 Good evening everyone. Thank you for joining us for our conversation between Tania Lunsford-Links and Dr. Albert Broussard. In conjunction with Tania's exhibit, we were here. We have a lot of you joining us today, so I'm just going to give it a minute to let everybody join us. Happy Black History Month, everyone. So before we get started, I want to acknowledge that the library is located on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytu Sholoni peoples of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the original peoples of this land, the Ramaytu Sholoni have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their rightful responsibilities as the caretakers of this place. We recognize that we benefit from living, working, and learning on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as First Peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramaytu Sholoni community. At the library and as the African-American Center, we also honor the gifts, resilience, and sacrifices of our Black ancestors who toiled the land, built to institutions that established the city's wealth and freedom, and survived anti-Black racism despite never being compensated nor fully realizing their own sovereignty. Because of their work, we are here and will invest in their legacy. We acknowledge the exploitation of not only their labor, but of our humanity and through education and outreach, we are working to repair some of the harms done by public and private actors. So happy Black History Month, everyone. I'm Shauna Sherman, Manager of the African-American Center. We're so glad to see you here. We have a bunch of programs and including this one for our Black History Month programming that's called More Than a Month. To find out more about all the programs we're offering this year, visit sfpl.org and click on the More Than the Month icon. I'm just going to run through a couple of programs here before we get started with our show. In addition to the Weaver Here exhibit, we have a new show at the main called Toward the Black Aesthetic, Kenneth P. Green Seniors Photographs of the 1960s and 70s, which is on view in our Jewish Gallery and in the African-American Center through April 21st. In the Jewish Gallery, you can see Mr. Green's photos of vibrant and beautiful Black women. And in the African-American Center, we have pictures, we have images of African Liberation Day May 1972. Please come and check that out. And to put that exhibit into context, we'll be hosting Dr. Tanisha C. Ford in conversation with Dr. Tiffany E. Barber to talk about Black women's style. And that'll be happening in our virtual library at the end of the month. And the next, the very next day, we'll be talking to Dr. Jacqueline Francis, who will be in conversation with Virginia Smiley, board member of the San Francisco African-American Historical and Cultural Society, to talk about Sergeant Claude Johnson and the new exhibit that's at the Huntington Gallery in Southern California, and the new book on him as well. And we're also hosting a special conversation for our On the Sames book this month, which is On the Rooftop, written by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, who will be in conversation with Dorothy Lazard at the African-American Art and Cultural Complex, which is offsite. It's at 762 Filton. And that'll be happening on February 27. Doors open at 6.30. And the event is at 7 p.m. And last but not least, we were here. Our main event for our program tonight by Taniya Lungsford-Links is on view on the third floor of the main library through March 1. Now, since the We Were Here exhibit has been up at the library, I have been so delighted with the reaction people have had for this exhibit. Our biggest gratitude for Taniya for bringing this exhibit to the library and to our exhibits department for helping put it up and to the San Francisco Arts Commission with partnered with the San Francisco Public Library in the Artists in Residence program of which Taniya was a part. This exhibit not only showcases Taniya's wonder for writing, it also shows an important part of our African-American San Francisco past. And I'm so delighted that Taniya has brought Dr. Albert Broussard to be in conversation with her to talk about his interview with Aurelius Alberga in 1976. Now, before I bring Taniya Lungsford-Links to the screen, I'll give you a little introduction. Taniya Lungsford-Links is a writer, abolitionist, and fourth generation black San Franciscan on both sides. A proud alum of voices of our nation's Vona and the Lambda Literary Retreat. She has been awarded an individual artist grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission as well as Residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Public Library in Collaboration with Radar, Mesa Refuge, the Rising Voices Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center, Oxbow, the Erica Landis Scholarship at Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Grace Paley Fellowship at Under the Volcano. Her work has been published in Foglifter, the Lambda Literary Anthology, and in Nothing to Lose but Our Chains, Black Voices on Activism, Resistance, and Love. Lungsford-Links earned a BA from Columbia University and an MA from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She was a 2022 San Francisco Public Library San Francisco Arts Commission Artist in Residence and is currently working on her first novel. I'm going to stop sharing my screen and bring to Nia to the stage. Welcome to Nia. Hello, hello. Hi, everybody. Thank you, Shana, for that introduction. I'm so grateful to be here tonight in conversation with Dr. Alba Broussard to share and honor and learn more about his fantastic work, some of which we get to see and we were here. I want to thank you, Shana, for stewarding the African-American Center at the Library, for really bringing our community together and creating a home and a space for us. Thank you also, Allison, from Exhibits at the Library for all of your work and support in making the show happen. And thank you, Maysoon, Waswas, for also being such an integral part of the community. And, of course, thank you, Dr. Alba Broussard, for being here and for creating the work that made all of this possible. I'm going to read your bio. Thank you. Yes, Dr. Alba Broussard is the author and co-author of numerous books, including Black San Francisco, The Struggle for Racial Equity in the West from 1900 to 1954, American History, The Early Years to 1877, African-American Odyssey, The Stewards, 1853 to 1963, and The American Vision. His recent work includes considerations of African-American civil rights dialogues in Hawaii. Thank you. