Sidney and Iréne Dearing, along with their two small children, faced lynching and bomb threats after they settled in a “sundown town” in California in 1924.
As the first Black homeowners in Piedmont, a wealthy white suburb of Oakland, they endured a racial terror campaign that included a mob of 500 people showing up on their property. The police chief, who was also a high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan, failed to protect them. The city eventually took the Dearings to court, claiming it needed to seize their property to build a road.
Within a year they were forced to sell, and a road was never built…