The Bay Area

The Bay Area has long been a center of activism and social liberty since its creation but the Civil Rights movement of the 19050s and 60s had a significant impact on the area, inspiring generations to push for change.

In the 60s, the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale-focusing on civil rights and community empowerment for Africa Americans and the organization of social programs.

Throughout the 1970s, San Francisco became a center for LGBTQ+ communities and broader neo-romanticism movements. In 1978, Harvey Milk became the first openly gay person elected to public office, setting a precedent for the Bay Area as a hub of social liberties.

The 1980s saw an increase in environmental activism throughout the Bay Area, with groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club organizing campaigns to protect the beauty of Northern California.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Bay was a center for antiglobalization protests, with activists organizing against corporate globalization and neoliberal economic policy. The 1999 Seattle WTO protests that shut down the World Trade Organization was largely organized by Bay Area activists.

More recently, the Bay Area has been at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement, with protests and demonstrations organized in response to police brutality and systemic racism. The tech industry, which has a significant presence in the Bay Area, has also been the subject of activism, with tech workers organizing against issues like gentrification, labor exploitation, and data privacy.

What does being an active community member mean? Over the last few years, we’ve seen the nation take strides in becoming more politically involved, especially in our younger generations. As people take to the streets for issues they feel passionate about, the best way and most effective way to educate ourselves for the future is by looking at the past. Everyone has a different idea of what a “community member” is, but in its simplest something back to the community they are part of.

Chris Shrager is the embodiment of these characteristics- from the physical work that he did in the Bay Area to help and support his community to the protesting and activism work he contributed to in the greater area and nationwide political and social fight for change.. From his early days in high school, he made his thoughts known and spoke openly about the movements he felt passionate about. As he transitioned his vocal rhetoric to physical protesting, he not only developed his community engagement but further defined how he wanted to be perceived in the world.

After his dismissal from Verde Valley Boarding School in Arizona, Chris Shrager made his way to New York, where he spent a semester at New York University. This coincidentally was the only school his former headmaster did not contact and worked perfectly for Chris as during his year in the city, he would meet the group of people that inspired him to be what he ultimately became. While in Manhattan in the late 1960s, Chris became associated with self-proclaimed “anarchist” groups that organized protests and would “get in fights with police,” as Harry pocked in during his interview. Attending economic protests for the Vietnam war, Chris would get beaten up for the rhetoric he supported. The nation was in a very delicate position during the 1960s. During this time, the Cold War was in full swing and the U.S. government had made it its role to not only intervene in countries to “protect democracy” but to extend U.S. imperialism. While couch-surfing across Manhattan, Shrager became hyper-aware of this anti-communism propaganda spread. Being in Harlem, he saw a great deal of the lasting ideology of the Harlem Renaissance, which was the advancement of African-American culture that would lead to the very beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement for great assimilation into American society for these groups post-Jim-Crow era legislative.

With this group, he traveled to Cuba (while it was still embargoed) and saw the reality that the American narrative of communism wasn’t the truth in Cuba, that although Castro had instrumented communism, it had provided the people with wide opportunity and social support that America had chosen not to report on. This form of yellow tape reporting, or lack of reporting is what inspired Shrager for further activism. He saw the actuality of American mis-education and how the US wasn’t truthful in its reporting. Although he wasn’t necessarily pro-communism, the lack of factual information and reporting is what lead him to a life of activism, fighting for truthful expression to the American population. When Chis attended Canyon Valley Boarding School, a school deep in the Arizona desert and attended by both kids off the nearby Hopi Reservation and white students, he saw the reality that in America, there are places within this country that don’t have running water, that don’t have functional electricity. This is the complete opposite of what he would later see in Cuba, where communists supported the people and provided them with the resources they needed to not only survive but to establish a life for themselves. From what he saw in Cuba, he returned to the US and attended an anti-war rally in Washington D.C. in 1969 on his 18th birthday. Freshly sprayed with teargas by Capitol police, he rode the bus back to New York, marched into the draft office-still reeking of the deterrent, and registered his draft address in Havana, Cuba.