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Broussard. Hello. Thank you for the invitation, absolutely. I'm looking forward to this very much. Yes. So I thought we'd actually just get started by situating ourselves. So you can tell me where you're from and what was that place like at the time you were growing up? Okay. So I am a native of San Francisco and when I come back to the city and tell people that, people are often shocked because, as you know, the Black population in San Francisco has declined significantly in the last three or four decades and we perhaps could talk about that later. So I grew up, I was actually born on the Presidio in Letterman Hospital, which is not there anymore. My father, like so many Black Southerners from Southern Louisiana, migrated out to the Bay Area. He had been in the military and decided to live in California. My mother came out about the same time that my annual did actually during World War II and attended Girls High, which eventually became Benjamin Franklin Junior High, which was the school that I attended. So these things really do go full circle. So I was born in 1950. So I lived in what we would call the Fieldborne District. It was also called the Western Edition. I remember San Francisco as a young kid being a city of neighborhoods, a city that was relatively safe and open. You could hop on a bus or a streetcar and go all of the city without really any fear that you were going to be hurt even as a child. And I guess this word didn't exist when we were all actually kids because I was raised by a single mother who raised four kids. So basically we had to sort of look out for one another, take care of ourselves. So I remember being a, even though San Francisco is one of the major cities and clearly one of the great cities of the world, it didn't seem that large. It didn't seem, it seemed to be like a manageable place. As I said, it struck me as a place, a city of neighborhoods. And I learned that was even more important as I got older. As a kid, of course, I didn't know much about discrimination and restrictive covenants and those sorts of things. So we went to our neighborhood schools. I attended Rafiwil School, just two blocks from where I grew up. And we had a community that had Japanese and Filipino and a handful of Chinese, very few white kids interestingly, but it was a very mixed sort of group. And so I went through school pretty much with the same kids that I had grown up and within my neighborhood from K through 12. I mean, we sort of scattered that point. So I just remember it being a very pleasant place to grow up, but I had never been anywhere else. So I mean, I did not have much of a criminal reference at that point. It's so interesting hearing you talk about your experience because there are so many similarities in my time growing up in San Francisco as well. I joked that if I had done something silly on my walk home from school, which is, you know, right up the block from where my grandmother lived, that she would know by the time I got there because one of the neighbors would have called in that very much did happen. And so it also speaks to what you're saying about being from a city of neighborhoods, knowing your neighbors, folks knowing you being a part of raising you. And also what you shared about riding the bus or hopping on the train or going around the city and being able to navigate in a particular way. That felt safe. And that was absolutely true for my childhood as well. Also, when we were kind of preparing for this talk today, we chatted a little bit about some of the things that come full circle. And I really wanted to highlight something that you were saying about school and higher education around the time that you were growing up in San Francisco. And as a teacher at City College, City College is now free and accessible to folks again. But I wanted to kind of, if you if you will, just share a little bit about your experience at City College. Sure. Sure. So let me back up even from that and talk about high school because no one in my family had had graduated from college when I attended City. My mother had gone for about a year to City. And again, she raised four kids with without a husband and a house. So she had to work basically. And I didn't appreciate that as a young person. But once I got married and started having children, and I don't have four children, I have two children, I realized how difficult that must have been for a single or a single woman. In fact, impossible. I can't really even imagine it. So I had, and most of the young Black men and women in my neighborhood either went to City College or they went to San Francisco State. And so I had thought that that's where I would go. I would go to City College for a year or two and then I would transfer to San Francisco State. And my goal, interestingly, in high school was to be a high school history teacher in part because I was a good student in an area. And number two, it seemed to me kind of a practical sort of career, one that I thought I could handle. And secondly, the role models and they were all white at that time. There were very few Black teachers at Polytechnic, unless there were physical education teachers that I never had. But I had teachers who believed in me. They probably, in fact, I shouldn't say probably, I know they believed a lot more in me than I believed in myself at that time. So I went to City and I shared with you this the other day. So when I started at school in San Francisco, you could start in the middle of the year. So you could start actually in January, which meant that you graduated not in June, you graduated actually at the end of December. And so when I graduated from high school in 1968 from Polytechnic High School, right across the street from Kiesbar Stadium, I basically had a period of time six, eight months to do something, right? And so I enrolled in City College and I took a full load. And at that time, I began applying to other colleges like San Francisco State and UC Berkeley. And on a LARC, one of my college, I'm sorry, high school counselors suggested I applied to Stanford. So I applied to Stanford and I