New Comic Book Chronicles San Francisco Bay Area History Through the Eyes of Youth of Color.

(From AScribe)

OAKLAND, Calif. -- Forty years after the Civil Rights Movement, why do housing patterns in many parts of the Bay Area remain segregated? Why are good jobs and good schools still out of reach of neighborhoods where a majority of people of color live? The answers are found in a beautifully illustrated 28-page comic book, "How Did We Get Here? A regional history of the Bay Area," just published by the Oakland-based non-profit organization Urban Habitat.

"Opportunities available to generations of Bay Area families have been shaped by policies that spur suburban sprawl and abandon our inner cities," said Juliet Ellis, Executive Director of Urban Habitat. "This book offers educators a creative way to engage students in regional economic history by showing the impacts of social and economic forces on real people."

Narrated by four fictional Bay Area young people, the book follows the lives of their grandparents and parents from the 1940s to today. As they peer in on the post-war suburban boom, the "War on Poverty" of the 1960s and '70s, and Reagan-era cuts in public services, the narrators recount family histories shaped by racial discrimination in lending and zoning, the relocation of capital and jobs to the suburbs, industrial pollution near low income neighborhoods and other policies that made it difficult for ethnic minority and immigrant families to build the nest eggs that many white families accumulated.

The forces of disparity are battled by some of the real life super-heroes who have lead struggles for equality in the Bay Area. Featured are activists like Emil DeGuzman, who helped save the International Hotel at the heart of San Francisco's Filipino community; N'Tanya ...