Senior Stories

Senior Stories

Oakland elders dish up a slice of history.

As an Oakland firefighter in the mid-1950s, Burl Smith was up against more than smoke and flames. After serving in the ranks of the Tuskegee Airmen—the first group of African-American pilots in the U.S. military—Smith returned from World War II to settle in his hometown, finding employment with the segregated Oakland Fire Department. Although he was just looking for a career, not the chance to be a civil rights activist, time and place intervened, and Smith soon found himself on the front lines in the bitter struggle toward integration. “I’m glad to see that all ranks of the fire department now reflect the ethnic diversity of the city,” says Smith, 86, who has remained in Oakland. “I am proud to be a part of that legacy.”

If it weren’t for oral historian Nancy Thompson, though, no one outside of Smith’s immediate family might be aware of his contributions to his community. Thompson was inspired to chronicle the lives of Oakland seniors after she and her mother recorded the story of her mom’s 1943 cross-country move, a journey that brought her by train from New Orleans to Oakland. The tale has been preserved through the StoryCorps Griot Project, which documents the lives of African-American families.

Thanks to Thompson’s grand plan, Smith and 11 other local seniors had the rare chance to tell their own fascinating life stories last spring. Beginning in January, Thompson led the seniors through a series of storytelling circles at the North Oakland Senior Center. She documented the stories through recording and in the self-published book Pioneering Spirits: A Legacy of Courage. On June 27, the group gathered at the senior center to celebrate the volume’s publication and to share some of their tales with family and community members.

In a huge, high-ceilinged room flooded with sunlight, the seniors sat against a backdrop of photos and newspaper clippings from decades past. Each person told a piece of their personal history to a proud and enthusiastic group of 150 family and community members, an audience that ranged from toddlers to octogenarians. White-haired and wearing a dark suit and red tie, Smith recalled that the senior center had once been University High, from which he’d graduated in 1940. The room in which he shared his story had been his high school auditorium.

“This project was not only about being able to tell a story,” said Thompson, who hosted the event. “It was also about being able to listen to someone else’s story, letting someone else’s voice be heard and validated.”

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A youthful 62, Thompson, a former paralegal who lives in Oakland, is passionate about the value of sharing life stories. “Elders are not getting the recognition they rightly deserve—they’re almost invisible,” she says. To preserve her own family’s past, she wrote her mother’s history and also produced and directed the documentary, Mrs. Brown’s Beauty, about her 81-year-old aunt’s mixed-media collages. The remarkable Mrs. Brown, then unable to speak or walk, discovered her artistic talent at age 74, through the Art With Elders program at Alameda Hospital. The film has been featured at venues including the San Francisco Black Film Festival and the Oakland International Film Festival.

In search of a wider-ranging project that focused on seniors in her own community, Thompson secured a $5,000 grant from the City of Oakland Cultural Funding Program. More encouragement for Thompson’s idea came from colleagues at the Association of Personal Historians, an international trade association for professionals in the field. A proliferation of similar-minded enterprises, such as the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, and the popular StoryCorps (with weekly broadcasts on National Public Radio), points to a growing interest in personal histories, an appeal bolstered by technology that makes it easy to record a life story in print or on video.

Because of its diverse population, the North Oakland Senior Center at Martin Luther King Jr. Way and 57th Street became Thompson’s focus—she chose her 12 participants from its patrons, and the seniors told their stories during four group circles and an individual interview. Thompson’s request to each person: Share your personal challenges, life lessons, and words of wisdom for future generations.

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The stories offer a window onto history. Through tales of personal activism within the civil rights and women’s movements, Elder Circle members illuminate key events that shaped the 20th century. Oakland resident Angela McLinn, 88, whose story includes being arrested and jailed for refusing to sit at the back of a Virginia bus, recounts a sit-in at Thompson’s Restaurant, a well-known eatery in Washington, D.C. As president of the Howard University chapter of the NAACP, McLinn organized this peaceful protest in 1944. “We knew we wouldn’t be served,” she explains. “We each got a tray and a glass of water and scattered throughout the restaurant; we had signs outside letting everyone know that Thompson’s would not serve us.” In 1950, a civil rights organization brought the Thompson’s Restaurant case to the courts, resulting in the 1953 Supreme Court decision outlawing whites-only restaurants in the nation’s capital.

Burl Smith’s story brings the civil rights struggle home to Oakland, with tales of the desegregation of the city’s fire department. In 1949, Smith was the only African American in a group of 25 new hires. As protocol demanded, he was sent to 22 Engine, the all-black firehouse on Magnolia and 34th streets. The segregation of black firemen meant that 22 Engine was overstaffed and overcrowded, with 10 men per shift rather than the usual five found at the white firehouses.