didn't think there was a chance in the world that I would get in Stanford University. And as fate would have it, that was the very first place that I got accepted to. And so that that was the end of it right there. I mean, I thought I was I would Berkeley was really the place that I wanted to go, right? I mean, big open campus, beautiful campus, one of the I guess still one of the great public institutions in the world, right? But once I got admitted to Stanford and I got a full ride, that was the end of discussion at that point. City College was a great place to be. First of all, for someone like myself who had grown up in the Western Edition, it was big enough. It didn't cost a dime to go. It was completely free. They had courses that were demanding enough that if you took, they called it a University of California parallel track. If you took those kinds of courses, they could transfer automatically to Berkeley. And I found out later when I got admitted to Stanford, all of the credit that I took it at City College transferred to Stanford. So when I enrolled at Stanford in the fall of 1969, I was classified as a freshman with advanced standing. I already had 23 hours of credit, right? Because I went to city for one full semester and took a full load. And then I went one summer, I took a summer school course as well. And so every single one of those courses transferred to so that that really helped down the road because I didn't I sort of put that in the bank, so to speak. And by the time I became a senior in college, when I started thinking seriously about graduate work or law school, whatever I thought I was going to do, then I could sort of take my foot off the gas, take fewer courses because I had to sort of back load this cushion that I already had and spend more time with college, excuse me, graduate school applications, law school applications and things of that. City College was a great place. I mean, it had wonderful professors. I guess you're one of them now. But I enjoyed the experience there. I had an older brother and a younger sister who both attended City College as well for short periods of time. I love that. I love to hear it. So you did you did do a lot more. You did stay in school a lot longer. Can you tell us where you are now? And I know you talked about entering college in 1969. There was a lot going on in 1969 that made it possible for us to have a lot of the things that we have today, including our departments sometimes, depending on where we are. But I guess can you tell us kind of where you're seated now? And at the time, what drew you to oral histories? Yeah. So when I went to Stanford, it had just established one of the earliest Black Studies programs in the country. I actually think San Francisco State has the honor of having established the first one. But I think Stanford had one of the earliest for a private institution. And they hired Sinclair Drake, who is an eminent sociologist. And some of your viewers might be familiar with a book called Black Metropolis. It's a two-volume book on Chicago that he and another sociologist and leader by the name of Horace Clayton co-wrote. I believe in the 1940s and the 1950s. It's been quite a while since I read it. And so I was really, I was into Black history in ways that just unimaginable to try to explain to anyone today. So I thought this is really what I wanted to do. But of course, I was 18 years old, right? So do you really know what you want to do when you're 18 years old? And so, you know, you take the core curriculum in Stanford, as you know, or don't know, is an extremely demanding place. And I did well enough. And I thought, you know, do I really want to go into history or do I want to go to law school? So I applied to a bunch of both. And I got accepted. I want actually a Ford Foundation fellowship my senior year, which basically allowed me to go anywhere I wanted to go, right, that I could get in. Basically, it was a free ride for five years after that. And so I went to Duke. I ended up going to Duke working. They had just hired a young Black historian. They were sort of trying to rewrite the civil rights movement in the South. And so I literally left California someplace, a place that I never thought I would ever leave and move clearly across the country, 2000 miles away to Durham, North Carolina, very, very welcoming place. They brought in Black students. We had five or six Black students in my first class, entering class, a freshman, but they had never graduated Black PhDs in my department. They had had Black students before I had arrived, but none had finished. So a group, a small group of us, three of us actually finished at the same time in 1977. So we were sort of pioneers in that respect. And from there, I got a job at a small school in Colorado, University of North Carolina, Colorado, and moved around quite a bit as early teachers do, young early career teachers do. And in 1981, I was recruited to run a Black Studies program at Southern Memphis University in Dallas. That's what brought me to Texas. And in 84, 85, excuse me, I was recruited to come down to Texas A&M, and I had been here ever since with a few exceptions. I've taught visiting professorships in a few places well. So I have stayed true to Black history for about a half century. I've done other things, but that's essentially what I have done. And I began my teaching in 1977. So this is year 46 for me, 46, 47. I've lost count. Yes. And we appreciate you for it. Thank you so much for all of the things that you're still doing to contribute to our understanding and our knowledge of Black history. So I'd like to pause here for a moment just to bring up part of the transcript from this oral history, this interview that took place in 1966 or so with you and Aurelius Alberga. And so this is the oral history that I encountered. It's one of about 25 oral histories that you led, that you stewarded, that now live at the library. And you talked about this being your third or so meeting with Mr. Alberga. And this is the one that was recorded that later became the oral history, right? Yes, absolutely. So I had actually taken courses in oral history as a graduate student at Duke. And so I had a fair amount of training as an oral historian. But something I failed to mention to you the other day is that I actually spent an entire summer with a group of graduate students traveling throughout the South interviewing