Hayward City Council approves resolution apologizing for institutionalized racism against BIPOC – CBS San Francisco

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HAYWARD (CBS SF) Hayward City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved a resolution apologizing to Blacks, Aboriginals and People of Color (BIPOC) for past city policies that racially discriminated against them while formally recognizing the institutionalized racism that left a legacy of iniquity.

The resolution cites Haywards’ involvement, as well as the real estate and banking industries, in the practice of redlining, which has prevented minorities from owning property within the city limits of Hayward. Discrimination drove black and Latino families to neighboring unincorporated areas of Hayward, which lacked municipal services. The lasting effect has been the refusal to create intergenerational wealth; a disproportionately higher rate of BIPOC tenants in Hayward; and economic, medical and emotional stresses.

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Prepared and recommended to council by the Hayward Community Services Commission, the resolution also recognized Hayward’s role in urban renewal projects in the 1960s and 1970s that resulted in the massive displacement of largely black households without fair compensation. The example cited is Russell City, an unincorporated community along the Hayward coastline established in 1853.

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Russell City became home to a culturally and commercially vibrant Black and Latin American community, but in the 1950s, Haywards Town leaders saw the area as a plague and sought to rebuild it into a park. industrial. In 1963, Alameda County and Hayward began a forced relocation of Russell City residents, bulldozed the entire community, and redeveloped the land for industrial use, the city said.

Haywards’ resolution also aims to guide future city policies and spending on issues of housing, employment, travel, wealth creation, quality of life, and access to municipal, educational and recreational services.

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In addition to resolving the apology, the Hayward Community Services Commission has developed a list of ten other actions the city could take to address past wrongdoing and complicity in historic institutional racism and racial prejudice, including by working with residents and surviving descendants of Russell City to determine restitution.

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