Every few months, James Knowles receives an email saying he’ll soon be updated on efforts to address a 63-year-old injustice.
Knowles, 74, and his family — and his entire community — lost homes and business when their mostly Black and Latino neighborhood, known as Russell City, was cleared through eminent domain.
“This is the same thing they’ve been doing, passing the buck and kicking the can down the road,” Knowles said. “It’s smoke and mirrors.”
More than 1,400 residents were forced to move in what is now recognized by city and county officials as a historic wrong, the destruction of a predominantly Black and Latino community to make way for an industrial park.
Former residents say the loss of homes, land, and businesses erased opportunities to build generational wealth — harms a new fund is intended to acknowledge through cash payments.
Such community destruction was a common trend in the 1960s. Government agencies commonly seized land from Black and Latino property owners to expand cities and build infrastructure. Restrictive deeds, later made illegal, meant people of color were often able to buy property only outside city limits that lacked services like trash pickup or public sewer access, making them vulnerable to such moves. Despite this, in places like Russell City, residents built a close-knit community. It was a place where people raised farm animals, tended crops, and hosted a culturally important blues club attracting legendary stars like John Lee Hooker, Ray Charles, and Etta James.
In 2020, a demand to redress historic wrongs grew following the murder of George Floyd and the national Black Lives Matter movement. Presidential candidates fielded questions about reparations, or cash payments to make amends. State leaders launched a task force. And, in Hayward, local officials apologized to those who had once lived in Russell City.
Nearly six years on, nationally, a few hundred reparations programs have started, and a handful have issued payments or returned land.
Russell City descendants, like Knowles, wait for emailed updates. Experts said the challenges facing the Hayward program follow patterns seen across the country — amid limited government resources, threats of lawsuits and difficulty managing distributions and raising funds, turning promises into payments may be the hardest part.
Months after Hayward and Alameda County officials announced the fund, it has now raised $1.3 million from donations and county and city coffers, but no payments have been issued. And more money is still being sought through fundraisers. Key questions about eligibility – who qualifies, how much they will receive, when, and how – remain unresolved. Delayed progress from a working group overseeing the fund has left families like the Knowleses suspended between hope and uncertainty.
“I want to remain optimistic that my dad will receive part of the restitution fund,” said James Knowles’ daughter, Aisha Knowles. “But I’m not sure.”
When multiple agencies are involved — in this case, both the city and the county — even shared goals can lead to layers of review, said Erika Weissinger, co-director of the Black Reparations Project and a professor at UC Berkeley.
“That doesn’t make delays acceptable, especially when elders are waiting, but it does help explain why so many reparations efforts struggle at this exact point,” Weissinger said. “Time is not neutral here. Every month of delay disproportionately affects elder survivors, many of whom are in declining health or pass away before receiving redress, creating a moral urgency that conventional bureaucratic timelines are poorly equipped to meet.”
One of the biggest hang-ups, said Hayward Councilmember Angela Andrews, is potential litigation from those who argue taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for what critics say they haven’t benefited from.
“Our city did benefit from it — we’re getting way more than $250,000 from that industrial sector,” Andrews said. “We’re building robots. We’re building drones. We’re building data centers. We’re building a lot of things that the city is benefiting from.”
One group, Hayward Concerned Citizens, has raised its concerns primarily through social media and comments at public hearings.
“Hayward never owned the land in Russell City, never conducted the appraisals & paid the owners/renters, never relocated even one resident. Alameda County did all of those things, NOT Hayward,” the group said on its social media account in August 2022. The group didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Despite slow progress on the work, the fund recently passed a key milestone: a working group selected a nonprofit fiscal sponsor to manage and disburse payments.
While the Oakland-based nonprofit Philanthropic Ventures Foundation will manage the fund and issue direct payments, it will not determine who gets the cash. The city and Alameda County keep that responsibility, and are still developing criteria.
The working group has prioritized former Russell City residents displaced between 1963 and 1968. But proving residency in a neighborhood destroyed more than half a century ago could be tricky.
“If I say I lived in Russell City, how do I prove that? What criteria are you asking for?,” Knowles said.
Such uncertainty with the process so far leaves many community members “frustrated, upset, disgruntled, unhappy,” Knowles said, especially since quite a few former Russell City residents have already passed away, while others struggle with declining health waiting for an email bearing news of progress.
Ara Rosenthal is a UC Berkeley journalism student.
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