Transforming Community Space During World War II: Black Recreation Centers in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1940–1950

This article argues that World War II transformed the roles of Black recreation centers in the San Francisco Bay Area as the centers grew to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding population. Using three community centers based in San Francisco and Oakland as case studies, I concentrate on the visions of the Black directors, the programs they built, and the ways that Black residents made these spaces their own. As thousands of Black migrants flocked to the West to find defense industry jobs, they found new opportunities but also familiar forms of discrimination they thought they had left behind in the Jim Crow South. Black community centers provided the physical space for new residents to congregate and socialize, and they served as an entryway into political organizing, education, and relief from daily forms of racism. Drawing from the centers’ archival material, including annual reports, program listings, meeting minutes, newspaper announcements, letters, and the personal papers of the directors, I reconstruct how these centers functioned in people’s lives and how they contributed to a long tradition of Black institution building in response to racial segregation in California.