Where San Francisco’s Black population stands — and where it goes from here

“Sadly, the levels of residential segregation in the Bay Area are pretty similar to what they were decades ago. We haven’t made a lot of progress on that,” Eli Moore, Program Director at the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, told The Examiner.

That racial and economic divide is never more evident than in The City’s Black population.

San Francisco used to be a hub of Black culture. But after decades of structural racism, The City’s Black core has been pushed out of its seven-by-seven grid to the surrounding suburbs — or out of the Bay Area and state entirely.

In 1970, there were about 96,000 Black people in San Francisco, according to U.S. Census Bureau counts, accounting for 13.5% of its population — a high point for The City’s share of Black residents. By 2020, the Black population in San Francisco had dwindled to about 45,000, comprising just 5.1% of its population, most of whom are among The City’s most disadvantaged residents and confined to the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood.

Maps of San Francisco’s changing demographics make visible the erosion of The City’s Black population each decade from the 1960s to 2020, the year of the most recent census.

That trend is vividly depicted in San Francisco’s Fillmore, loosely located between Turk Street and Geary Boulevard, mostly contained inside of what is now the Western Addition neighborhood. There were about 22,000 Black San Franciscans living in the Fillmore in the 1970s, accounting for almost 60% of the neighborhood’s population.

During World War II, thousands of African Americans, largely from the Jim Crow South, migrated to San Francisco to work jobs in the war industry at the shipyards. Many of them moved into Fillmore residences and storefronts that had been emptied by the forced internment of Japanese Americans.

The neighborhood quickly developed into a sprawling and vibrant center of Black culture, right in the heart of San Francisco. The district was nicknamed “the Harlem of the West” and featured a flourishing jazz scene that attracted musicians such as Louis Armstrong and T-Bone Walker.

But beginning in the late 1950s, fueled by President Harry Truman’s 1949 Housing Act — which authorized the demolition and reconstruction of areas considered slums — the community was torn up. The process known as urban renewal targeted low-income and nonwhite neighborhoods. It destroyed jazz clubs, expanded Geary Boulevard into a four-lane expressway and evicted Black residents from their homes without anywhere to land on their feet.

By the time The City’s redevelopment projects were completed in the 1980s, the new houses were too expensive for most of the former residents to move back into.

In 2020, there were closer to 6,000 Black residents living in the Fillmore, making up about 12% of the neighborhood’s population.

Urban renewal is one of a litany of institutional reasons why The City’s Black population has dissipated over time. Moore said that other factors include redlining — the post-Depression era practice where banks wouldn’t offer mortgages to people of color — War on Drugs policies, policing and incarceration of the Black community and the growth of the tech sector.

“There’s just been one wave after another of exclusionary policies and economic processes,” he said.

Where does San Francisco go from here?

Moore said he has noticed a renewed and more direct effort to revitalize Black communities since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which “put anti-Black racism in the public spotlight in a way that it hadn’t been” in his lifetime.

“It opened up space and just gave this moral urgency to the way that racism has directly impacted black communities, specifically anti-Black policies and practices,” he said.

For most of its history, The City, like most municipalities in the country, has tried to foster economic development through catch-all policies, rather than crafting initiatives aimed at specific socioeconomic or ethnic groups, according to Moore.

He said that strategy has largely failed. The Othering and Belonging Institute found that racial disparities — defined as differences in outcomes among racial groups — between the Black and White communities over the last 50 years mostly haven’t changed.

But recently The City switched towards creating what Moore called “targeted solutions with universal goals,” which hone in on specific barriers that each individual community faces, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach.

The rhetoric around race is changing, too — especially from city leaders, who now more than ever before are openly acknowledging the racist policies of the past, authorized by their predecessors, that have put Black San Franciscans in the disadvantaged spot they are in today.

Floyd’s murder led to the establishment of enterprises such as the Dream Keeper Initiative, The City-led effort to invest tens of millions of dollars annually towards addressing structural inequalities in the Black community, as well as San Francisco and California’s reparations committees.

Both reparations task forces last summer released comprehensive reports, recommending how the state and The City can dole out reparations to Black residents to make right centuries of oppression.

Moore said that both committees showed “great promise” in the direction of where political thinking is trending.

But he added The City is still in the opening phases of shifting towards more “targeted solutions” and there’s plenty of work to do before there’s any tangible results which stem the decline of San Francisco’s Black population.

“We’re in a place where the public narratives have come a long way to recognize anti-Black racism and the legacy of policies and practices that have created these inequities,” he said. “But the public policies and investments that would really move the needle on these conditions haven’t been adopted at the scale that would actually get to moving the needle on The City as a whole.”

“It’s progress that leaders are talking about, but it remains to be seen whether that will translate to substantive policy change,” he added.