2.8.23 4:27 pm: We have updated this article to correct a few minor biographical details.
Last year’s Mill Fire devastated the town of Weed, including the historic California landmark neighborhood known as Lincoln Heights. But the community’s legacy to California’s Black history remains.
In December, United Way of Northern California held a screening of award-winning artist Mark Oliver’s 2011 documentary, “From the Quarters to Lincoln Heights,” as a fundraiser for survivors of the Mill Fire. About 100 people attended the Redding event, which raised about $28,000.
The film is the culmination of six years of research and 60 hours of interviews designed to clearly portray the significance of Lincoln Heights to California’s Black history.
Oliver co-created and funded the Lincoln Heights project with the help of James Langford, who moved to the area in 1974 and became the town’s first African-American elementary-school teacher. Langford eventually wrote his Master’s thesis on Lincoln Heights, a racially segregated community of mill workers, originally known as “the Quarters,” that included parts of Weed, McCloud, Mount Shasta and Dunsmuir.
The area as home to some of the earliest Black settlers in northern California, many of whom came from labor mills in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas in the 1920s, the film documents. Weed’s thriving lumber industry began with the city’s founding in 1901 and continued through the 1980s. The wages for that industry, which paid more than Black laborers could make in the South, brought many of them to Weed.
They were part of America’s mid-20th century “Great Migration,” a period of history marked by the movement of Black people from largely segregated areas, particularly the South, mostly to larger cities where economic opportunities were more promising. During the “Great Migration,” many of those who moved to Northern California settled in largely conservative and white timber communities.
Oliver’s film explains how lumber companies like Long-Bell offered to cover travel expenses and provide company-owned housing for workers who relocated to California. Other Northern California lumber communities like Quincy and Sloat also imported workers from the South. In 1956, Long-Bell was bought out by the International Paper Company (IPC), which dropped the company-owned town model and began selling lots and homes to residents, including Black employees, at reasonable prices.
While lumber jobs provided relatively good wages for African-Americans migrating from the South, Oliver explained to Shasta Scout during a recent phone interview, their hard labor also provided significant financial benefit to the lumber industry.
“These big companies benefited from all this really cheap wood and also cheap labor,” Oliver said. “It was a better life than (Black Americans) could have in the South. You know, they made more money. But, still, it was the hardest work, and (the companies) gave that to all the Black people.”
In the midst of 1960s social movements, descendants of those who originally settled in the Quarters fought to improve their socioeconomic status as part of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), a nationwide civil rights group founded in 1942. CORE’s Weed chapter began in the summer of 1966, when demonstrations and boycotts took place, speaking out against tokenism by local business establishments in their hiring processes.
Oliver’s work documents how CORE’s efforts led to more fair treatment of Black employees in Weed and ushered in other landmark changes, including the 1986 election of California’s first Black sheriff, Charlie Byrd, who won his Siskiyou County seat despite an African-American County population of less than 2%.
Despite that progress towards equity, Weed’s Black community continues to face ongoing negative impacts from the lumber industry, including the 2022 Mill Fire which, according to an investigation by CalFire, likely started in a building owned by Roseburg Forest Products, the company that bought IPC in 1996.
Residents have filed lawsuits against Roseburg for claims of negligence, inspection failures and wrongful deaths. While Roseburg has not admitted liability for the fire, the company is distributing $50 million in restoration funds to victims.
It’s not the first time Roseburg has had to pay for harm caused to local residents. In 2011, due to violations of the Clean Air Act, Roseburg had to pay $75,000 in penalties.
Mill activity, the film documents, has also led to contaminated soil, and ground and surface water in and around the Lincoln Heights neighborhood. In the 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found toxic preservatives used for lumber processing since the 1930’s in soil surrounding the J. H. Baxter Company facility, another IPC-owned company.
The contamination was so life threatening that, in April 1983, the County Health Department closed Lincoln Park, a playground for children from Lincoln Heights, for further sampling. The facility was declared a Superfund site by the EPA in 1990 and took several years to clean up.
For Oliver, who spent the summer months of much of his childhood in Weed, this film and his other documentary efforts are one way to address the ongoing inequities in the community. Oliver works primarily as a painter and sculptor, but also studied film as a college undergraduate before beginning to make videos for art installations.
The “Voices Between the Mountains,” a film project funded by a 2007 California Council for the Humanities grant, brought Oliver back to Siskiyou County to work with youth, including Karuk youth in Happy Camp and Orleans. Learning about lumber industry’s role in bringing Black residents to Weed helped spark Oliver’s work on the Lincoln Heights project.
Lincoln Heights continues to change from ongoing impacts of the lumber industry. Oliver says he’s heard many of the homes being built after the Mill Fire may rent for prices too high for local Black families to afford. It’s one more reason the historic Black town is waning, Oliver said.
“Not many people in that movie are alive (now). So, it was a good thing we made it when we did.”
Redding’s First United Methodist Church will show the documentary “From the Quarters to Lincoln Heights” on Friday, March 24 from 6-8pm. They’re providing free admission & free child care and will be accepting donations for fire Lincoln Heights fire victims.
