Our Times 11/23/22

If you’ve only driven past Weed on Hwy 5, or stopped to take a photo of Mt. Shasta and have a cup of coffee at the Hi-Lo Cafe, you might not have known that the town had “a thriving and vibrant Black community.” That’s how the neighborhood of Lincoln Heights was described in a New York Times piece about the fire that destroyed 60 homes and killed two people before exploding to burn 4,000 acres of countryside.

As explained by reporter Kellen Browning, “In the 1920s, hundreds of Black Southerners made the journey to rural Northern California, lured by the promise of employment, for $3.60 a day, at the sawmill owned by the Long-Bell Lumber Company, which had just closed two mills in Louisiana as it searched for untouched forests out west.

“The company lent workers the train fare and provided them with wooden houses amid the aspens and pines in a small place called Weed. It was a company-owned, segregated town, and Black mill workers and their families were required to live on the northern outskirts. That neighborhood was known as the Quarters and, later, Lincoln Heights.

“For decades, Black residents of Weed had their own church, barbershops and nightclubs, according to residents and a 2011 documentary about the neighborhood’s history produced by Mark Oliver, a filmmaker. They were prohibited from being buried in the white-only graveyard, so they had to dig their own. Black people could shop in some white-owned stores and cafes, but they couldn’t linger…

“At the sawmill, white workers were given safer, more lucrative jobs indoors. The only integration came at school — where white and Black children learned together before returning to their cloistered communities — and on the Weed Sons, the town’s baseball team.

“That began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, when the civil rights movement slowly arrived in Siskiyou County. In Weed, Black residents arranged sit-ins at restaurants that wouldn’t serve them and boycotted businesses until they agreed to hire them…

“Lincoln Heights residents said theirs was the kind of neighborhood where children who were spotted misbehaving by a local elder could expect a call to their family home that evening. On Sundays, the Mt. Shasta Baptist Church was full… The center of social life was 13-acre Charlie Byrd Park, named after the first elected Black sheriff in California, who grew up in Weed and led Siskiyou County’s law enforcement agency for 16 years…

“In 1982, the International Paper Company, which had succeeded Long-Bell, sold the sawmill to Roseburg Forest Products, a transaction that residents mark as the beginning of the decline of the local logging business. Around that time, advances in automation and a growing environmental movement curtailed lumber jobs.

“Some found other lines of work at the local community college, the water bottling plant and restaurants, or in nearby towns. But others left the region entirely. In 2020, nearly a third of Weed households lived below the poverty line, according to census data.”

“The city accounts for 6 percent of the population in Siskiyou County, but has 36 percent of the county’s Black residents, based on 2020 census data. It also has a higher share of Hispanic and Asian American residents than the county as a whole.”

Sorry I couldn’t make it to Fort Bragg. I always have a good time with you and the friends you’ve organized into the Elders Council, but I feel like an imposter. The invitation said, “Pebbles Trippett created this council in hope that we can make a difference with our wisdom – help stem the rising tide of industrial cannabis with its low values and quality, the over-reaching government regs, and other issues that are causing our extinction as a culture in the hills and regions of our beloved Northern California.”

It struck me the wrong way –just like Jerry Rubin saying “Don’t trust anyone over 30” all those years ago. Wisdom, like compassion, is not something you can attribute to yourself. All we have is our experiences and our perspectives. I’m sure my POV is very different from yours and all the authentic elders’.

Do we even agree on the facts? At the end of the ’60s, as it became obvious that the various political “movements” were not going to fuse into a party capable of defanging The Great Satan, thousands of disappointed young adults moved to the North Coast where denuded forest land was affordable. These people were essentially (and for understandable reasons) giving up on politics and seeking private solutions to life’s challenges. Beth Bosk, a brilliant publicist, dubbed the migration “the new settler movement,” which gave it a political aura. The new settlers who made a living by growing marijuana helped lead the fight against prohibition. But essentially their so-called movement was in pursuit of private solutions within the system as it now stands. They were saying “CAMP should let us make a living,” not “America needs land reform.”

The Imaginary Party line is there are no private solutions. (Although sometimes, in despair, I think there are only private solutions).