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Next year, it’s possible that the region that likes to think of itself as the most progressive place in the country will have zero black state legislators and zero black mayors of major cities.
That’s only happened in the Bay Area for five years in the last seven decades.
The trend was thrown into focus last month when the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to yank Acting Mayor London Breed from office and switch her with Supervisor Mark Farrell — replacing an African-American woman for a white man and creating an uproar over race and politics in the Bay Area.
Breed’s supporters, who packed the ornate City Hall chamber, shouted at the supervisors who ousted her, and the move set off alarm bells among many black activists. But Breed’s removal is just one example of a broader ebbing in political power for the Bay Area’s African-American community over the last few decades.
“My colleagues think we’ve come a long way, and we have in terms of our progressive policies,” said Barbara Lee, the Oakland Democrat who is the Bay Area’s lone black congresswoman. “But if you look around and see the dearth of African-Americans in elected office (in the Bay Area), you have to wonder why.”
It’s a change for a region that has given rise to some of California’s most influential African-American leaders over the years, from the Black Panthers to Willie Brown to Kamala Harris. The Bay Area has been consistently represented by at least one black legislator in Sacramento for all but 10 years since 1949 — and Brown was leading San Francisco for five of those gap years. The region has also sent an African-American to Congress continuously since 1971.
The state of African-American political representation in the region today is “pretty bleak,” said James Lance Taylor, a professor at the University of San Francisco who is writing a book on black politics in California.
Community activists, politicians and experts say a variety of forces have made it difficult for black candidates to get much more than a toehold in regional politics in recent years, from a drop in the African-American population to complicated political alliances.
The 6-3 vote by the Board of Supervisors to remove Breed was an act of political gymnastics by more liberal members to deny her the advantage of incumbency in the upcoming June election. The supervisors argued that Breed, the board president who became acting mayor after the death of Mayor Ed Lee, was too close to wealthy tech industry donors, and that it was inappropriate for her to serve as both board president and acting mayor. They replaced her with Farrell, a white venture capital investor representing the city’s most affluent neighborhood, who is not running in this year’s election.
The move incensed many black activists. “The so-called progressive liberal coalition postures themselves as being with the black community,” said the Rev. Amos C. Brown, the head of the San Francisco branch of the NAACP. “They have shown their true colors.”
Neither Farrell nor Supervisor Aaron Peskin, one of the architects of the switch, responded to a request for comment.
Breed, who first ran for supervisor in 2012 — inspired by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign — played down allegations that her removal was racist.
“It’s important that this decision doesn’t tear our city apart,” she said in a recent interview. She’s still running in the June election.
Her experience growing up in public housing a few blocks from City Hall helped shape her policies on issues like affordable housing, she said. “It’s not that I’m just African-American, it’s that I come from and understand a community that had tremendous poverty and violence,” Breed said. “A lot of things that we want to change, as a city and a country, are things that I as a policymaker have personally experienced.”
A drought in political power for African-American elected officials goes far beyond Breed. Only one of the 101 cities and towns in the nine Bay Area counties currently has a black mayor: Pittsburg, where Pete Longmire, a former police officer, has served on the City Council for seven years and is in his second stint as mayor.
African-American political representation in the Bay Area “ebbs and flows,” Longmire said in an interview. As mayor, he’s made an effort at reaching out to minorities in Pittsburg, a diverse community of 63,000 people. After police shootings around the country in 2015, he started a series of roundtable conversations between police department leadership and community activists, which led to the hiring of four new black officers in the city.
Longmire said he’s often the only black person in the room when he goes to meetings of Bay Area political leaders — “a hell of a lot more often than not,” he said. “You look around and you can’t help but notice.”
Part of the reason why is a precipitous drop in the region’s black population. According to census data compiled by the Association of Bay Area Governments, the African-American population percentage in the nine Bay Area counties declined from 9 percent in 1980 to 6.7 percent in 2010 — among the lowest of any large metro area in the U.S.
In San Francisco, the decrease has been even steeper: The city’s black population declined from 96,078 or 13.4 percent of the total population in 1970 to 45,607 and 5.4 percent in 2016. And in Oakland, it dipped from 159,351 and 47 percent in 1980 to 101,936 and 26.1 percent in 2016. (It’s always been low in the South Bay.)
“Many of the African-Americans who used to be in San Francisco and Oakland are now living in Antioch or Tracy,” said Elihu Harris, a former Oakland mayor and state legislator.
Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, who represents a district that stretches from Hercules to Richmond to north Oakland, has been the sole African-American state legislator in the Bay Area since he was elected in 2014. A former Richmond City Council member, he said he quickly learned how difficult it is to run a first campaign.
“People always told me not to run or to wait my turn,” Thurmond said. Once in office, “I wanted to build a bench to support others, and to mentor and coach them,” he said, “prioritizing African-American candidates and women candidates.”
Thurmond is now leaving office as he runs for state superintendent of public instruction this year. At least four black candidates are running in the crowded field to replace him in district 15 — but two white candidates, Buffy Wicks, a former Obama campaign strategist, and Dan Kalb, an Oakland city councilman, have led in fundraising and endorsements.
“It is important to have as much of a diverse slate of candidates as possible in every race, and then ultimately up to the voters to make the final decision on which candidate’s individual life experiences, skills and approach will be of best service to them,” Wicks said in an email, noting that she opposed Breed’s removal from office.
Rochelle Pardue-Okimoto, an El Cerrito councilwoman who is also running for the seat and has been endorsed by the California Legislative Black Caucus, said she thought race and diversity among elected officials in the region should play a part in the campaign.
“As an African-American, I’ve always felt underrepresented in politics,” Pardue-Okimoto said. “We don’t need a lot of replicas of the same person representing us.”
The Bay Area does have more black elected officials on city councils, school boards, and commissions around the region. And most of the smaller cities rotate the mayoralty among their council members every one or two years, providing opportunities for leadership roles.
One major obstacle for first-time black candidates running for more prominent offices is fundraising — it’s harder for them to tap into wealthy donor networks, Lee and Thurmond argued. Publicly financed elections would mean “people from underrepresented groups and backgrounds will have the same opportunity as anybody else to run and win campaigns,” Thurmond said.
Meanwhile, modern-day protest movements like Black Lives Matter have focused less on electing their leaders to office than African-American activists in previous eras, said Taylor, the USF professor.
Lee got her start in politics volunteering with the Black Panther Party in Oakland. As the president of the Mills College Black Student Union, she refused to register to vote, convinced that working inside the electoral system couldn’t help. But she changed her mind after working on Sen. Shirley Chisholm’s boundary-breaking 1972 presidential campaign and Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale’s 1973 Oakland mayoral race.
“We have a lot of young people who know what it takes who would be great candidates in the Bay Area,” Lee said. “We need to make sure there are African-Americans in the pipeline who are ready to run.”
