The Social Justice Photography of David Bacon: Part Six, Homeless and Hungry in People’s Park

For residents of Berkeley, the park represented a transformative moment. In 1969 they transformed it in just a few days from a vacant lot to a green expanse of trees, grass, a performance stage, and more. Within a month, the university mobilized the Berkeley Police to retake the park.

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Editor’s note: We’re delighted to share the sixth of a multi-part series from the archives of photographer David Bacon. A former union organizer, Bacon’s photographs and writing from over the past thirty years capture the courage of people struggling for social and economic justice in countries around the world. His images are now part of Special Collections in Stanford University’s Green Library.

Part Six tells the story of what happened at People’s Park in Berkeley, California, in the years after a police attack in which park activists were beaten and killed. In the ensuing decades, the space was occupied by people displaced by gentrification, and Bacon found community activists organizing to bring them food while they tried to find a place to live off the streets.

For student radicals of 1969, People’s Park was a transformative moment. In 1967 the University of California acquired a 2.3-acre plot of land near Telegraph Avenue for dormitories or a soccer field.  After buying the land, the university bulldozed about twenty-five single family homes and boarding houses, which many people felt was a move to get rid of low-income housing.

The area sat vacant for two years, until April 1969, when it was taken over by the surrounding community, transforming in just a few days into a green expanse of trees, grass, a performance stage and other products of the 1960s imagination. Berkeley residents had grown tired of the University of California’s octopus-like acquisition of land. People’s Park was an act of creative resistance.

People’s Park was an act of creative resistance.

Within a month, the university mobilized the Berkeley Police to retake the park. On May 15, after the university’s chancellor ordered the property cleared, Berkeley police, backed by the California Highway Patrol, deployed guns and teargas against demonstrators up and down Telegraph Avenue. In the escalating conflict, cops shot and killed James Rector as he stood on the roof of a building watching it all unfold below. On May 30, 35,000 people marched from the campus to the park to protest, but a fence remained around People’s Park until May 1972, when protesters took it down for good.

This story was recently retold in The Battle for People’s Park, Berkeley 1969 -  a brilliant book of text and photographs by Tom Dalzell, who we affectionately called The Dazzler years later when he worked for the United Farm Workers.

By the 1990s, as gentrification hit Berkeley and upscale housing pushed low income people onto the streets, many of the displaced found their way to the park. Berkeley has always had a floating population of young people passing through, and they too found in People’s Park a place where they could unroll sleeping bags and rest from the road.  The park's permanent residents, some of whom wound up living there for decades, developed an uneasy alliance with those they sometimes scornfully called “the travelers.” 

At the end of that decade, I began a long partnership with the Alameda County Food Bank, documenting widespread hunger and homelessness throughout the East Bay, in reports the Food Bank issued every two or three years. For the next 15 years I went with hunger activists out to food distributions. Together we interviewed people living in garages and tent encampments—living testimony to the endemic poverty mushrooming in this land of plenty.

After the recession hit in 2008 I spent a lot of time in Peoples Park, talking with its residents and getting to know their complex social structure.  Some managed to get a roof over their heads through a city program that took over a converted hotel, and I followed them into their new home.

Over the years, many organizations brought food to the park. Food Not Bombs was one of the first, although activists had to challenge bureaucrats who tried to use food safety regulations to shut down on-site meals provided by volunteers to hungry people. 

A later effort was organized by Night on the Streets and the Catholic Worker.  Early one Saturday morning I found them in the park, led by their organizer and instigator, JC Orton.  Every week he would collect food, storing it in a garage behind his house in west Berkeley. Then on the weekend he'd meet his crew in the park.  Hungry and sleepy people would line up in front of his tables, and there they'd get a meal.

JC did not see himself as a distributor of charity, but as a social justice militant. He was part of a crew that published a newspaper, Street Spirit, edited by Terry Messman and funded by the American Friends Service Committee. The paper trained homeless people in writing skills, and its pages were filled with poems, reporting and photographs from below.  People’s Park was one of several places where homeless folks would pick up their bundle and hit the streets, selling each copy for a dollar.

These photographs show a slice of time - between the upheaval that created the park to begin with, and the ongoing efforts of the university that may someday soon take its land away.

These photographs went into Street Spirit, and were distributed by the people in the images.  They show a slice of time - between the upheaval that created the park to begin with, and the ongoing efforts of the university that may someday soon take its land away. They are the reality check - people are hungry and sleep out of doors. But they also show that our community has the creativity and will to deal with immediate need, even as we envision a different, better world.

Photos 1-4: Dozens of homeless people sleep and eat in People's Park. Denise Harding lights up a cigarette after waking up while Richard Green relaxes on his sleeping bag. Scott Justus keeps his bike next to his campsite. They all stand around smoking and waiting.

Photos 5-8: After people wake up, volunteers from local churches in a program called Night on the Streets bring pots and boxes of food into the park for breakfast. People begin to line up, and a man reads a newspaper while waiting in line.

Photos 9-13: People begin to get breakfast and eat. William Braid Clark Jr., Jim Reagan, Dawn Caraway and others get coffee and a breakfast sandwich. JC Orton, the organizer of the breakfast providers, talks with an activist.

Photos 14-15: Tony McNair and a friend sit on a park bench and talk while they eat.

Photos 16-17: "Hateman" challenges his friend Ron Coleman, and anyone else who asks him for a cigarette, to engage in a pushing contest to show how much they want it, and then rolls a cigarette and shares his papers and tobacco with another friend. "Hateman" had been living in the park for many years, along with other older residents.

Photos 18-20: Jim Reagan got a room at the UA Homes eight months after getting on the list.  He lived on the street for two years before that. First he sits in the place where he slept at night on the sidewalk, and then on the bed in his new room.

Photo 21: JC Orton is the director and main organizer of Night on the Streets, which provides food to homeless people in Berkeley. He has converted the back of his home into a storeroom and kitchen for the food he distributes. Betsy Edwards, an organizer with the Alameda County Community Food Bank, helps JC get the food.

Find other installments in this series here.