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Five years ago, the Emerson Collective, a philanthropic company founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, launched a series of community meetings in East Palo Alto to ask residents how they felt about prospective housing development.
Among the variety of responses, people expressed a sense of fear, said Sharifa Wilson, executive director of the East Palo Alto Community Archive, a nonprofit group that is among the grant recipients of the Weekly’s Holiday Fund.
“You heard this theme of, ‘We’re afraid of losing our history, that in 20 years, people won’t know that this is a community of color, because of so much gentrification, development,'” Wilson said.
That’s when East Palo Alto residents put their heads together to search for a solution – a way to keep the history of the city alive as the region rapidly developed.
Community members officially founded the East Palo Alto Archive as a nonprofit in 2023 and have since collected and digitized thousands of artifacts, including newspaper clippings, school dance flyers and class photos. All the while, they conducted new interviews with local leaders to paint a detailed picture of the Black, Latino and Pacific Islander residents who built the city.
Thousands of artifacts later, the archive is seeking a home for the items – somewhere residents can visit.
“From articles to photographs to programs to brochures,” Wilson said. “We want people to come in and be able to touch and feel that.”
The nonprofit’s ethos revolves around keeping a multicultural community connected through story telling and that’s exactly how the organization was first established.
Frank Omowale Satterwhite, a longtime resident who helped found the city, approached Wilson, asking if an archive might be feasible. Satterwhite and Wilson established a group of 10 people, or “connectors” with deep roots in the city, then set out to answer that question. The group quickly connected with a web of more people and began to build the archive by 2020.
Today, the archives helps tell the story of East Palo Alto’s founding and transformation. It details the city’s demographic shift as more Latino residents immigrated to the region and it explains what the ‘60s Nairobi Movement is – an era when Black East Palo Altans set out to build their own institutions as they were excluded from health, social and educational resources.
In early December, the archive hosted an event honoring its legacy sports teams, all of which were built and funded and funded by the community.
For example, East Palo Alto’s rugby team, the Razorbacks, was first established in 1988 as the Eagles, Wilson said.
“It was something that started back in 1988 by a group of Tongan men who lived across the street from Jack Farrell Park,” she said.
The club has since produced Olympic players like Folau Niua, who started his career in East Palo Alto before playing for the United States national team for over a decade.
The archive also celebrated the work of an East Palo Alto T-ball league, which was founded by locals in ‘94 when they hoped to “reclaim” Jack Farrell Park, a hotspot for drug activity at the time, Wilson said.
“They put together this league, and the kids played,” she said. “Quite frankly, the drug dealers were respectful enough at that time, and did not go out there while the kids were playing.”
From sports teams to religious leaders, East Palo Altans have helped develop the city despite pushback from neighboring cities like Menlo Park, where residents voted against the incorporation of the city.
Through the archive, that push and pull is fully documented in a historic timeline.
Though she didn’t grow up in East Palo Alto, the archive helped Wilson realize how “self-sufficient” the town is, she said.
“There were no [nonprofits], just people wanting to do something, organizing it and getting it done, and that’s typical of East Palo Alto,” Wilson said.
As the archive continues to develop and garner support to eventually find its permanent home in the city, it kicked off this year a public art project at Cooley Landing. Local artist Jessica Monette, is currently hosting story-telling sessions with community members to inspire the piece, which will depict the history of East Palo Alto.
The display is set to be unveiled in December 2026.
