The GroundTruth Project, September 24, 2018: Crossing the Divide; California
SAN FRANCISCO — In a neighborhood that once boomed with black-owned venues and hotels, and hosted musical greats like Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, a struggle to survive is underway. African-American residents and business owners in the Fillmore District are trying to preserve this historically black neighborhood.
It probably sounds like a common story in San Francisco, as the tech industry fuels the most expensive rental market in the United States and an extraordinary concentration of wealth. But in the Fillmore District, known in the 1940s and ‘50s as the “Harlem of the West,” this upheaval goes back decades further and steeps the current debate in a bitter history.
