San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Hidden history of ’06 quake in Black, Asian populations
The past is full of surprises. Monday is the 116th anniversary of the great San Francisco earthquake and fire, an epic disaster that nearly destroyed the city.
The 1906 earthquake is so much a part of the San Francisco legend that it’s still celebrated before dawn every April 18th with a gathering at Lotta’s Fountain at Market, Kearny and Geary streets. It’s one of those only-in-San Francisco moments, a celebration of the city being destroyed and rising from the ashes, better than ever. It’s the San Francisco story.
But not quite. On further review, as they say in football, it turns out that thousands of people were left out of the city’s biggest story. The sizable Chinese population is barely mentioned in earthquake histories except to note that the city’s Chinatown was destroyed and Asian refugees from the disaster were resettled in segregated tent camps. San Francisco’s small but significant Black population is not mentioned in the many books and articles about the earthquake.
Historians simply left Black people out, as if they did not count. I’m guilty, too. I’ve written dozens of pieces about 1906 and I went along with the standard narrative. You could call it a sin of omission.
But as the earthquake anniversary neared, I took a look at “Among the Ruins: Arnold Genthe’s Photographs of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Firestorm,” a splendid recent book of pictures taken during and after the great fire by Arnold Genthe, a celebrated San Francisco photographer. It’s published by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Cameron + Co.
The pictures are sharp and clear, a wonderful slice of the past, but there is also a surprise, something not found in most history books: a historic Black enclave in the heart of the old city. Genthe roamed San Francisco for days as it burned. It was the story of a lifetime for a photographer. He carried a brand new 3A Kodak Special camera, top of the line for those days.
In late morning of the day of the quake, Genthe was on Clay and Sacramento streets between Stockton and Powell streets, on the eastern edge of Nob Hill. The houses are either flats or wooden Victorian style buildings, the type highly valued in today’s San Francisco. There are cable car tracks down the middle of both streets. The scene could not be more old San Francisco.
Two couples are standing in the street; both dressed in the fashion of the day: The women wore big hats and long coats, and the men wore jackets and ties and derby hats. They are African American, and as the fire moves toward them, they are about to lose everything they own and become refugees. Everyone in those pictures lost their homes later that day.
Nob Hill in those days had mansions of the very rich at the top and the homes of ordinary people on the sides. Along the lower edge was a neighborhood of Chinese and Black people, some apartments, some low-rent places, even the city’s first Japanese restaurant. It was a bit of San Francisco diversity 116 years ago.
Genthe photographed the fire and its aftermath, and the pictures appeared later in books and magazines. But the reproductions were not always of best quality.
And over the years, Genthe’s negatives, made on cellulose nitrate film, and stored at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, were fading away, “They are disappearing before our eyes,” said James Ganz, curator of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Art, in 2017. Ganz and Barrett Oliver, a Southern California photographer and printer, combined to make high-resolution scans and prints from the negatives. The results were spectac ular. Now you could see what Genthe had seen. Now it was clear who was standing on that street watching their city burn.
But it was more than that: “These images are especially significant because they preserve a palpable Black presence in this important body of work,” Rodger C. Birt wrote in an essay on African Americans in “Among the Ruins.”
Birt, a historian and expert on photography, points out Black people have a long history here. “The presence of people of African descent is California is as old as the idea of California itself,” he wrote in “Among the Ruins.” He noted a quarter of the members of the Spanish Anza party that traveled from Mexico in 1776 to found what became San Francisco were listed as “Negro, mulatto or mestizo.”
The Black community here was not large, but it had an important role in the city’s life — Birt mentions William Leidesdorff, who opened San Francisco’s first hotel and operated the first steamboat; Archy Lee, a former slave who figured in an important early civil rights case; and many others. There were several Black newspapers. Two African American churches, the Third Baptist and the First African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, were founded in 1852. They are among the oldest Protestant congregations in the city.
The First African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church had a building on Stockton Street near Broadway in 1906 — “one of the most beautiful in San Francisco,” according to descriptions of the day. “There was none in the country that excelled it.”
However, like everything else in the neighborhood, it was destroyed in the great firestorm that followed the earthquake. “There was nothing to be salvaged from the ashes,” the church said, “not even one record.”
Like the rest of the the city’s citizens, members of the congregation had a tough time after 1906. It took them years to rebuild their church and relocate to the Western Addition. After 168 years, the church continues to thrive, now on Golden Gate Avenue.
But the Black experience in 1906 does not appear in the stories people tell about those days. I asked Sheryl Davis, executive director of the city’s Human Rights Commission, about the omission. “There are lots of hidden stories,” she said, “stories that are not known. But it depends on who is telling the story.”