1960 African-American population
1970 African-American population
zones meant a predominantly white work force received favourable access to loans and capital, while African-American industrial workers in West Oakland found it impossible to acquire mortgages, creating a form of economic apartheid in which black residents were forced to stay within the red lines. Even during the 1960s, when most of the legal forms of redlining had ended, the effects of the lines themselves continued. Oakland’s post-war history has been marked by large transportation construction projects – promises of future mobility that became the means to divide up neighbourhoods and mark boundaries. In the 1930s and 40s, African-Americans had worked to purchase houses in West Oakland; by 1949, Oakland’s planning commission has designated the entire area blighted. Both the Bay Area Regional Transport System, which began in the 1950s and an interstate highway linking the East Bay suburban corridor were built right through West Oakland. These transportation lines,
built to facilitate employment, became racial lines, marking steep differences in house prices. Thriving communities of owner- occupiers were designated as blighted and on the basis of that categorisation, people relocated, communities were cut in half and West Oakland fell into a downward spiral. How many times have we heard that classifications reproduce themselves? Many of the dispossessed residents of West Oakland moved east. Today, on High Street, a major artery in Fruitvale, East Oakland and one of the red lines that indicated the beginning of the redlined lower reaches of the Bible belt, there is little evidence of racial zoning. The smell of roast chicken wafts from a large Mi Pueblo supermarket on one side of the line, and meets the small of simmering lengua from the tacqueria opposite. The policies that institutionalised the red lines are now gone, immigration totally changed Oakland’s urban space and, according to census data, Oakland has 27,000 fewer African-Americans than it did in 2000. *
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