Black Urban Landscapes of the Second Great Migration

Building on themes from her forthcoming book, Chasing the Sun: Staging Life, Belonging, and Displacement in the Black Bay Area (University of Washington Press), Oakland-born-and-raised historian and poet Wendy M. Thompson explores the ways that the Bay Area’s built environment has played a core role in the formation of race, belonging, and black California identity. Within the context of the Great Migration west, which spanned from the Second World War to the 1970s, Thompson analyzes various periods of development: the Second World War and wartime industries, the temporary building and permanent razing of housing, white flight and the development of racially restricted suburbs, and the municipal approach of “letting die.”

Today, the vestiges of yesterday’s built worlds stand in the form of aging, defunct infrastructure: derelict shipyards, seasoned highways, abandoned bus stops and train stations, and empty churches and storefronts. What these structures remind us of is the contested story of progress, where home and belonging were overwritten and overridden, and dreams were permanently deferred. Thompson recasts African American neighborhoods, war infrastructure, and industrial sites as urban ghost towns, interpolating former sites of early rural California extraction history with ongoing hauntings of industry, urbanization, and black displacement.

An in-person and virtual presentation by Wendy M. Thompson, poet, author, and Associate Professor of African American Studies, San José State University, San José, California