African-American Archives

Remembering Black pioneers of the Peninsula and Santa Clara County with historian Jan Batiste Adkins

“The most important thing we can do is to document our history.” A Stanford staff photo of Sam McDonald on campus (date unknown). McDonald worked a variety of jobs on the Stanford campus, eventually becoming the superintendent of the school’s athletic grounds, effectively making him the first African-American administrator at an American university. McDonald would later be known for his preservation of the land in La Honda that is now Sam ...

Un-forgetting the segregationist history of Palo Alto (and Daly City, and San Francisco, and…)

Richard Rothstein’s book The Color of Law documents how American communities—including much of the Bay Area—were purposefully segregated along racial lines. In 1954, one Peninsula real estate agent seized upon the sale of a single home on the east side of Palo Alto. (Book cover image via Liveright/W.W. Norton Publishing) Floyd Lowe, President of the California Real Estate Association at the time, quickly began amplifying racial tensions by warning residents that the one black family ...

Peaceful, powerful: Protests on the Peninsula (in pictures)

A highly spirited peaceful rally on Redwood City’s Courthouse Square drew a diverse cross section of Peninsula residents on Tuesday, June 2nd in support of the Black Lives Matter Movement. (Photo by Federica Armstrong) See what history in the making looks like in your backyard In the wake of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police, an abundance of protests continue to persist around the nation. Here on the Peninsula, there ...

‘All of us can do something.’ Local black restaurant owners react to George Floyd protests

Support them and others by checking out our list of local black-owned eateries Lisa, Myles and Dulani Spencer in their home kitchen in East Palo Alto. (Photo by Sinead Chang) Lisa Spencer holds her breath when her youngest son, Myles, leaves their home in East Palo Alto. He’s 15 years old now — not yet an adult, but old enough for his parents to sit him down for a conversation about how to behave in any interactions ...

From serendipity to Sinatra: the queen of Bay Area broadcasting reflects on her early days

Belva Davis and her half-century of blazing trails By Charles Russo A perennial personality of Bay Area tv news, Davis’s journalism career spans six decades. (Photo by Charles Russo) “An accident of fate.” That’s how Belva Davis characterizes for me her initial entryway into a long, distinguished career as one of the most storied broadcast journalists of the past half-century. I’m somewhat surprised to hear “accident” as a component of that equation, but I assume that Davis — even in retirement — simply ...

The fittest man in Silicon Valley wants you to try the pesto pizza

Triathlete (and coffee entrepreneur) Max Fennell chats Peninsula lifestyle in-between workouts and hustle groups By Charles Russo California Dreaming: Max Fennell talks local lifestyle on the Peninsula. (Photo courtesy of Max Fennell) Menlo Park resident Max Fennell is on the move, and in more ways than one. As metaphors about triathletes go, that’s a bit of a gimme, but Max makes it work in ways that go above and beyond. At 29, he was recently the subject of ...