White Euro/Americans

​

Berkeley was home to a majority white population. While definitions of ‘whiteness’ changed from decade to decade, these settlers came from a wide array of backgrounds: Scottish, Irish, Swedish, Norwegian, German, French, Italian… Many of Berkeley's more prominent members (Shattuck, Leonard, Barker, Heywood, etc.,) came out to California sometime during the Gold (or Silver) rush. Most made their money in business, whether in land speculation or providing services for the growing community like Zimri Haywood, who started a lumbering business in partnership with James Jacobs.[2] Historian Dr. Chuck Wollenberg would note that Haywood's prolific family of thirteen had considerable influence in city, including providing as three of Berkeley's mayors.[3] In regards to where they settled: wherever they could afford to  live. The working-class often settled near the factories that employed them, though groups (such as a heavily Scandinavian constituency) settled in enclaves such as those that made West Berkeley home. After the 1906 earthquake, the influx of Bay Area migrants helped push Berkeley from an up and coming rural landscape of fields and orchards to to a subdivided and developed residential community.  

​

African Americans

​

As can be seen from the graph, very few African American people made their home in Berkeley the first quarter of the 1900s. The first African Americans to live in Berkeley were the enslaved individuals associated with the family of Napoleon Bonaparte Byrne: Peter, the waggondriver, and Hannah, the family's nursemaid.[4] People made their homes throughout the city -- including North Berkeley and South of (UC Berkeley) Campus until about the 1920s and worked in a myriad of jobs. It was in the 1920s that Professor Gretchen Lemke had noted that the restrictive covenants had pushed black Berkeleyans to South Berkeley, where an enclave grew to over 500.[5] Pre-World War Two housing in Berkeley for the most part meant living West of then-Grove Street or South of Dwight Way.  Just as there were some exceptions to location, (such as boarders living along Shattuck Avenue) there were also individuals who lived in traditionally white enclaves.[6] Other families with members employed as porters would live in rented homes on Adeline, (near Ashby Station).[7] Their nearest neighbors, if not migrants from other states, were first-generation Americans of Swedish, Norwegian, German, or Irish descent. Lemke's work would note that primary schools in Berkeley around that time were integrated, and there were Berkelyans that graduated from UC Berkeley at that time -- women like Vivian Logan Rogers (1909), Ida Louise Jackson (1922), and Tarea Hall Pittman, (MA '46).[8] Berkeleyan Walter Gordon would graduate (J.D.) in 1918 and served as Berekley's first black police officer.[9] Aftrican Americans in Berkeley were educated and had active organizations that spanned religious, social and political community interests. Buying homes to settle was more of an issue. Like some examples of Asian homeowners, when African Americans were unable to find people to sell to them, they would acquire proxies that would buy the home desired and transfer ownership.[10]

​

​

Chinese

​

Chinese immigrants who famously arrived at “Gold Mountain” –– San Francisco during the Gold Rush, were put to work building the Transcontinental Rail, then settled in various Chinatowns throughout California. As mentioned, there were many Chinese that lived in Ocean View (West Berkeley). They also settled near Dwight Station, one of four Central Pacific stops along Shattuck Avenue. In the biography of August Vollmer, (Berkeley’s first Chief of Police) Berkeley was one of many places where the Chinese lived and known to sometimes run gambling operations. Berkeley’s Ordinance No. 451, approved in October 1892, prohibited gambling and charged “every person” guilty of such violation with a misdemeanor. Those found guilty would also be charged a fine to not exceed one hundred dollars, and if not paid, those fined could be “imprisoned at the rate of one day for every two dollars of the fine so imposed and remaining unpaid, such imprisonment, however, not to exceed in all thirty days.”[11] Despite this, gambling flourished.

​

Vollmer had initially become Town Marshal on an anti-graft platform, as the previous marshal had been ‘on the take’ from gambling institutions that operated from the back of laundries. In Berkeley, “gambling and opium dens operated with little interference from the authorities, and criminals from San Francisco and Oakland found the town an easy target.” [12] In March 1906, Vollmer’s raids eliminated the existence of unsanitary conditions and coordinated with the health department and building inspector to clean up the area near Dwight Station and other areas of Berkeley. Among the ordinances, “the cubic-air statute is being violated in nearly all the places visited, there being five to fifteen bunks in an ordinary room.”[13] Crowded conditions such as these were considered firetraps.

