Black community leaders in San Francisco have spent the past few years wrestling the city for control of the Fillmore Heritage Center. They say turning the city-owned property over to Black residents is the key to resurrecting a neighborhood once known as the Harlem of the West.
Monday marked an escalation in their tactics. In a bid to push city officials to do what many Black San Franciscans have long thought was right, they tied Black ownership of the center to reparations.
“A landless people is a hopeless people,” the Rev. Amos Brown, a San Francisco native and NAACP chapter president, told me. Brown also belongs to a state Reparations Task Force committee advocating alongside residents and community groups for control of the heritage center.
There’s a savvy strategy in linking its ownership to reparations, because it could very well force the city’s hand. But if the city does hand over the center without helping the Black community bring it back to life, any failure to revive the center and the neighborhood that surrounds it could hurt the broader reparations movement, which is already fragile and poorly understood.
Slave reparations are an old, divisive topic in America. Black people were promised 40 acres and a mule as repayment for slavery in 1865. What we got instead was 156 years of systemic oppression. Only recently have elected officials taken the dialogue seriously, with California starting the first-in-the-nation task force over the summer to study and recommend reparations for descendants of slaves.
San Francisco and Oakland have created guaranteed-income pilot programs and reinvestment initiatives shaped by the spirit of reparations, even though local officials avoid publicly describing them as such.
That could be because of how poorly the term polls.
More than 60% of Americans, and 90% of Republicans, oppose reparations, according to a recent national poll by the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Only 28% of white people support it.
Local officials dance around the word. Black leaders in the Fillmore have embraced it.
“I see (the Fillmore Heritage Center) as something that can whet the appetite around reparations talk in the city,” said Majeid Crawford, who, as associate director of the New Community Leadership Foundation, has tried over the years to breathe new life into the vacant Fillmore Heritage Center. “But it shouldn’t become the symbol of reparations.”
Here’s where it gets complicated: It already has.
The Fillmore neighborhood was the city’s Black cultural epicenter in the 1940s. Black shipyard workers flocked to the area for jobs during World War II. They set down social and economic roots, turning the Fillmore into a self-sustaining chocolate city wrapped inside of a largely white one. Then came urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s, which razed non-white neighborhoods like the Fillmore in the name of “redevelopment.”
San Francisco’s efforts to revitalize the neighborhood have been scattershot and more performative than substantive in recent years. Multimillion-dollar projects have come and gone, yet the area is still plagued by infrastructure woes. Even the $75 million Fillmore Heritage Center, built in 2007 to be a premier attraction headlined by a short-lived, high-end Japanese restaurant and nightclub, failed to attract enough foot traffic to keep local businesses afloat.
The heritage center was supposed to mark a new chapter for the neighborhood. It never materialized.
San Francisco and its redevelopment agency, which currently own the property, have acknowledged that the space belongs under Black ownership. But after the heritage center closed in 2019, they’ve rejected proposals from Black-led community groups vying to take it over.
“It’s an absolute outrage that a beautiful building like this has sat vacant over the years because the city can’t get its act together,” said District Five Supervisor Dean Preston, who has helped nonprofits pitch reopening plans to the city.
This feels even more jarring when looking at what’s happening across the Bay Bridge. Last week, Oakland officials took one step closer to handing over their share of the Coliseum, the city’s largest piece of public land, to a Black-led entity called the African American Sports and Entertainment Group.
It didn’t take calls for reparations. The group just had a detailed plan — possibly bringing an WNBA team to Oakland, housing and the creation of a cultural hub celebrating Black culture — and Oakland officials agreed.
There’s some desperation in the reparations demand made by Black community leaders in San Francisco. The city isn’t going to change its ways, they say, so even without a plan for what nonprofit will run the heritage center, they still chose to go public with their demand.
That makes me a little nervous about how all this will turn out, but I understand why they’re fed up. And Crawford said that what worriers like me don’t appreciate is that this is actually part of a multistep plan that the state Reparations Task Force is putting together.
“The reparations committee’s upcoming five-month plan is the steak. This call for the Fillmore Heritage Center is just the appetizer when it comes to reparations in the city,” Crawford said.
Black leaders took a risk by invoking “reparations” in a serious way for the first time last week. I just hope it was a calculated one.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Justin Phillips appears Sundays. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JustMrPhillips
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Linking Black ownership of the Fillmore center to reparations is a bold gamble. I hope it pays off - San Francisco Chronicle
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