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Frank Omowale Satterwhite, who has a doctorate from Stanford University, is a former Ravenswood School District superintendent and lead organizer for the movement to incorporate East Palo Alto as a city. With a big smile, he looked at a crowd of over 50 people in East Palo Alto’s EPA Center on Friday, and reflected on how the city has changed over the past decades.
“People ask me now, ‘What was it like in East Palo Alto?’” Satterwhite said in a buoyant voice. “We weren’t just a village, we were like Wakanda without the technology.”
In an era coined the Nairobi Movement, Black East Palo Altans set out to build their own institutions in the 1960s, when they were often excluded from health, social and educational resources. The movement gave birth to a Black school board, a Black chamber of commerce, a local Committee of the Poor, the Nairobi Culture Center, Nairobi College, Nairobi Shopping Center and much more, Satterwhite said.
It was this work, in part led by Satterwhite, that built the city of East Palo Alto.
The city of East Palo Alto, JobTrain and the East Palo Alto Community Archive hosted its first “On the Shoulders of Giants,” event, Friday evening, to celebrate the contributions of Black leaders in the community, as Black History Month came to a close.
Larry Moody, former East Palo Alto mayor and government affairs and community liaison with local nonprofit Job Train, pitched the idea for the event in an effort to highlight Black contributions in a changing neighborhood.
“We would like new residents to be active participants in the community, not just rest their heads here, but be engaged in our schools, at our parks, with our nonprofits – there’s always room at the table,” Moody said.
People often only get together for funerals or family reunions, he said, and Moody saw this event as a family reunion.
As the event began, EPA Center, an East Palo Alto community and arts center, was relatively quiet. Inside a room covered in murals, colorful tables sat empty. But as the event progressed, longtime and new East Palo Alto residents alike entered the room, embracing one another and recalling memories.
The room was filled with chatter and laughter – with residents excited for the opportunity to hear from “local legends,” Satterwhite, Robert Hoover and Clayborne Carson.
During the main portion of the event, these men answered questions regarding lessons they’ve learned, the history of East Palo Alto and how Black movements have evolved over time.
Build up
In a Palo Alto Proclamation dedicated to Hoover, he is described as a “social giant,” a U.S. Air Force veteran who founded the Nairobi College, an independent Black institution that served hundreds of students, and East Palo Alto’s Junior Golf program, which teaches minority youth honesty and patience through the sport.
These are only a few of his many accomplishments, but unlisted, was his creation of the “Floating Crap Game,” in the 1960s. It was a quasi-governmental organization that met once a month to lay out development plans for East Palo Alto.
At Friday’s event, he spoke on stage about the advice he would tell his younger self.
“I remember I was complaining to Stokely Carmichael about how long it was taking us to accomplish some of the things we were trying to do,” Hoover said. “And he said, ‘Hoover, do you realize that the things that we’re struggling for are not going to be realized in our lifetime?’”
So, while he now knows that his fight against racism and struggle to incorporate East Palo Alto would span across decades, he said the legacy of that work would last lifetimes.
In 1962, Hoover’s mentors realized that neighboring cities were beginning to annex East Palo Alto land, he said. In response, they recruited about 30 people to create the “floating crap game,” which began the fight to incorporate the area.
“It takes a village to raise a child,” Hoover said. “And I just tried to be a member of the village.”
Incorporation
“Everything that happened in East Palo Alto was the people’s movement, but the people wouldn’t have moved if Bob Hoover hadn’t been there to help guide them,” said Satterwhite.
In 1979, a pro-incorporation mayor of the East Palo Alto Municipal Council, formed the East Palo Alto Citizens Committee on Incorporation, and appointed Satterwhite as the chair.
But when the San Mateo County Local Agency Formation Commission – a bureau dedicated to facilitating governmental changes, better known as LAFCo – learned about the incorporation committee, it hired a consultant to conduct a study on the possible incorporation of East Palo Alto, Satterwhite said.
The study found that incorporation would have negative effects, Satterwhite said, so the East Palo Alto incorporation committee set out to find a more “credible” study.
Satterwhite hired Stanford research specialist Tom Fletcher, whose specialty was municipalities around the world, to conduct a new study, which found that incorporation would yield positive effects. When the study was presented to LAFCo, the agency agreed with the results and permitted an election to incorporate East Palo Alto.
But the election was tainted with votes from Menlo Park that opposed the incorporation. Satterwhite and his committee then mobilized to publicize the “unfair election,” and garnered the attention of KCBS, which included multiple editorials against the decision to include Menlo Park voters.
“They began to run editorials all day long, for several weeks, chastising the county for creating a ballot measure where non-East Palo Altans defeated our self-determination effort,” Satterwhite said.
The county then allowed the group to re-apply for incorporation, but the decision was quickly challenged by former U.S. Rep. Pete McCloskey, who filed a voter fraud lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court. Once that lawsuit was rejected, East Palo Alto became a city in 1983, winning by 15 votes in a local election, Satterwhite said as the crowd in EPA Center stood up and cheered.
Looking forward
Clayborne Carson, a Palo Alto resident and pioneer in the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr. studies, was also honored at Friday’s event in a video presentation created for the event.
“How old was Dr. King when he was assassinated?” Carson asked. “Before they could answer, I said ‘… 39 years old.’”
While there are plenty of studies on what King Jr. accomplished, Carson said, people should focus on what he would have accomplished in the following 39 years.
“[King Jr.] focused on economics, the inequalities around the world, but he also focused on the future,” Carson said.
As a new generation begins to take over Black and cultural movements, Hoover feels organizations and nonprofits have become siloed, and don’t work together like they used to.
But in times when people feel most oppressed, Satterwhite said, people often feel more connected.
“I predict over the next four years, we’ll see some of the best organizing,” he said.
