Bringing Home the News: Reading Black Family History, the Second World War, and Change in Marin City

Abstract

This article resulted from an effort to locate Black migrant life and history in Marin City, California, by uncovering strands of the author’s family history in the Sausalito News, a weekly paper (1885–1966) that covered events in and around Marin County. As the center of social and political change during World War II, Marin City, a community that began with the construction of a massive shipbuilding complex in Sausalito in 1942, would give way to a Black migrant community that would enrich the Bay Area, remaking the region into “a new black frontier.” Using the newspaper as an archival mine, I flesh out the contours of the Second Great Migration and the postwar era in Marin City, highlighting an alternate archive, one that pushes against dominant narratives and allows Black people to resist historical erasure by preserving specific acts of Black placemaking, political activism, and community engagement unique to the Bay Area.