Marin City is small; once the location of worker housing during WWII during the Marinship days, it’s not even a town, but an unincorporated community, tucked away on the opposite side of highway 101 from Sausalito. While it may be small, this community has had a huge impact. Marin’s most significant and influential Black community has seen itself on the national stage many times, from its historic impact as part of the desegregation efforts in the 1960s to modern-day efforts to fight housing discrimination and support Black Lives Matter. So in honor of Black History Month, we’re taking a look back at some of the most important highlights of Marin City past and present.
The Sausalito Marin City District’s Desegregated TK-8 School Strives for Integration
Sausalito Marin School District was part of one of the first voluntary desegregation efforts in the county, but integrating the school districts has remained fraught. In 2019, after an investigation of the district, then California State Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced the first desegregation order in California in 50 years in the Sausalito Marin City School District. There were two public schools in the district at the time. The regular public school, Bayside MLK Jr. Academy in Marin City, served almost entirely students of color. The other school, a charter school called Willow Creek Academy, operated on the Nevada Street campus in Sausalito where Dr. MLK Jr. Academy is today. Willow Creek was a fairly diverse charter school, but served almost all the district’s white students. And Willow Creek’s resources and achievement markers were significantly higher than that of Bayside MLK Jr. Academy, a disparity that caught the state attorney general’s attention.
The History of Marin City
Marin City was established in 1942 as part of the Marinship project. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government decided to use the waterfront shipyards at Sausalito to build Liberty supply ships and tankers for the war effort. To house some 6,000 of the shipyard workers who migrated to the Bay Area from all over the nation, the government financed the construction of single-story housing units, called Marinship. Many workers came here from the South for well-paying jobs they couldn’t find back home.
Black Lives Matter in Marin
In 2020, just after George Floyd had been killed, 16-year-old Tamalpais High School student and Marin City resident Mikyla Williams decided it was time to take action. That week, as people took to the streets to demand accountability for the Black lives lost to police and vigilante brutality sheltered by systemic racism, Williams united with Lynnette Egenlauf and Ayana Morgan-Woodard to organize a Black Lives Matter protest to fight racism in her community and beyond.
Fighting Discriminatory Housing
When Paul Austin and Tenisha Tate-Austin purchased an iconic “pole home” in 2016 — one of 300 wooden homes built across the hills above Marin City in the early 1960s as part of a redevelopment effort — they knew they were buying a bit of Marin City history. What they didn’t know was that they soon would be making history by filing a lawsuit to expose ongoing racism in the real estate marketplace. In early December of 2021, the couple joined the Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California (FHANC) to announce the filing of a lawsuit in federal district court alleging housing discrimination due to race in a loan appraisal process.
Reworking Restrictive Covenants
The Marin County Restrictive Covenants Project was launched in 2023. Through the collaboration of the Community Development Agency, the County’s Office of Equity and the Assessor-Recorder’s Office, the Marin County Restrictive Covenant Project has been established. This initiative sheds light on the historical significance of governmental policies and programs intentionally designed to discriminate, which consequently led to the creation of segregated communities within Marin. While the project aims to wipe out racist illegalities, it also seeks to go beyond the requirements by “finding assessor parcel numbers that were affected by discriminatory restrictions and working with specialists in the County’s Information Systems and Technology department to create and publish an interactive map,” says Jodi Olson, Marin Chief Deputy Recorder-County Clerk.
Marin City Architecture
At the heart of Marin City, the Golden Gate Village buildings went up between 1959 and 1962 to replace previous Marinship housing that had fallen into disrepair. Two highly respected Bay Area architectural firms, Aaron Green and Associates and John Carl Warnecke and Associates, designed Marin City’s housing, while famed landscape architect Lawrence Halprin helped conceive much of the original outdoor common areas and grounds. In 1964, the U.S. Public Housing Administration (later known as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD) gave the planners of Marin City an award for excellence of design.
Honoring Grandmothers
One important part of Marin City’s legacy stems from its elder women residents, known affectionately as “the grandmothers,” who arrived in Marin City in the early years, built the community’s foundation and have nurtured it for decades, according to Felecia Gaston, codirector of the #MarinCity80 celebration (in collaboration with activist and musician Jahi Torman). It’s these dedicated women who are celebrated in a keepsake cookbook entitled Grandmothers Feed Us Love: Celebrating the Legacy of Marin City’s Grandmothers Through Cherished Recipes and Photos.
Making a Difference for Marin City’s Youth
Play Marin was created in 2012 by Paul Austin, who has deep roots in Marin, as his great grandparents came to Marin City in the late 1930’s / early 1940’s to work in the Sausalito Shipyards during WWII. A student-athlete who grew up in the community, Austin started by coaching one basketball team of nine players. Today, Play Marin reaches well over 300+ kids in Marin County annually through dozens of sports, summer camps, and many other enriching activities. We caught up with Paul to find out how the organization is going.
Homegrown Businesses at the Heart of the Community
Almost 80 years after William and Clara Bullock moved from Louisiana and settled into the dormitory-style worker housing in the flatlands of this enclave, their grandson, Bishlam Bullock, owner of Salon B in San Rafael, spoke with us about his family’s history and his experience growing up as part of one of the original multi-generational families of Marin City.