Black farmers and sharecroppers. And these were people who had gotten land during the New Deal under an FSA program. And this was, I mean, we literally, I had never really been in the South. I mean, the South, I'm not talking about a major city, the back country, the rural areas. And we would, we would stay in a community for about a week and 10 days. And we would find as many of these people that we could. And this was a large grant from the Department of Commerce. And we were trying, the purpose was to ascertain what difference land owning had made in their lives, right? So we questioned them, we have a formal questionnaire. And then we had actually a, we had the ability to then just sort of freelance and ask them questions about their lives. So that's when the orchestra kicked in. So this particular interview I conducted in December, I actually saw it on the front page the other day, December of 1976. I was a graduate student. I just moved back to San Francisco earlier that year. And I began to conduct both my archival work, which ultimately became Black San Francisco part of it anyway. But I also began to talk to people older Black residents who had lived in San Francisco prior to World War II. And it, it, it finally dawned on me who recommended Mr. Alberta. And it was a woman by the name of Mrs. Mary McCann Stewart, whose daughter I interviewed actually extensively for my second book, After American Odyssey. And she had mentioned, you got to talk to Mr. Alberta. He's been in San Francisco since the 19th century. And he lived through the San Francisco earthquake. So I just picked up a phone directory. He lived in Oakland at the time, even though he had been born in San Francisco in 1884. And there he was. I mean, this is when people picked up phone to represent our people. And I called him on the phone and I explained who I was and asked if I could come by and talk to him. And he said, sure. So, you know, I got in my car and I drove across the bay one day. And this would be the one of three, as you say, three interviews. We talked about two to three hours at a time every time we talk. And I don't remember if I taped him the first time or the second down to the third time. I know it wasn't the first time because by this time, I had gotten a relationship with someone at the public library to start these transcripts, right? And so he agreed to be interviewed. And that's where this interview comes from. So I was all of, let's see, 76. Well, I was 25 years of age at this time. I was a very young person. But I had been doing a fair amount of oral history. And so here it is, you know, for better or worse. I think it still stood up well over the years. It's a beautiful interview. And there are aspects of it that blew my mind. So at the time in 1976, when you're having this conversation with Aurelius Alberga, you're here as BRO Brassard and Aurelius Alberga's ALB. I'll read a bit of it. But I think it's also important to encourage folks to listen to the actual audio transcripts, which also live there in the library because you can hear- Good. I didn't know that. That's good to know. Yeah, you can hear your voice and you can hear Mr. Alberga's voice. And at this time, like you were saying, Mr. Alberga is over 90 years old. Yes, that's correct. So I'll just read a little bit and we'll kind of chat a little bit. So I'm starting right here at the bottom where you're saying, you lived during the earthquake. That's something that a lot of us can't day. Tell me a little bit about the earthquake. What were you doing when that earthquake hit? And we can go to the next page. And so at this point, you're referring to the 1906 earthquake, which is something that's deep in the history of most San Franciscans, which of course took place April 18, 1906. Just after 5 a.m., it was a 7.9 quake, which if folks were around and in the city for the Loma Prieta earthquake, that was a 6.9. And so in 1906, we have the 7.9 earthquake and there's devastation everywhere, but there are also fires surrounding the city. So Alberga says, sleeping. You say that was probably a good thing to be doing. He says, yes, it was in the morning around five o'clock. Where exactly were you at in the city at this time? He says on commercial and Kearney street. You ask, was that a hotel? He says, yes, my father was living there too. He had a room right upstairs directly over me. The quake loosened and one side of the building collapsed. Outside the building were big windows, which years ago had iron shutters that pulled in and closed over a little balcony. When the bricks fell down, they forced the shutters closed. The doors in those days used to open out and the door to my room was jammed shut. I couldn't open it. So I made enough noise and yelled out for my father. He came down the best way he could and pulled away the rocks from the hallways to make the door wide open enough so I could come out. You asked, were you hurt at all? He says nothing at all, but I lost everything I had. You clarify all your possessions. He says, after I went out of there, I went down to check the old man. Here, he's referring to someone that he worked for. This is where I think the story becomes much larger than life. This is where I was just listening and reading and I could not contain myself. I was in the history center in the library, which is up on the sixth floor, and it's a very quiet place, so I was trying my best to hold it in. He's calling someone the old man who is his employer, Metzgar. He says, he lived on O'Farrell street between Stockton and Powell. The whole front side of the hotel had fallen out into the streets and left exposed the rooms on that end. He was right there, referring to his boss. He slept through it all, which was a blessing. If he had awakened, he would have gotten killed because he always got out of bed on the side that the whole damn building had fallen out of. I called his chauffeur and we went up there together. We had the keys to his room and we went in slowly. I went to the edge of his bed, went over to him, and spoke to him softly. Now come out this way. I gave him my hand quickly so he wouldn't make any false move. Then I told him what had happened. He couldn't believe he'd slept through all of it. I told him, if you had gotten out of bed the other way, you would have landed at the foot of O'Farrell. I told the chauffeur, you'd better take him out, living next in the street