PIEDMONT has unveiled a preliminary conceptual design for the Sidney and Irene Dearing Memorial, a public artwork honoring the life of Piedmont’s first Black homeowners and acknowledging a difficult chapter in the city’s past.
The memorial will be constructed amidst a redwood stand in Triangle Park at the intersection of Magnolia and Wildwood avenues, near the Dearings’ former home.
In May of 1924, the same year an equestrian statue depicting Confederate general Robert E. Lee was dedicated in Charlottesville, Virginia, a mob of 500 angry white people massed outside the home of the only Black residents in Piedmont.
Dearing, a descendent of native Seminoles, moved to California from Texas and became a successful businessman. He owned a jazz club called the Creole Cafe on Oakland’s Seventh Street. He and his wife Irene had two children, a girl and a boy. Irene’s mother was white, which allowed her to purchase property that fell behind the city’s mapped red line that designated areas off-limits to Blacks. She bought the home at 67 Wildwood Ave. for $10,000 and signed it over to her Black daughter and Black Native son-in-law.
The angry crowd that appeared at their doorstep that same year had come to demonstrate that the whole neighborhood wanted them to relinquish their property and vacate the city.
In historic reports of the event, there was no mention of the presence of the city’s police chief, Burton Becker, who was an open member of the Ku Klux Klan. Sidney and Irene Dearing faced relentless harassment and violence. Dearing eventually offered to sell the house to the city for $25,000. They paid him $10,000. Dearing passed away alone in 1953 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Martinez.
The painful story of Dearing was placed in archives and largely forgotten until 2019, when Piedmont native Meghan Bennett pieced together the history of the Dearings with clippings and public records from the Oakland Public Library and the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Her research website gained notoriety during the Black Lives Matter social movement. In 2020, the City Council resolved to examine Piedmont’s history and, in 2022, launched the memorial project.
The memorial, called the “Dearing Portal,” was created by acclaimed artist and landscape architect Walter Hood based on conversations with the Dearing family and technical advisors from the city.
Hood, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and chair of the UC Berkeley Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning, is internationally recognized for crafting powerful public installations that offer new narratives about the past, and provide alternative ways of thinking about, looking at, and experiencing the world.
The Dearing Portal features sculptural elements of a home — a doorway, window, and mailbox — symbolizing what was lost. Inside, interpretive displays share the Dearings’ story. An elevated window displays the words “There are Black people in the future,” a quote by artist Alisha B. Wormsley that has come to symbolize the greater participation of Black and brown people in American leadership and society.
The city is raising funds for the memorial’s construction through a public campaign, with installation expected in 2026. Donations can be made at Piedmont Beautification Foundation’s website.
The post Piedmont’s first Black family was being chased out in 1924. Now they are being memorialized appeared first on Local News Matters.