A Spy in the Struggle

Holloway, CA: How a Has-Been Town Became a Hotbed of Black Eco-Activism

Holloway, California. Population 400,000. A small Northern California city at the end of the BART subway line, just past Richmond. Like its Bay Area neighbors—Richmond and Oakland—Holloway attracted many African American migrants from the South to work in shipyards for World War II. But after the war, those transplants found themselves in a dead-end.

However, on Holloway Avenue, a few relics of the town’s former glory survived the riots of the late 1960s. Above the old plywood boards that were nailed over the door and broken windows, a sign with peeling yellow and blue paint still invited pedestrians into Netta’s High Class Hideaway, formerly a legendary blues nightclub. For a while in the early 1990s, some local heroin users removed the boards from the back door and used the place as a shooting gallery. A few dirty needles in dusty corners had escaped the hasty and slipshod cleaning of the overworked public health division. No one in the community knew who owned the place, abandoned since the riots. Down the street, another sign had survived: Jimmy Earle’s Legendary BBQ.

Today, Holloway Avenue boasts a string of fast food joints, several bars, and a few cheap Chinese food places. For nightlife, Holloway residents have to travel ten miles to Oakland or across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. In response to repeated shootings, the City of Holloway won’t grant permits to any nightclubs.

In the late 1990s, the mayor had begun to push Plan 2000!—an initiative to build a gated biotech research facility that promised to bring thousands of jobs to Holloway. Plan 2000! did bring thousands of jobs, just not to many Holloway residents. The mostly white researchers would zip off the 80 freeway and through the heavily guarded gates, while the clerical workers would take the short walk from the Holloway BART subway stop.

Only the unskilled and custodial jobs ended up going to Holloway residents. Initially, there was some community outcry, but after a handful of protests, the town sunk back into its usual disappointment. RandellCorp isn’t the only gated community in Holloway. On the top of the hill, Cartwright College has stood for over 150 years, an elite women’s school with a barbed wire fence around a rustic campus. Eucalyptus trees and brick walls screen the campus from the view of residents. The 27 bus line brings workers from downtown Holloway to and from the campus—cafeteria workers in hairnets, gardeners who maintain the pristine grounds—but the female students rarely venture off campus. Unless they have cars, in which case they can hop on a nearby freeway on-ramp and bypass the town completely.

To the people of Holloway, RandellCorp became like Cartwright College, a fading insult in the landscape of neglect.

However, a few years after Randell was built, the cancer rate in Holloway began to soar. In Randell’s fifth year, Randell was caught dumping toxic chemical waste in an abandoned railroad yard not far from an elementary school. Randell agreed to pay a fine and clean up the site. Meanwhile, there were allegations of other dumping sites. And although those sites did show evidence of toxic contamination, there was no conclusive evidence to tie them to Randell.

Meanwhile, environmental researchers released several studies in which the data clearly indicated that the cancer rate had A) grown significantly since RandellCorp began operation and B) risen in proportion to the residents’ proximity to the railroad yard and other alleged dumping sites. However, for every meticulously researched independent study that led to damning conclusions, a government-funded study would appear, tracing the cancer to other causes. An oped in the West County Herald questioned the habits of the town’s predominantly African American residents, encouraging them to “eat a lower carb diet” and “exercise more regularly.” One study cited the cuts in physical education at Holloway High as a factor in poor health outcomes and another blamed the increased cancer rates on video games.

Two years ago, when a KPFA/Pacifica radio Top 10 list identified the Randell-cancer link as one of the most underreported stories of the year, the issue caught the interest of a national environmental group. Planet Greener, headquartered in Maryland, had long been criticized for a lack of diversity in its senior staff and board of directors. More recently, they had gotten a slew of bad press for having installed oil and natural gas drilling on several of their nature preserves. In response to donor questions about their drilling practices, Planet Greener insisted that the wells were necessary to raise funds for their Minority Community Outreach programs, which they would be unveiling shortly. Although there had been no previous public information on these programs, they began appearing soon afterwards in low-income communities around the nation—one in nearly every state. During that year, Planet Greener hired Marcus Winters, a black activist from Richmond, to develop a community gardening program for youth in Holloway.

Winters, a veteran community organizer, started a youth leadership project that quickly connected community gardening to Holloway’s lack of green space to food justice to environmental racism and police violence. He began to train the teens to organize a multigenerational campaign against Randell. The youth activists picked the name “Red, Black and GREEN!” explaining that Red stood for Indigenous people, Black for African Americans, and Green for the environment. But these are also the Pan African liberation colors, associated with many radical African American movements, which was not at all what Planet Greener’s leadership had in mind. However, Marcus Winters seemed to have a thriving youth project on a very modest budget, and it was the most successful of their Minority Community Outreach Programs.

Many of the teens came from Holloway’s St. Anthony housing projects, or from the working-class neighborhood that surrounded the projects, a combination of concrete block apartment buildings and small, single-family homes. The projects are widely known as “The Stats,” both a convenient nickname, and for its statistics: high concentration of nearby liquor stores, high infant mortality rate, teen pregnancy rate, incarceration rate, addiction rate, HIV rate, dropout rate, and murder rate.

Although Red, Black and GREEN! has had an impact on the teens in the city, it’ll take a lot more than a youth empowerment project to truly make Holloway much greener.