Against a backdrop of civil rights victories nationwide, Oakland’s fire department reached a turning point in 1955 when John Sweeney, a white man committed to integration, became fire chief. Sweeney began to send the men from 22 Engine to work at previously all-white firehouses, making Oakland one of the first cities in the nation to integrate. “Some of the white firefighters didn’t accept it,” Smith says. “They cussed and fumed, but the chief said if they didn’t want to do it they could resign.” Smith recalls that one or two firefighters in each house would typically ostracize the black firefighter on their shift and not eat meals with him. At one house, Smith encountered a white firefighter he’d gone to high school with, who ignored him in front of the other whites, but wanted to talk once they were alone together. “It took a while to get everyone used to getting along,” says Smith, “but gradually people found out that each individual was an individual. Slowly but surely the tide was turned.”

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As Smith fought fires in the city and racism in the firehouse, Dorothy Eng, 86, was making some Oakland history of her own. Sporting short gray hair and a bright pink top, Eng speaks matter-of-factly about her achievements. While living in Oakland’s Chinatown in 1944, she founded the Chinese Young Women’s Society to provide hospitality for Chinese-American soldiers in the Bay Area. “At this time, Asians weren’t always welcome in public places,” says Eng, who was just 21 when she spearheaded the organization. “In cities like Portland and Seattle, Bakersfield, Sacramento, and Stockton, the Chinese churches had programs where they’d invite a service boy and treat him like family. It was disgraceful that this wasn’t happening here, since San Francisco was a main port of embarkation.”

Within three months, Eng’s vision led to the creation of an Oakland Chinese center at the Lincoln Clubhouse on 11th Street. Eng organized the women from four Oakland churches to offer Saturday night hospitality at the “Oak Chi Center,” with refreshments, card and table games, music, and dancing. In those days, though, expressions of gratitude only extended so far. “No one left with a service man at the end of the evening,” Eng recalls. “We had to be very strict because the parents did not want their daughters entertaining any man.”

After the war, Eng turned her energies toward higher education of young Chinese women. “It was always my mother’s teaching that a woman should be educated to be independent,” says Eng, whose mother, a child bride, never had that chance. “In the classroom, Chinese Americans were a group of invisible people; we were never invited to be a part of things at school.”

Passage of the GI Bill in 1944 brought generous tuition benefits to servicemen, easing the obligation for Chinese-American women to work in order to fund their brothers’ college educations. The mission of the women’s society became fund-raising for scholarships for girls, accomplished through fashion shows, big band parties, fancy teas, and luncheons. Newspaper clippings from The Oakland Tribune and Oakland Shopping News highlight the fashion shows, with society members posing in elegant gowns from the 1940s and ’50s.

Eng was the group’s organizer and cheerleader. Recalling their evening meetings, she says, “I had to prepare a dinner so the women wouldn’t have an excuse for not coming.” Gradually, members were drawn in. For Chinese families (a largely segregated community living in about 10 square blocks of Chinatown), the fund-raisers offered an avenue into mainstream American culture. The events not only united the group, but also offered, in Eng’s words, “a finishing school that prepared the women for the larger society.” One of the group’s original members, March Fong Eu, later became California’s secretary of state. The myriad fashion shows and luncheons paid off for the next generation as well, funding college scholarships for 27 young Bay Area Chinese women.

Although it had been set up as a wartime effort, the Chinese Young Women’s Society continued until 1994, providing services and support for new Chinese immigrants. The group was honored in the documentary film, We Served With Pride, which highlights the role of Chinese Americans in World War II. Eng attended the 1999 screening at the Smithsonian and was thanked for her work by President Clinton. “At 21 you’re half child and half adult,” she says today. “You don’t know any fear; you take on something and say, we can do this.”

The narratives that emerged from the Elder Circle range from sagas of political and spiritual growth to tales of family and illness. Oakland resident Don Calhoun spent five years as a missionary in rural Ethiopia, helping to build schools and medical clinics. Activist Frances Beal wrote the acclaimed essay “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” published in the 1970 bestseller, Sisterhood Is Powerful. And Oakland’s Lillian Edwards, an employee of the Campbell’s Soup Company from 1945 through 1982, embarked on a high school education at age 40, when the company offered a GED equivalency class.

“The whole community is blessed by projects like this,” says Steve Lavoie, librarian in the Oakland Public Library’s History Room, who hosted the Elder Circle Project last summer. “Oakland is an astonishingly interesting place because of the people who live here.”

The book is available in the history room of the Oakland public library, the Mills College library, and the East Bay Genealogical Society, where Thompson will speak about the Elder Circle Project early next year.

Thompson is optimistic that the project will live on and hopes it will serve as a prototype for similar efforts in other senior centers. The elders are eager to share their stories at community venues. “They’re ready to go,” says Thompson. In the meantime, she offers this advice: “Spend some time with your grandfather or great-aunt. We all have a story to tell, and you’ll find a wealth of information in your own family.”

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For a copy of Pioneering Spirits: A Legacy of Courage, contact Nancy Thompson at (510) 268-1146.

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Rachel Trachten is a freelance journalist and copy editor and a frequent contributor to The Monthly.

Faces of the East Bay