, alongside a BART line in progress. It would be three more years before the transit system opened.City Center demolition ceremony, November 12, 1970.
The last major project directed by Williams was the development of City Center Plaza. This $225-million-dollar undertaking mandated the demolition of fifteen city blocks, and was intended to refurbish the city’s central business district — though actual results were disappointing. Here Williams and agency commissioners Eujene Jurs and Leslie Moore pose with Theresa Smith, Miss Oakland 1970, to christen the wrecking ball.City Center demolition ceremony November 12, 1970.
A local audience watches as the wrecking ball levels the first building to come down as the City Center development began. The plan to modernize downtown was inarguably a failure, and the redeveloped zone is now a generic business complex, full of chain stores that close on evenings and weekends, or sit eerily empty. John B. Williams’s vision of a centrally located, pedestrian-friendly plaza — what was promised as “a new chance, perhaps the last chance, to properly develop the center city into a vibrant area" — has yet to materialize.*
* John B. WIlliams quoted in REDEVELOPMENT: Oakland, CA, Annual Report of the Redevelopment Agency of the City of Oakland (1966), 21.City Center Fence, 1971.
Oakland’s redevelopment narrative is more than a story of decline and destruction. It is a testament to the challenges faced by African-American leaders who invested in liberal government intervention, grassroots organizing, and resistance against ill-conceived policies and projects, as well as to the enduring legacy of community response during Oakland’s post-war crisis. The redevelopment of Oakland in the 1960s leaves us with a rich picture in which racialized lending practices and discriminatory zoning laws created urban blight, but also instigated a lasting and radical liberation movement.
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