A Great Migration: From Louisiana to Oakland—and Back Again
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My parents wanted to escape the harsh treatment of Black people in the South and decided to migrate to California.
Over six million Black people moved from the American South to the North, Midwest and to Western states. This mass movement, known as the Great Migration, was driven by the need to escape racial violence and Jim Crow.
When the United States entered World War II, it brought the expansion of national defense jobs to the Oakland, San Francisco area where several of my mother’s brothers had already moved.
My parents felt that this was a chance for them to have a better life for themselves and their children.
In 1943, they moved to Oakland and my dad got a job at the Naval Ship Yard in Oakland. They moved into a two-bedroom apartment in West Oakland. In 1948, the war had already ended and my parents now had four children and still living in a two-bedroom apartment. My dad saw most of the 40,000 (estimate) workers hired during the war now out of work and he started to look at moving back to the South.
My parents saw some of the same discriminations in Oakland that they witnessed in Louisiana. In 1951 they decided to move back to Shreveport, La. My dad got a job at Mid-Continent Steel Casting Corporation. They were able to buy a small house in a Black neighborhood, where my four siblings and I lived until our adulthood.
Our neighborhood was all Black families, our schools and church were all Black families and our teachers were all Black, mostly graduates from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). I feel that my parents made the right decision for us.
Photo caption if needed.
Faith Ross • Age 79 • Petaluma resident
Faith Ross and her husband moved from Oakland to Petaluma in 1975, seeking a safe and welcoming community in which to raise their family. She was born in Oakland but raised in the South after her parents concluded that many of the same racial disparities they encountered in the South also existed in California.