Upon arriving back in the country, Shrager found the US that he knew and grew up believing wasn’t what he thought. After the March in Washington, the AntiWar movement exploded across the country, starting at Kent State University in Ohio where a group of students protesting was killed by the National Guard. As Shrager eludes, “They were rioting. The group I was with in New York was doing the same.” By this point, the country was invigorated with the war effort, parents were tired of getting their kids back in boxes, students were tired of the draft and the American populace wanted to know why the US had intervened and why their voices weren’t being heard.

So I came back from Cuba. The government lied to us about a lot of stuff, and within a matter of weeks, the anti-war movement kind of exploded. Some students protesting at Kent State University in Ohio were killed by National Guard troops. There were riots. The group I was with in New York did some. Looking back now, perhaps not totally wise thing.

The group that Shrager was a part of decided to make their name heard on the national stage and publically challenge the American intervention in Vietnam and the lack of democratic understanding in the homeland. In the early 70s, computers were the size of large rooms and the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C. had one of the largest, writing algorithms and solving equations for the eventual creation and possible use of the hydrogen bomb, a proposed operation to be executed in Vietnam. The group organized an attack on the building in an attempt to blow up the computer. While the bomb did not ignite, the group was under threat of treason and domestic terrorism. Shrager and his fellow protesters fled, hiding out in small towns across New England. Shrager would eventually find himself back in California with his extended family that summer. He started to establish roots in the Bay Area during the early 70s, roots that would continue through the decade and further establish his career in activism, while on invite to speak at Menlo College, becoming reacquainted with Harry and Vicky Clark while they were studying at Menlo College in Menlo Park in the ‘70s. Shrager and Harry knew each other from their joint studies at Verde Valley but would reconnect in these political science classes. Shrager was invited to give speeches at the college about his political stance in the rejection of the draft, the impacts of communism, and the realities he saw in Cuba while picking sugar cane with locals, a concept that was relatively “alien” to a largely indoctrinated group of American students. American students were ignorant to the actuality of what wasn’t expressed through the American media narrative and being at a liberal college during the civil unrest around the country, Shrager, and Clark saw this as an opportunity to inspire other students in the work they were doing.

The trio would organize movements around campus in support of the Civil Rights Movement and spend sleepless hours together at cafeteria recruitment tables, pushing for equal rights on campus and in the wider community. By graduation, the three had established medical clinics along El Camino in Menlo Park for low-income students and residents and The Spencer Moss Community College. They also started building up their commitment to their community, becoming full-fledged communists by officially joining the CPUSA (Communist Party USA). As Harry Clark reflects, “ We were making rhetoric. We were doing reparation stuff.”

As the country pushed to get humans in space and flex its military arm to the Russians throughout the Cold War and the rise of anti-Communist narratives, the Bay Area became a hotbed of change. California was always a liberal place but during the ‘50s, it became a significant location for the creativeswriters, artists, musicians, and the highly educated, being so close to Stanford and UC Berkeley campuses as well as the liberal ideology of the valley and greater Bay Area. As society raced upward during the cold war and life around the country changed, the Bay Area saw widespread social changes, San Francisco, and especially the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, centered these thinkers and brought up young voices that challenged social norms. While Shrager was instrumental in these initial cultural changes, UC Berkeley student Mario Salvo initiated the Free Speech Movement and propelled social development activism into the public. Bringing his fight up to the Supreme Court, he empowered students to challenge what was being done and helped to make their speech a federally protected right across college campuses.

This chain of movements mostly started in the Bay Area among like-minded groups that organized over the change they wanted to see.

Between the Anti-Vietnam Movement, the Racial Justice movement, and the widespread social changes the Bay Area and nation saw, Shrager, Harry, and Vicky Clark found their footing- becoming aware of the social tension and increasing awareness of these movements by the general public. From organizing movements on campus to events that would spread into the community, the trio had joined a civil rights movement group called the Brown Berets, a paramilitary group that emerged as a result of the Chicano Movements in the late 1960s. The group was founded by ex-leaders of the Black Panthers and modeled after the Black Panther Party. The goal of these groups was to organize the people and with the way that the Civil Rights riots and Anti-Vietnam protests had gone, it was made clear that the government wasn’t listening to the people while preaching a narrative of instigation to protect democratic values. While a majority of the groups didn’t think the work they were doing would turn into a nationwide violent outbreak, many members did see this on the horizon. For example, many would go out to the forest and practice sharp-shooting while they weren’t working. Members of these groups thought the work they were doing would result in social unrest and a revolt against the government, using their voices to instigate this type of change they wanted to see. With the support of into the early 70s and the eventual middle 1970s, the ambitions of these groups largely changes and so did our trio’s goals. Shrager, Harry, and Vicky bounced around different groups as their alignments changed and eventually would change their role in these groups as the Civil Rights Movement ended with Federal Legislative. By the mid-1970s the Black Panthers had been demolished, with most of the leadership being imprisoned or killed as a result of their protesting. The remainder of the members would organize into smaller groups that mostly fell apart while a few stuck around or transitioned to protesting and activism on other issues.

