Russell City Remembered in Film
Some 150 people came to the Chabot Theater in Castro Valley on Sunday night, April 7, to see a screening of a film about the intentional destruction of a mostly Black and Latino community in Hayward in the early 1960s.
“The Apology” tells the story of the fight against the destruction of Russell City, originally founded in 1853, and the fight for justice for those former residents today.
In 1963, after declaring it “blighted,” the county seized the homes of 1,400 people along with
a school, churches, and stores and bulldozed them to make way for an industrial park. The former 200 acres of Russell City is off West Winton Avenue, which used to be called Russell Avenue.
The former residents and descendants of Russell City have hardly forgotten. They have banded together for a reunion picnic over 40 times since their displacement, though they did skip the pandemic years.
“I grew up going to those picnics and hearing people’s stories,” said Ashland resident Aisha Knowles, whose father, James, had lived in Russell City and spoke at the screening. “I wanted to make sure many more people heard them if they could when I got older, and I hoped those people could get justice in some way.”
She told Russell City’s stories by getting together with director Mimi Chakarova and becoming a producer of “The Apology.” Together, they went through a mass of historical materials and spoke to a number of now-aging former residents, one of whom was Aisha’s father.
Russell City’s residents came to the community because the racial covenants and redlining of the time often prevented them from buying homes elsewhere. Several eventual residents recalled in the film that realtors explicitly pushed Black homebuyers toward Russell City.
There, they found a community without fresh water lines in nor sewage lines out, where main roads were paved, but side streets weren’t, the former residents said. Busses and trains did not serve the community. But it was also a place where different races lived together without rancor and families helped raise each other’s children.
They recalled that there was a good local school, the Russell School, with an excellent teacher and an unusually large school library.
Russell City sat on unincorporated land. First, Alameda County refused to annex them and provide services. Hayward followed suit. The county, in the early 1960s, moved to condemn the land to make way for an industrial park, and residents fiercely defended the community at a series of well-attended public meetings.
The county paid families $2,250 each to take and bulldoze their lands under eminent domain laws.
Years later, the first screening of “The Apology” was held in May 2023 in the same Hayward Veterans’ Building where some of those public hearings were held, with today’s county officials invited.
A month later, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors apologized for the county’s destruction of Russell City, citing the film for making them aware of the injustice. The City of Hayward apologized soon after for its role. Several commissions are looking at ways to fully compensate the former residents and their descendants.
“The Hayward City Council approved the 26 recommendations made by the Hayward Russell City Reparative Justice Project to undo as much harm as possible for the residents and their familes,” said Aisha Knowles, who serves on that project. “It is wonderful to have a theater like the Chabot to show the film, and wonderful to see the support from Castro Valley groups and individuals at the screening.”