Oshalla Diana Marcus stepped into the bus shelter on Marin City’s busiest street and stared at the new mural of dignified Black shipyard workers in heavy welding clothes and Sunday finery.
One of the women portrayed was Annie Small, who left Louisiana with $8 in her pocket, sat for days on her suitcase in the aisle of a train until she reached the Bay Area, and was among the thousands of Black men and women drawn to newly created Marin City to work in Sausalito’s shipyards in the early years of World War II. She died in 2018.
Marcus grew up next door to Small. Now her neighbor of 30 years is part of a public art exhibition honoring this legacy.
“Her granddaughter and my brother are married,” she said. “So the legacy doesn’t stop — because we are a close community. Even though a lot of first-generation people who came here are gone, their legacy continues.”
The bus shelter art project is part of an ongoing effort to tell the enclave’s Black history led by Felecia Gaston, a local historian, educator and nonprofit executive who has partnered with the county’s schools and libraries to teach this California story.
“There were maybe 20,000 Black people who worked in the shipyard from 1942 to 1945,” said Gaston. “We selected a few because we actually have their oral histories.”