For years I have noticed the sign of this old hotel towering in the Oakland sky. Was this the Hotel California that the band The Eagles sang about? The building on the cover of the album was actually the Beverly Hills Hotel and was not even related to the album.

 

So what about this Hotel California which sits in a dark underbelly in Oakland? Was there some song written about it also? Oakland’s most visible landmark opened in 1930 and was the hot spot for entertainment and leisure. This hotel was also deeply connected to the construction of the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge, which opened in November 1936.


Many of these early stories fail to mention that this was a whites-only hotel, a space where people of color were not welcome. As one resident recalls, “when you walked by, you held your head down and didn’t even look into the window.”

 

By the 1950s, the California Hotel became what was known as a “cultural institution”. Based on marks left in concrete from the early 1970s, we know that Sly Stone and Big Mama Thorton were regular visitors to these venues, as well as Oakland R&B greats such as Eugene Blacknell, Charles Brown, and Roger Collins.


“The California Hotel served as one of the premier African-American entertainment spots in the East Bay in the 1950s and 1960s.  Dancer Ruth Beckford performed at the hotel’s Zanzibar Club, as well as such rhythm and blues singers as Little Richard, Sam Cooke and gospel great Mahalia Jackson. Yet most African Americans were not allowed into the hotel until the 60’s.”

That was over 70 years ago and things just do not seem to be changing. We now have voter ID laws and then there was the racial slur last week on a take-out receipt at Papa John's. There are reports of dolls hanging from nooses and certain school children told they should work as janitors by a ridiculous elected official. Not to mention the news report of "whites only" signs from a country club in Pennsylvania last summer to another sign on a Cincinnati pool in September.

 

Thankfully last Thursday the Ohio Civil Rights Commission upheld the decision that Jamie Hein’s historical ‘whites only’ sign on her pool was nothing but discrimination. She banned an African American girl from swimming in her pool due to her hair products clouding up the water.

Her white father Michael Gunn, 40, took issue with Hein’s sign and filed a discrimination charge with the Ohio Civil Rights Commission. Heine’s first response was that everyone, including her own father, had to ask permission before swimming in her pool. Later her official response was:

“I’ve never said anything to that child,” Hein said. “If I have to stick up for my white rights, I have to stick up for my white rights. It goes both ways.”

Is this 2012 and do we have to go back to Birmingham?

Having a black president in the White House is enough to seemingly drive some of these racists over the edge but it does not seem to stop there.

Republican hopeful Ron Paul’s vision of America is that the property owner should be within her rights to post and enforce this sign. He feels that the Civil Rights act actually aggravates racism and should never have been passed. But as an individual property owner discriminating based on race he believes that the individual should have that right.

Isn’t this continuing racism?

 

 

Can’t we all just get along?

 

Happy Martin Luther King Day! 

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Linda Seccaspina 2012

All Photos by Linda Seccaspina 

 

“They livin' it up at the Hotel California

What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise)

Bring your alibis !”