after you take him, come right back, and we'll go up to the office is what he goes on to say. I guess I'll pause there and just encourage folks to read the rest of it because there's something that happens with safe and hiding money and all of these kind of fantastical things. But I want to ask you kind of why oral histories, what is the significance of this oral history at the time that you were recording it? Well, it's amazing to look back at this interview that I did almost 50 years ago. What struck me is that most of his responses up to this point are very short and direct, right? No more than a sentence or two sentences. But here he goes on and on and on. And one of the things that I had been trained to do as an oral historian is let people talk, right? And I do not interrupt him. I don't ever interrupt him, for I wouldn't have been interrupted him anyway because people of my age group just wouldn't interview, wouldn't interrupt adults, right? But I let him talk and it's a remarkable story. Obviously it left an indelible memory in his mind that he could describe this 70, almost 70 years later, right? With such vivid detail, right? And maybe these kinds, these are the kinds of traumatic events like war, right? That we are told by sociologists and others that people live with these things and they never forget them in some kind of way. Now, you know, whether some of this was performative or not, I don't know. I'm not really able to judge. But it's a remarkable story. And to answer your question more directly, is that with our history, we would have never gotten this story. Let me just say no one had written about Mr. Albert before I wrote about Mr. Albert, right? I mean, he has only two short pages in my San Francisco book and I'm mentioning him briefly also in his wife, Tony Stone, who by the way, in the three interviews that I conducted with him, never mentioned that he had a wife named Tony Stone, who was one of the first Negro League and one of the best Tony Stone. Yeah, never mentioned, never mentioned that fact. Someone had to point that out to me actually. So she appears in a later book that I wrote called Expectations of Equality. And he just appears very, very briefly as an example of Black soldiers in the West. He did, I did not vet some of the things he told me, for example, he continued to tell me he was a colonel. Well, he wasn't a colonel. Charles Young would be the first Black colonel. But he did make the grade of first lieutenant by the time he left the army and he was noncommissioned. So he did go and offer offices training school. And I was able to actually find the enlistment of all those Black soldiers online. And so he did get promoted. I have not found his actual military record in France, but I take him at its word and he did serve for nine months in France. And he was a highly respected man, not particularly a wealthy man, but a highly respected man in the Black community and had some very solid political connections. So without oral history, I don't think that we would know much about a Mr. L. Berger, many of the other people that I interviewed for this particular project. And one of the great things about oral history is it does capture the voices of marginalized people, not just Black people, but women, people in the LBTTQ community, Hispanics, etc., etc., etc. And that's why I continue to urge my graduate students or even I've trained many communities, people in communities, to do oral histories of their organizations or schools, etc., etc., etc. Otherwise, those voices just, they never get captured. That's right. I think one of the impacts of listening to and reading this oral history that you created through this interview is actually we're able to see the 1906 earthquake, an event that was devastating, but so key to the rebuilding and to the history of San Francisco as a Black history. Absolutely. And we've never heard that before. We had never seen that before. And I think that was one of the main things that inspired my exhibition to be called, We Were Here. Because what it did, listening to your questions and listening to his answers really inspired me to start looking for us everywhere. In all of these braided histories of what makes San Francisco this city, we were here. We may not be at the forefront of the photos or at the forefront of the stories or things like that, but we were here. And so have that truth to be grounded in that is amazing. You talked a little bit about what you say to your students about oral histories and what you advise the folks in communities about encouragement to record these oral histories. But I guess my next question is, what is your hope really for the future of oral histories? We're living in a moment where things are really instantly accessible to us online. And so I guess what's your hope for the future of oral histories in this context? Well, I continue again to encourage my students who are doing recent history. I'm moving in my own work into racial and social justice issues in the late 20th century, an area that I never thought I would be working in. One of the areas that I had absolutely no training in, I've been working in for five or six years. And that is how the age and HIV epidemic impacted the Black community in the West, San Francisco in the West. And I have found some remarkable material, primarily at the GLBT library in downtown San Francisco. But that is going to necessitate me actually getting out coming to these communities and interviewing some of these people. Now, I'm at a disadvantage because, number one, I no longer live in the city. And secondly, AIDS, as you know, just devastated Black communities as well as White communities everywhere. And so many of the people that I would love to talk to simply just aren't around anymore, right? And so I think if you're going to continue to capture these marginalized voices, in some cases, this is not an incidental person, a Mr. Albert. He was a very important political leader, even though he never had what we would call a significant political job. He was a member of this California State Republican Club. And no one had ever written about that before I entered in the state of Bergen. And then I went up to, I took a trip to the California State Archives, and sure enough, I found the records of an organization, the California State Archives. So you never know. I mean, this is another reason you talk to people because they will tell you things. Sometimes they may seem fanciful, but it's really incumbent upon you as a historian or as a journalist to to vet it, right? To check it out. