The Weight of What Was Built,
and What Was Taken

The Great Migration and the Rise of the Harlem of the West

African Americans have been present in San Francisco since before the Gold Rush, but the community's defining growth came in two waves during the 20th century. [1] In 1940, fewer than 5,000 Black residents lived in the entire city. The Western Addition itself held just over 2,000. [2]

World War II changed everything. The federal government's war production expansion drew tens of thousands of Black workers from Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and across the Deep South to Bay Area shipyards and munitions plants. [1] They came escaping sharecropping, tenant farming, racial terror, and the fixed ceiling of the Jim Crow South. [3] San Francisco offered stable government wages and the promise of something different.

But housing discrimination throughout the city was severe. [4] A UC Berkeley report cited in the SF Public Press found that 34 out of every 35 apartments in San Francisco prohibited African Americans. [5] The Western Addition was one of the few places where Black families could rent or own — in part because President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 had forced Japanese American residents into internment camps in February 1942, leaving thousands of homes vacant. [3]

What grew in that context was extraordinary. By 1950, the Western Addition's Black population had grown from roughly 2,000 to 15,000. [2] The neighborhood became the center of Black cultural, economic, and civic life on the West Coast. Between 300 and 400 Black-owned businesses operated along Fillmore Street — jazz clubs, restaurants, hotels, barbershops, beauty schools, insurance companies, bookstores, clothing stores. [6] Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Thelonious Monk all performed here. [7] It earned its name: the Harlem of the West.

Despite segregation elsewhere in the city, the Fillmore had become a self-sustaining ecosystem. Families from Texas sent for relatives. Churches anchored neighborhoods. The Fillmore Auditorium, Small's Paradise, Bop City, the Blue Mirror — these were not just entertainment venues, they were the infrastructure of community life. This was not a neighborhood waiting to be saved. It was one that had built something remarkable under severe constraint.

Urban Renewal: The Two Phases of Displacement

The city's decision to redevelop the Western Addition did not emerge from concern for its residents. As documented in the 48 Hills analysis of the redevelopment record, the Fillmore was only five blocks from Pacific Heights, and San Francisco's white business and political establishment was alarmed by the rapid growth of a large Black community in proximity to one of the city's wealthiest enclaves. [8] The "blight" designation applied to the Western Addition was a legal instrument of that alarm.

Chester Hartman's City for Sale documents how a downtown-government coalition — organized through the Blyth-Zellerbach Committee and the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) — drove a targeted neighborhood demolition strategy. [9] The result came in two phases.

When the bulldozers finally stopped, the full accounting was staggering. Across both phases: 883 businesses closed, 20,000 to 30,000 residents displaced, approximately 2,500 Victorian houses demolished. [16] Many displaced residents moved to SoMa, Mission Bay, and Hunters Point — and were then displaced a second time when those neighborhoods were also seized for redevelopment. [5] Without the business ecosystem that had previously employed thousands, without the homes that had anchored families, the economic foundation of Black San Francisco collapsed.

The Long Decline

The Black population of San Francisco peaked at approximately 96,000 in the early 1970s — 13.5% of the city. [17] In the Western Addition specifically, the neighborhood was approximately 80% Black in 1970. By 2000, that figure had fallen to 30%. By the mid-2010s, estimates for the broader Western Addition area registered as low as 7%. [18]

By 2020, approximately 45,000 Black residents remained in San Francisco — 5.1% of the city's population. [17] The Black population is the only racial group in San Francisco that has declined in every census count since 1970. [19] A 2019 UC Berkeley poll found that 58% of Black San Franciscans were considering leaving the state entirely — a rate 14% higher than Asian and Latino respondents. [20]

Former Mayor Willie Brown, whose political career began when the Black population was approximately 90,000, described the arc directly: "Suddenly, redevelopment started, and when re-development started, the first thing they did was get us out. They called it 'urban renewal.' No. It was 'urban removal.'" [21]

The 2023 San Francisco Reparations Plan, produced by the African American Reparations Advisory Committee (AARAC) after two years of research, community engagement, and expert testimony, documents how housing harms produced concomitant inequalities across every dimension of life — education, employment, health, and culture. [22] A companion Stanford Law School study, Disinvestment of San Francisco's African American Community 1970–2022, produced for the SFHRC, traced systemic disenfranchisement across housing, economics, and health with quantifiable data. [23] In December 2025, Mayor Daniel Lurie signed an ordinance creating a reparations fund, though without an initial funding allocation given the city's $1 billion budget deficit.

This is the historical context in which the Fillmore Community Action Plan operates. The FCAP is not addressing neighborhood decline in the abstract. It is addressing the documented, quantifiable consequences of deliberate government action — action that destroyed a self-sufficient Black community, displaced its residents, shuttered its businesses, severed intergenerational wealth pathways, and produced health outcomes that persist today as a direct result of displacement and the chronic stress and poverty it generated.