Between 1940 and 1944, the Bay Area experienced a huge surge in population. Wartime industry jobs attracted over half a million new residents, including many African American workers from the Eastern U.S. and Latinx households from Mexico, Central America, and Southern California. These people of color settled in different neighborhoods throughout Oakland.
The expansion of the Interstate Highway System was one event that reinforced social, economic, and racial segregation in cities. Highways were often built through low-income, minority neighborhoods whose residents lacked the political power to stop these developments. Entire communities were displaced while higher-income, often white, citizens moved to the suburbs, where one could own a private plot of land. In contrast, over 10,000 people–many being African American and Latinx–were displaced from West Oakland due to these “urban renewal” projects and moved to neighboring districts like Fruitvale.
As World War II came to a close, the completion of the MacArthur Freeway in 1949 marked the beginning of a wave of white flight from Fruitvale and the “flatlands”–the areas in Oakland closer to the Bay–as many white residents left the city and moved to the suburban Oakland Hills. While jobs remained concentrated in the city’s core, the highway system allowed many people to separate their public and private lives between the suburbs and downtown. A high demand for wartime jobs and housing further fueled an increase in suburbanization.
The expansion of the highway also led to the rise of cars and the downfall of the Key System, Oakland’s pre-eminent transit service. The Key System had been mostly inactive since 1946 when National City Lines, an affiliate of General Motors, acquired the service and replaced their trademark streetcars with buses. AC Transit later took over in 1960, marking the end of the Key System, whose ridership had already been declining for decades. The new bus lines, which were based on earlier streetcar lines, formed the foundation of AC Transit’s bus system. Nearly all these routes exist today, and the Fruitvale Avenue bus line–which runs by the Oakland EcoBlock—continues to be part of the transit network.
Cover image credit: Mapping Inequality project/University of Richmond