“ Is that even late sixties early seventies, the whole atmosphere of how everybody felt was very different. There was the war color. Everything was young enough. It was the older people that got drafted more than we did. They were beginning to change out of that. They had to be concerned about the draft. But the odds of someone exactly our age being drafted were less than the ones that were older, so less people that we knew directly or went to school with went to Vietnam and died.

But the atmosphere was still there. The war was heavy duty, serious, bad and other bad things going on too. So there’s this whole atmosphere you’re working in which makes you a serious person. Yeah, you could party, you could have your life. But it was important, it was serious. It was, you know, and that it wasn’t just that you lightly.”

As the momentum from the Civil Rights movement slowed down as a result of the annihilation of the Black Panthers and new legislation across the country, the activists of the 60s and early 70s had to find a new way to impact their communities and continue their work. Shrager, as well as many other activists, felt a calling to continue their work after these movements, struggling to find roles that would “do no harm” (for the environment, the community, the under-served or the little man)”, many transitioning to other movements or careers that provided similar opportunities and impacts for communities. While many moved around the country and to this day fight for labor and gender rights, the Bay Area became a new hub of environmental activism, pressuring local and state government groups to protect the land to ensure the beauty and land management of the state. While Bay Area activists repositioned their political power, Shrager, Harry, and Vicki settled down into work that they deemed- “less risky,” -opening community services across the Peninsula to help lower-income communities. Shrager would spend a summer driving families out to prisons in the Central Valley and East Bay. One of the most significant projects they did in addition to food banks, medical centers and even a small community college, is the daycare center he established in Menlo Park. Shrager’ family, originally from Chicago had a family house in Menlo Park that Shrager grew up in and would come in inherit. Rather than settling down, he would turn this stately house into a daycare center for the city and end up donating the now multi-million dollar house to the city of Menlo Park where it still sits as a day care center. The Newsom administration has visited the site and granted thousands in state funding to the project. (A recent print article came out about the house and incorrectly states Shrager as a partner rather than a co-founder and the one that donated the house. Shrager established the house, donated it and even spent time with the children. While he has no intention to correct the article, Harry and Vicky sure had a lot to say about the incorrect citing)

Shrager went to Arizona and started a family while Harry and Vicki stayed in the Bay to grow their family. As time went on, the group stayed connected while continuing their passion to give back. Harry and Vicky moved to work for the public school system to teach the next generation n while Shrager worked for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Parks Service in Arizona. He set up in Arizona and found a way to provide for his community through restoration work.

Arizona has had an archaeologist history of thousands of years, but largely overlooked as the constructing cultures were Native Americans, which as we know, the US has gone to great strides to remove the impact that these cultures had on the US, but Shrager found that through restoration, he could save and revive the history of Arizona. He took the job primarily because it allowed him to do the archaeological work he always wanted. In his interview, he talks about how he could work for a private adobe restoration company in Arizona and live quite comfortably but he appreciates the humble parts of the job- riding donkeys out into the desert to work sites, working with students on field trips and establishing friendships with the volunteers that he gets to work with. At first, he was uncertain that they would hire him, knowing that the FBI surely had a file on him for the incident at the Atomic Energy Commission, but he got the job.

As the Trio, Harry, Vicky and Shrager, settled from their activist lives, they found a place in their communities for them, where they could do the work that would not only fight from within the belly of the beast by working for the government, in the BLM and education sector, but changing the perceived narrative that the media perpetuates and be the change they wanted to see after dedication years of their lives to the fight. The change allowed the group to see the government and the work they did from a different perspective. From constantly fighting against the government, they were now the ones that worked for and represented it.

Perspective is key, there are always two sides and the group concluded that the way of life is to gain as much perspective as