Jacqueline Myles Smith: “The Marin City Story”
By Carol Acquaviva
This is the first in a series of articles about Marin City.
In July 1965, the book The Marin City Story written by Jacqueline Myles Smith was published by the Marin Council of Community Services in San Rafael. With the subtitle A Five Year Community Development Project, the book’s aim was not to be a critique, but rather a survey of and tool for those involved in social planning. Smith was director of The Marin Council of Community Services’ Marin City Program from December of 1959 through March 1965. This community development program aimed to forward racial integration, assist in cultivating positive relationships between the “new Marin City” and the wider community, and connect with agencies to provide social services to Marin City. Activities under the program included arts, music, sports and teen groups. Modernization of a rebuilt wartime site aimed to include a shopping center, schools, a community center, churches, and recreational activities.
Jacqueline Smith was one of four children raised in Dermott, Arkansas by a barber and his wife who were “so family and education oriented” that all of the children graduated college. “It was just always assumed we would go to college,” she said. Smith completed graduate work at the schools of social work at both Howard University and at the University of California. Among her many accomplishments in Marin City, she organized Career Day and a study center staffed by volunteers from all over the county; established a summer recreation program; supported households, and established help for tenants to work with the Marin Housing Authority and Redevelopment Agency. Her aim was to not only help Marin City residents, but help the entire community reshape relationships with the county as a whole. In 1963, she said:
“What we are working toward is helping Marin City people to participate more actively in Marin County affairs and encouraging the county to be more aware of the need to include Marin City in county affairs at all levels of all areas. Marin City is geographically a part of Marin and what happens to the people, no matter where they live, is a County concern.”
The “transition period” of Marin City was physical and philosophical. Wartime housing built for Marinship was intended to be temporary. What came after Marinship had hoped to be, in Smith’s words, “a totally planned redeveloped community.” A serious need for action was created by the lack of adequate services, isolation, systemic segregation, and the intense restrictions on Blacks — written and unwritten — to establish a post-war life in Marin in terms of home ownership, employment, educational opportunities, and social endeavors. Smith wrote in The Marin City Story, “The focus that is being directed toward Marin City is bringing into the open prejudices and anxieties which some of the public has regarding racial integration. These feelings are heightened by the fact that the redevelopment plans include sale houses and rental units that encompass a fairly wide price range, thus providing for greater economic integration than now exists, as well as creating a setting that allows for racial integration.”
The underlying fear that Smith describes, while not unique to Marin, lead to what Smith titled “Citizens in Search of a City.” In 1952, complaints by the Marin City Tenant’s Council were brought to the Board of Supervisors. The chairman of the council explained how in the years that had passed since Marinship operations ceased,
“Marin City [residents] have no place else to go. We work in Marin County and must remain in Marin County, yet other housing is either denied us or beyond our ability to pay. Faced with this hard fact, you will appreciate the mounting pressures upon us as we have lived for more than two years under a constant threat of eviction. In addition, we are faced with deterioration of our housing — originally built to last five years and now standing for thirteen years. More roofs spring leaks, more of our kerosene cooking stoves blow up, the roads fill with chuck holes, the temporary water and sewage pipes need more frequent repairs, etc. You can understand the depths of our feelings when we believe a good, intelligent solution is within our grasp, and then something happens to block or delay fulfillment.”
Smith took pride in her position within the community. She became the first Black woman ever appointed to public office in San Francisco when she was named to the city’s Welfare Commission. She made an impact in the 1950s while working as community relations director at the Bay Area Urban League. Her work on racial integration was known well beyond Marin City both before and after her time there. Smith begins one of the chapters of The Marin City Story with this thought:
“Few people have the unusual experience of being the last citizens of a ghost town and the pioneers of a new town at one and the same time. This is the unique experience of Marin City residents who are living through the transition period from the old to the new Marin City.”
For more on Marin City’s history, please visit The Marin City Historical and Preservation Society, an initiative of Performing Stars of Marin.
