Reflections of A Longtime Black Family in Richmond
Background: In the following interview, Harry and Marguerite Williams reflect on the housing discrimination that they and other Black families experienced in Richmond. Racist covenants played a large role in determining where they could live, and as Marguerite explains, housing options were limited further by lack of housing construction. The sections below are excerpted from the original interview and are abridged with ellipses for clarity.
HARRY WILLIAMS (HW): I had just come out of the service and I wanted to buy a house. . . . We saw the “For Sale” sign on a house [near Stege Crossing and Forty-Seventh Street]. I had this old ’36 Chevrolet. I got out and asked [the realtor] if the house was for sale and he said, “Yes.” . . . he said, “You have to put up a deposit, three hundred dollars.” That was part of my mustering-out pay. So I gave him 0, and went back to see about the house, and I found out that they had a restricted covenant. This house could not be sold to Blacks, Orientals, Mexicans, whatever.
So I went back and told the realtor and asked for money back, and he said, “No.” So I jumped in my car and I drove right to the VA [Veteran’s Administration] in Oakland, and I told a lawyer about it and he picked a phone and called back to the guy. And [the lawyer] came out and said, “You can go pick up your money.” And I went and got my money. [The realtor] was going to take advantage of me, see. A little young Black kid coming out of the service, didn’t know nothing.
MARGUERITE WILLIAMS (MW): [Harry’s aunt] lived in North Richmond, and she really took advantage of people. She used to raise chickens—she’ll tell you what she did now, she’ll laugh about it now. But at the time I thought it was wrong. They would white wash the chicken houses, and they were renting that out! They weren’t the only ones.
HW: At one time a Black person couldn’t buy any property in Richmond. . . . They would farm them out over in North Richmond. . . . After the war started, and you got all this flow and mixture of people coming into [Richmond], Black people that had money couldn’t buy any house around here. . . . There were a lot of restricted areas. . . . A lot of [Black people] had to go into North Richmond, because they were forced, in a way, to move over there.
MW: What it was primarily was the fact that all these guys got out of the service at the same time, and they had their mustering-out pay and the GI loan. And there weren’t any houses! Because it was wartime, and they weren’t building. It wasn’t so much that it was restricted throughout here, there just wasn’t any housing to buy.
HW: The only time things started to break was when the federal government passed that law about fair housing.
MW: And they started building more houses!
HW: The California real estate at one time, they had control of everything as far as a minority moving into certain areas.
MW: Oh yeah.
HW: Until [the federal government] broke that, there were only certain areas that we could live. . . . What [realtors] would do, they would move a Black guy into the neighborhood, and then a white realtor would come along and he’d go next door to a white family and say, “A nigger’s moving next door,” or something like that, “and you’d better sell your house.” They called that—
MW: Blockbusting.
HW: Blockbusting. They used that quite a bit . . . they had all kinds of sneaky, underhand techniques that were really disgusting.
Source: Harry and Marguerite Williams, “Reflections of a Longtime Black Family in Richmond," an oral history conducted in 1985 by Judith K. Dunning, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1990.