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I had to do once I saw that I was like Republican Club, and I had to do some sleuthing and some research of my own. To, yeah, to read about the history of Republican kind of voting power and Black folks as Republicans in San Francisco at the time and all of that. I'm going to turn in a moment to Q&A, but I wanted to get us talking a moment first about legacy. Yeah. I think what you're recording and what you're encouraging us to do is to to think about that, not only preservation, but also legacy. So my question is, what are your hopes for a really South Bergus legacy? And then what are hopes for your own legacy? Let me try to answer the second question first. And that is, I don't think about the legacy. I'm too busy doing what I do every day, which is still teaching full-time, which is probably insane at my age. Still attending conferences. I'm still writing. I'm still training students, although I'm not working with nearly as many graduate students as I do. But my hope is that the Mr. Al Bergus plural that students continue, Black, Brown, White continue to first of all identify these kind of people and to write about them. Otherwise, no one will ever know about them, right? These aren't people who write about themselves. Even though this is a solid middle-class person, right? He was a first lieutenant ultimately in the military and a member, a very important member of the Black middle class in San Francisco. They don't, you know, I don't think he left any records that I know than any personal papers. And so unless you actually beat the bushes and conduct oral histories of these kind of individuals, who would know about them, right? And so my hope, not so much my legacy, is that this kind of thing, these kinds of projects will continue. And in Texas, if I can give the state of Texas a plug, there is a Black and Brown oral history project in Texas. And Google that and you'll find it. And these were people who got big grants and these are professional oral historians who then trained graduate students. And they went all around the state of Texas interviewing leaders. This is online. You can actually pull these interviews up and there you can see brief excerpts. I actually show some of them to my classes. And they're tremendous training tools, but also it shows just the wealth and the breadth of leadership in the Black community, in the Brown community, in the White community, all dealing with civil rights and racial justice eras. And sometimes in communities and during times when you don't think people are interested in these kinds of things. I got to know, and I'll make this quick, Texas A&M, shamefully did not admit its first Black student and students until the summer of 1963, but I got to know one of these individuals. And he was interviewed for this project. And I actually share his interviews with students in some of my classes and my Black history classes, because I want them to understand what it was like for the earliest Black students on this campus. I've been working with the former Black student organization on this campus to do the same thing. And one of the things we're trying to do, our special collection, which you guys are way ahead of us, is to begin interviewing these former Black students who came to A&M in the early 60s and the 70s and then deposit these transcripts in our special collection, which is called the Cushing Library at Texas A&M. And that's my hope before I have made the suggestion dozens of times and it's always fell on deaf ears. But now they seem to be interested in it, but we'll see how that goes in the future. Yes, yes, that's amazing. The other day we were in the African-American Center at the Library. We had a group of young folks, the youngest was maybe in kindergarten or first grade, come through and look at the show and see photos from 1906 from Black families and Black children in the Presidio after the earthquake. And so seeing a lot of these photos of San Francisco from 1906 and seeing folks come together, whether it's waiting in a milk line or working in a kitchen on the street, folks coming together in a form of solidarity after disaster happened. And that group of folks, that group of young folks were actually from the Booker T. Washington Center. San Francisco. One of my hangouts when I was growing up. Yes. And one that if I'm not mistaken, Mr. Alberga helped to found. Absolutely. Yeah. So that just goes to what one of the things you were saying about those full full circle moments. I think having those folks there with all of their little matching t-shirts and asking their questions and things like that. I think that is part of Mr. Alberga's legacy and part of your legacy and part of ours. So I want to give us a maybe like one minute to have a little sip of water and one minute to invite folks to drop your questions in the chat. Any questions that you have. And then I'll read a few and we'll talk through a few. Yeah. Let me just make one quick comment before they drop the questions. And so Booker T. Washington Community Center was segregated because things were segregated even in San Francisco, de facto to be sure. So the two community centers, because they were both roughly in the Western edition that I attended as a teenager growing up. One was the Booker T. Washington Community Center. And the other was the Buchanan YMCA, which was, if you know where Gary Street is, right? Right on the other side is Japan Town. I lived about two blocks from there. So that that was kind of where we went after school, right? Every day. And it had been a Japanese YMCA. However, during World War II, it became a USO for Black soldiers, right? And I learned through subsequent research that Dory Miller, the hero Pearl Harbor, actually spoke there at one time when he came through San Francisco. I had not known that, but I found actually that in one of the main sources of the period. But so it became a, after the war when the Japanese came back, right, and tried to get their lives together in the Western edition, that YMCA was shared some days by Black kids would use it some days of the week and Japanese kids would use it some days of the week. And I don't know that they ever used it at the same