Gaye LeBaron: Santa Rosa's fight to equity has a long way to go

There is a true tale — a brief chapter of local history, really — about something that happened or, more to the point, didn't happen here in Sonoma County in 1995. It illustrates the tenor of those times with regard to racial issues. And it also speaks to how little progress we have made in the past 25 years.

In the spring of '95 a young man came to Sonoma County to be interviewed for an editor's position at The Press Democrat. He was from Milwaukee. He came with excellent credentials.

He stayed at the Flamingo through a weekend, sat through the standard series of interviews and was invited to come back on Monday. He told his interviewers he was planning to use the weekend to acquaint himself with the area.

He had a rental car and, as planned, he went out exploring on Saturday and Sunday — over to the coast, maybe to the Sonoma Valley, I'm not sure exactly where. But I do know that he was stopped by law enforcement officers three times in two days.

Two of the stops occurred in Santa Rosa. The first time he was asked for his license and for the car rental contract and told he had been pulled over for 'being late to make a left turn.'

The second time in Santa Rosa, the police officer gave no reason, just asked for license and documents, examined them and sent him on his way with no word of explanation whatsoever.

The third stop was when he was on his way back from Bodega Bay. Being unfamiliar with California law enforcement vehicles and uniforms, he didn't know whether it was a Sebastopol policeman or a highway patrolman. Again, there was no explanation, just a request for his license and rental contract.

On Monday he came back to the PD office and was offered the job. He asked for time to consider and flew home to Milwaukee where he did just that. Then he called the managing editor to say he was declining the offer. He told editors about his weekend adventures. And said he didn't want to 'be a pink poodle.'

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Did I mention that he was a Black man? Or had you figured that out?

We had an interesting long distance talk after I heard of his experiences.

The 'pink poodle' comment came up and he added that he had not seen another Black person in this area at any time in the three days. 'Do you have any Blacks at all in Santa Rosa?' he asked.

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Santa Rosa did have Black residents of course, but it would be a stretch to suggest that there were enough to be considered a 'Black community.' There were, however, Black citizens who were trying hard to make that happen.

Sal Rosano was Santa Rosa's police chief at that time. He responded to my questions, as did Chief Dwight Crandall of the Sebastopol PD. Both pointed out that there had been an alert issued that weekend for a Black man accused of breaking into the homes of elderly people, beating them and stealing from them.

They made it clear that they were explaining, not excusing, and both asked for contact information for the Milwaukee resident, with intention to reach out for more information about his experiences.

I never heard the results of those calls.

But I did hear from a subsequent caller who pointed out, and was not contradicted, that the alert had been for a Black man 'on a bicycle.'

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Those Black people who were here — including several families who had been here since the late 1940s — were working hard to create an integrated community.

Black families had moved north from wartime jobs in the Bay Area. Most were originally from the Southwest — Texas, Oklahoma — with money in their pockets from defense industry jobs and no intention whatsoever of going 'back South.'

Jesse Love was discharged from the Navy at the air base on Wright Road here in '45. Love, who was at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, was from Mississippi and at war's end had no intention of going back. He married and with his white wife, joined the small group of Black people who lived mostly in the South Park area. More than 60 years later, in a video interview, he would recall the names of some who were already in residence, including 'Ben and Gladys Barnes, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Saunders and a Mr. Moore.' The Wyatt families, Curtis Sr. and Jr., and Ruth and Jimmy Carter arrived in '46.

Platt Williams came from Louisiana in '49 to attend Santa Rosa Junior College. He was a teenage track star attracted by SRJC coach Dick Blewett and his winning team. He stayed to marry and raise a family of seven. He worked 36 years at the Sears store on B Street where he was highly visible in this mostly white town as one of very few local Black people who went to work every day in a business suit.

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Gilbert and Alice Gray and family, who would be outspoken leaders of the embryonic Black community, came in 1950 and bought a house on Petaluma Hill Road south of the city limits, the first of their several land purchases in that area which would eventually become a development known as Gray's Meadow.

In 1951, Alice Gray was among the group that called upon a minister they knew from their time in Marin City during the war to help establish a Baptist Church in South Park. The church building was erected, with donated materials and labor, in 1956 and quickly became a de facto community center.

In 1953 Gilbert Gray and Platt Williams founded the local chapter of the NAACP, which, both nationally and locally, was raised to new levels in the civil rights movement of the '60s. They were joined by the Wyatts, teacher Willie Garrett and others. As the national Civil Rights movement grew, so did the membership — both Black and white.

In those troubled times, Williams and Gray led a small group of NAACP protesters who picketed Kress and Woolworth's stores on Fourth Street to protest those companies' lunch counter segregation in the South. It marked the first-ever Sonoma County protest against the so-called Jim Crow laws.

In '62, the NAACP chapter got more than one complaint about an old, established workingman's bar in the last block of Fourth Street (now the site of Jackson's Bar & Grill). The owner was refusing to serve Black people. The police paid a visit, with a warning, but the refusals went on — until one Sunday in May seven Black elders stopped in for a drink. One ordered a beer, another a shot of whiskey and that's as far as they got.

'I'm sorry boys,' the bartender said. 'You've had too much already.'

Twenty years later, when Gray talked to me about the incident, he was still — well, the word 'incredulous' comes to mind.

'Too much!' he said. 'We'd just left church!'

The result was an NAACP lawsuit, which was settled out of court. And after that, until it closed and morphed into a fancy restaurant called JM Rosen (like the cheesecakes), the 'Silver Dollar Seven' made sure that one or two of them bellied up to the bar once in a while — and had a beer.

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The Rev. James E. Coffee, who led both Black and white Santa Rosans to understand and respect each other, came to lead the little South Park Community Baptist Church in 1963.

Commuting from his Oakland home for the first years of his tenure, Coffee set about breaking down barriers between Black and white Santa Rosa. He and his wife, Vivian, moved the family to town and he became active in both Rotary and Kiwanis as well as the Salvation Army. He brought his congregation into the mainstream of Santa Rosa life.

It is notable that, when the church burned in '85, there was citywide support for a new location on Sonoma Avenue, where it remains today. It should also be noted that the church had 15 members when the Rev. Coffee came in '63 and more than 500 — of all skin colors — at the time of his death in 2010.

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Backing up to that 1995 column about being a 'pink poodle' in Santa Rosa — I can safely say the reaction back then was 'varied.'

One carefully considered response came from a white woman married to a Black man. They had two children. She wanted people to realize how differently she was treated in shops and stores when she shopped alone and when her children and/or her husband were with her. Night and day. Black and white.

Her story produced more letters. Some signed, most unsigned. Many of them told me how wrong I was to even bring up these issues.

Others, the ones who didn't sign their names, told me that I lacked the credentials to write about these things — in other words, that I knew nothing about what the 'real world' was like.

One angry merchant delivered his message in person, loud and clear.

'If they come into MY store,' he shouted at me, 'I sure as hell follow them around.'

That's when I learned things about people I had known a long time. And it is when I knew for certain that the 'race issue' was not a Black problem; it was something that white people have to solve.

It still is.