​

All this is important in that town ordinances and (later zoning) were utilized as a way of establishing categories and uses and avoidance of nuisances (things like fences and billboards) to include the restriction of whole groups of people. Towns like Berkeley used restrictions of specific businesses (namely laundries) that were considered safety hazards due to fire ris to exclude. “But the restrictions also served other more sinister purposes: most of the laundries were owned by Chinese immigrants, and city legislatures were concerned that the laundries were ‘becoming clubs of the Chinese.’”[14] Though these laws did not apply to white businesses, restricted businesses were forced to move to the outskirts of the city or to industrial zones. The papers were full of stories where the police went out of their way to harass or arrest Chinese residents.

​

Japanese

 

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, America became a place of an aging Chinese population. Japanese immigrants were few in new number by the turn of the century, but they did immigrate. Many came via Hawaii, where they worked for one of the big five plantation companies where they (and other Asian immigrants) were most of the population.[15] Between 1885 and 1920, there were approximately 180,000 immigrants from Japan.[16] Japanese that came to the mainland were employed as field laborers as well, but with less collectivization. Other work included that of small shop owners – restauranteurs, hoteliers, laundry, barbers, tailors, and shoemakers.[17] In Berkeley, this was also the case – though small in numbers. The Japanese community developed initially around Shattuck and Channing, then through the 1920s near Dwight Way Station --  between Haste and Channing and Fulton to Shattuck.[18] The Asian Exclusion League and other Anti-Asian groups were quite active, and a general racist environment was prevalent. Several students attended UC Berkeley, and some notable people like George Shima, Chiuru Obata, and Dwight Uchida made their home here. Most, however, were regular people who were not wealthy businessmen or famed artists. They were working-class people. And while zoning and covenants did not yet exist, racism did. It was this racism that would affect all Asian Americans in where they could live, and what homes they could buy or rent. This was one of the first things noted in Yoshiko Uchida’s work, Desert Exile: “the Realtors of the area hand-drawn an invisible line through the city and agreed among themselves not to rent or sell homes above that line to Asians.”[19]

​

​

Filipinos

​

But Berkeley’s University would attract many immigrants of the Asian diaspora. Among these students were Filipinos, initially granted citizenship after the Spanish-American War: “The first wave of Filipino immigrants to the United States dates from 1898 to 1941,” with the earliest group of the 20th century consisting of students, or pensionados.[20]

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

​

 

​Filipino Students Arrive at UC Berkeley (7 April 1902)[21]

​

​

They enjoyed educational opportunities at schools such as UC Berkeley. Many were the children of the well-off or connected. In July 1902, the Berkeley Daily Gazette reported on the many "Orientals" that were receiving education in Berkeley, (grouped together with Chilean, Mexican, Prussian, New Zealand, and Yuki Indigenous Californian students were Chinese and Filipino students). These last numbers included the two sons of Filipino General Filipe Buencamino. His sons attended Boone's University College, (a private school for boys on Durant).[22] So not only were foreign students attending the university, but some attended Berkeley High School and various private schools in the area. Early on, Filipinos who immigrated as US Nationals put themselves in the odd position of being neither citizen nor alien but allowed freedom of movement within the country. Many also worked in critical service industries and agriculture. Like others of the Asian diaspora, though, they were eventually stripped of their citizenship in 1934, with the passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act.[23]

​

 

South Asian

 

Around the same time that Filipinos were initially making their way to California to attend universities, the “tide of turbans” (mainly Punjabi Sikhs) made their journey to the Americas either through Canada or California via Hawaii. They were often called “Asiatics,” or “Hindus” though only a small fraction of the Asian Indian immigrants were actually believers of Hinduism. A third of these immigrants were Muslim, though the majority were Sikhs. Political activism in the form of university students found the first South Asian students arriving in the U.S. around 1901.

 

Indian students with nationalist tendencies were expelled in their home country’s universities. Ignoring these tendencies, Indian students were encouraged to transfer to American schools.[24] Some Indians in the early 1900s had come to UC Berkeley to attend school, though they worked the summers in the fields or worked as translators to their countrymen who labored in the fields around Stockton and Fresno.[25] 

 

Others, like Vashno Das Bagai and his wife Kala would come to the Bay area to settle and make a life for themselves, while also working for independence for India. The following is a video from the South Asian American Digital Archives focusing on Kala Bagai. While we will find she was not made to feel welcome in Berkeley, her community of activists had an important impact:

​

​