time, but I don't ever recall any conflict, because it was a Japanese man who became actually one of the most influential people in my life by the name of Yori Wada, who ran that Japanese center. And he was, he was, he was voted Mr. San Francisco. I mean, that's how prominent he was when, but he was one of the most important people in my life growing up. And probably the lives of hundreds and hundreds of Black kids, because he was probably the only father figure that most of those kids like I had growing up. So it was a home away from home, in other words. I love that. I do believe if I'm not mistaken, there is still a YMCA there. I think, are you talking on what Webster off of Gary? I think I may be. Yeah. I hope it's still there. We got a couple of great questions in the chat. Okay. Some are kind of clarifying questions for some of the things you said earlier. So I'll wait on those. But there's a question here from who I think is maybe a blasphemy community archivist who's wondering what constitutes as personal papers and does one have to be an educated or recognized community member to add value to histories, whether oral or via personal papers? No, no, you don't have to be educated. I think anything that you happen to have in your possession, memorabilia, whatever, margin, any personal artifact, all of those things are valuable. One of the things that I made sure I did when my grandmother died, who only attended 8th grade, was to make sure that I went in immediately and gathered up every possible piece of paper she had. And I actually have two archival boxes that I keep that actually right behind me in my office. And that's the story of her life, which is eventually going to get written. I mean, she's actually in one of my books already, right? But that is because she was an example of a black woman who had the agency to actually leave Kansas City, Missouri with my mother and come out to California because she wanted a better life. And once she got out there, that's where she stayed as well. So, no, you don't have to be a professional anything. I think anything you happen to have in your possession, I think can be valuable to some people. I agree completely. And I would really encourage folks to visit with the History Center, but also to visit with some of the things that have been digitized through the San Francisco Public Library because you also see photos of some of the things that live in the History Center. Some of those things include photos, original photos or transparencies. A lot of the photos from we were here, those photos are from 1906 and they've been digitized and they live online. There are hundreds of them. But some of them- I remember correctly, does this History Center still have that big shades project of photographs? Because I've gone through that book multiple times. Oh, it's so good. Hundreds of photographs of black people in the city that I had never seen before. So the Shades Project is a project that happened across different communities in San Francisco where folks came and submitted their personal photos, family photos, community photos. And yes, some of it is online and it's definitely on reference in the library as well. But some of the lesser common or lesser visited items I think are personal papers like diaries, meeting minutes, zines, chat books, letters, postcards, even thinking about what you shared about your grandmother report cards. There are all sorts of things that are kind of acknowledgments that place us into a certain time where folks were. And I think that's really important particularly in a San Francisco context because a lot of the history that we're talking about is not- like we wouldn't know based on kind of what the city looks like now. There's a lot of our histories that have been really built over or built on top of. So I'm going to take another question. There's a question about jazz and insights, your insights of the jazz era in the Fillmore and the city. Yeah, I've written actually a brief- I hate to call it introduction but it's sort of a brief description. I was invited several years ago to be part of this pecan and maul project and I don't know what status that is right now. It seems to be on the hiatus but I was asked to to write actually a brief description about jazz and so that's something that very few people outside of the Bay Area know but San Francisco know about. But San Francisco was one of the great magnets for jazz during the 20s and 30s and the 40s and 50s in particular because that's when you had a sizable black community who could support dozens of jazz clubs in the Fillmore. And so I know the Fillmore is because of regentrification and all of that is different to what I was growing up. But it's hard to imagine today that there were dozens of thriving jazz clubs in the Fillmore and I remember them mainly as a young boy growing up but I still remember them nonetheless. And some of the leading jazz and blues artists around the entire country would regularly as they would passing through California. Now you could probably make the argument that the Central Avenue area in LA was probably more important and more vibrant but LA had always had a much much larger black population but also the presence of Hollywood and many of those black musicians worked for Hollywood in a variety of different capacities. But San Francisco was really quite important and quite impressive. There's a good book on jazz in that Fillmore area and I cannot remember the author's name off the top of my head but I worked with her actually on a film called The Neighborhoods of San Francisco where I am one of the talking heads on the Fillmore so yeah. Beautiful, yes. So we can circle back to some of the clarifying questions so can you mention the name of the oral history that you mentioned that's happening in Texas that folks can find? Yeah if they just if they just google black and brown oral history project it will pop up. Right. Trust me I can't remember the full name but it will pop up that way yeah and in fact the University of Texas then published a book of of excerpts from the interview but you can online you can actually pull up the entire project. You love that? Yeah. And then there's another clarifying question about verbal so listening to the audio of the interview with you and Mr. Alberga so the entire audio interview is available online through SFPL I believe they'll probably drop it in the chat