Marin City’s historical legacy detailed in new book

A new book by a well-known community organizer depicts the rich and sometimes unsettling story of Marin City, the historical nucleus of the county’s Black residents who have long struggled with discrimination.

The book, “A Brand New Start … This is Home: The Story of World War II Marinship and the Legacy of Marin City,” by Felecia Gaston, was published last month.

Its focus is on housing and social issues through the lens of the Black experience. It’s a story that has gone largely ignored by residents outside of Marin City, Gaston said.

“We’re telling the untold story of the ongoing battle against power, money and politics,” she said.

Gaston said she began preparing the book five years ago. It is composed of archival photographs, articles and text from the Independent Journal, the Sausalito News, the Mill Valley Record, personal collections, libraries and other historical sources. The documents were collected in 2022 with assistance from interns at Dominican University of California in San Rafael.

Gaston hopes the book will allow Black and minority Marin City residents to remain in their historical home and secure some autonomy over their future with political action, radical organizing and advocacy.

“We want people to know this rich history,” she said. “And we want to have self-determination. We want to do it ourselves.”

The book runs the gamut from the Coast Miwok to the George Floyd protests. A few of the historic characters explored in the text include civil rights leader A. Phillip Randolph; keyboardist George Duke; Joseph James, a plaintiff in a historic California Supreme Court decision; Black Panther Geronimo Pratt; and community activist George “Rocky” Graham.

Events featured in the book include the Black exodus from the Jim Crow South to southern Marin, where shipyard workers flocked during World War II; cross-burning by the Klu Klux Klan; persistent power struggles over the construction of new housing; and the placement of the Golden Gate Village public housing complex on the National Register of Historic Places.

Marilyn Mackel, a retired attorney and activist, said the book is a parallel to “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” by Isabel Wilkerson, a 2010 book that won National Book Critics Circle Award. One critical portion of the work identified Marin City as a destination from the Jim Crow South, she said.

“[Gaston’s book] is an important documentation of people who migrated to Marin City and who are still here in many instances,” Mackel said. “Knowing your history, you know where you came from and you have a better sense of where you’re going.”

The book details a long history of segregation, said Emily Wu, assistant director of the service learning program at Dominican University.

“It’s important for the rest of the county, as one of the wealthiest counties in the nation, to recognize the unequal distribution of resources and ongoing structural racism in this community is not OK,” she said. “It’s ongoing.”

Wu, also a member of the university’s social justice and religion department, said the service learning program sent students to work with Gaston’s community organization, Performing Stars, beginning in 2018.

Led by university archivist Louis Knecht, students assisted Gaston with identifying, organizing and digitizing a vast collection of archival materials.

“I knew this was something we needed to involve more people in,” Wu said.

The book corresponds with the Marin City 80 celebration, which included events, museum exhibitions and a play in 2022. Gaston hopes the collection will be featured in a permanent museum in Marin City one day. For now, there are offers to feature the collection elsewhere, she said.

The Marin Community Foundation plans to highlight the exhibition at its office in Novato beginning in June. The Bay Model visitor center in Sausalito and the Mill Valley School District also want selections from the exhibition to feature in public displays.

An author event is planned at 6 p.m. April 25 at Sausalito Books by the Bay at 100 Bay St.