ABSTRACT
Prior to the 1940s, African Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area inhabited an ambiguous place in the rather fluid racial hierarchy that existed in cities like San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond. In 1943, black sociologist Charles Johnson headed a survey of the city’s African American population during the war years, and he found that while the migrants had a favorable view of the established black population, the long-time black residents held largely negative views of the migrants. By the time of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of May 1954, the San Francisco Bay Area had witnessed a profound economic, social, and cultural upheaval. The unsolved problems of the war years would leave a long and bitter legacy for African Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area, and they would be the seeds of the Black Revolution of the 1960s.