but there maybe four or five parts of it it's broken up into four or five tracks but you can hear the kind of sounds around the house you can hear the equipment and so it's my favorite thing to listen while I'm kind of reading along the transcript so all of it is available through the San Francisco Public Library and then let's see oh there's a question here yeah. Someone asked I started pop up why why did I move back to Texas I could ever get a job in California that's the reason why I did teach for one year as a visiting professor at Davis California Davis but that was in 1979-80 so there there there it is right there I I couldn't get a job I couldn't get a full-time job and with the family I need a job so I don't know I mean obviously I'm a lot of stage in my career toward the end of my career but I don't know given the cost of living in San Francisco and I have had opportunities to come back particularly to San Francisco State the cost of living has made it prohibitive I think for many many people to consider seriously moving back to California that's the reason you said it you said I love I love San Francisco I love the state of California my brothers that's where I would be right as born and raised in San Francisco but hey the reality is you have to be able to afford where you live as well that's right I think one of the things that's interesting um that I was kind of finding along my research around population uh is that there was such a steady and exponential growth of black American folks in San Francisco after the earthquake in that hitting a real height in the 60s and 70s and then such a sharp downturn um and right now having you know such a small population of black American folks left in San Francisco it's pretty devastating um so yeah no I think I said in one of my books that I think San Francisco had the sharpest decline of my population since the 1970s of any major city in the whole country now this this is true of many western cities I noticed Denver Colorado and many other cities also had that problem but San Francisco hadn't even sharpened decline so yeah um there's a question here about a photo um it's included in the exhibit I don't know if you've seen it um Dr. Broussard but it's a photo of like a family or community this is right after the earthquake the fires are still in the background of the photo and there's some black American folks in the foreground one or two turned out toward the photographer so that photo is by Arnold Ginta um and it's one of a series of photos taken in some of the only photos that we have really easily accessible to us that are published black folks in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake um the there's a question about the identity of those folks and they're not in the in any of the notes that I found have you found any of the no I haven't seen the photo either I'd love to see it and and unless they're recognizable people that is widely recognizable hardly unlikely right uh that they would be able to be identified at this late date so no I have not seen the photo I'd love to see it though so what I can say is that the photos are in we were here but that exhibition is also completely online through my site and so there are a number of photos that are part of the exhibition thankfully because they're they belong to the public I've been able to use them um but they're there for folks who are wondering and I wish I wish we could identify those folks because they look fierce um okay I'm looking for any last minute questions I guess we can pause there and and I really just want to kind of close on the note of thinking in dreaming and manifesting um a future of a black San Francisco that feels like justice that honors a past that is a black history what do you think that might look like whether a monument or whether a policy platform or whether a celebration of some sort what might it look like to honor the black lineage and legacy of San Francisco now I think number one people like myself doing what I can do and that is to continue to write and to research and tell the stories of these people I think one of the greatest travesties of my lifetime was what they did to people in the western edition with redevelopment pushing people out of their homes and I know I was not part of this reparations group but I was invited to speak from time to time to them and since I'm here you know I have a full-time job so I can't devote much time to that but I don't know what the solution is but but certainly they did not receive the kind of justice that I thought that they they should have I think the monuments the acknowledgement of people for example in the Buchanan area particularly people who who helped build the Fillmore including activists people that I knew growing up like Mary Rogers and others right who were working with the tenant associations basically working class people I think those people need to have some kind of recognition whether it's a plaque or whatever I'm happy to see there there is some acknowledgement now in their city hall for Colton Colton Goodlid I can't remember who else is acknowledged in that in that area but that's you know that's that's a small start but I think people like us continue through our art through our scholarship need to continue to try to put these people on the map put them before the public tell their stories in any format any venues that we have whether it's through your art your photography or me through my scholarship yes that's beautiful thank you so much I also want to just extend put it out into the universe if you want to come home just come home well if you want to do a little research by you here well make sure you got what you need um I was thinking earlier when you were talking about your scholarship and work on HIV AIDS and the impact that there are some photos that are up in the LGBT center in the Hormel Center at the library that are up their self portraits they're up right now but now that you've said it you want to come visit home we'll make sure it happens all right it'll be in person thank you so much thank you so much doctor for sorry for joining us and thank you all thank you all for your questions for your time um and for being a part of this I'm so grateful to everybody for being here thank you thank you thank you thank you to you as well I really appreciate this it's a lot of fun yes all right y'all have a good night thank you