Saving the Marsh

Having never heard the word "marsh," they just called it "over the tracks," and in sun or fog they swam in the tidal channels and stomped through the glistening salt grass in the yellow boots that Mary Lee bought for them. They caught tadpoles in jars and watched them turn to frogs, running to their treasures first thing in the morning to see how the creatures had changed overnight.

Come early spring, Mary Lee would go to the fields surrounding the marsh to gather wild mustard and turnip greens. "They were nice and tender, because they were out there in the cold," she says. "Oh, it was good, good. Everyone would come and eat. The menfolk would barbecue goat. Course I don't like barbecue goat, but a lot of people do."

Mary Lee grew up in Mossville, La., where the oak trees streamed with so much moss that the older generation dried it in the sun and stuffed it into mattresses and pillows. At 15, she married Richard Daniel Dotson, and in the mid-1940s they left the South for California with three children in tow and one on the way. (Whitney was their first California-born child.)

Like most of the other 500,000 African Americans who made the exodus to California between 1942 and 1945, it wasn't merely the pull of employment that sent them on their way, but also the push of Jim Crow and racially motivated violence. "It was pretty treacherous around there for men," Mary Lee says. "They didn't have no good time in Louisiana, not the part we lived in."

And so Parchester became a refuge. And within that refuge, the marsh became its own sanctuary--one of the last pockets of pristine tidal land along the bay.

Whitney's father, the Rev. Richard Daniel Dotson, and other local ministers had tried to make sure that the area past the berm would be protected as open space. They had shaken hands on the deal with Fred Parr, a local white developer who had built Parchester after getting assurances from the ministers that their congregations would buy new homes there.

But in the decades to follow, the pressure to pave the area, known as Breuner Marsh, became unrelenting. In the mid-1970s, Whitney's father and others successfully fought off a municipal airport intended for the marsh and launched a plan to transform the adjacent Giant Powder Co. property into a park. It is now the site of the Point Pinole Regional Shoreline.