“We need to ask ourselves: What will our grandchildren experience when they come here? What will they think about the decisions we have made?” - Janet McBride

8. RECOGNIZING THE PAST

   Three thousand years ago, Ohlone Indians heard only the music of birds on Brooks Island. In 1775, the creak of ships under billowing sail brought Spanish soldiers to this harbor. Until 1938, the ring of pickaxes echoed as men quarried the ancient rock for roads and sturdy buildings. Farther up the channel Chinese fishermen dried shrimp in midday sun. Boats unloaded at the sugar wharf, where boys like Tony Avalos came to swim and Hubert Webster caught perch, “great big ones.”

    From 1942 to 1945, the Ford Assembly Plant prepared tanks for the battlefront while Kaiser Shipyard Three, across the channel, added to the mechanical din. When the buildings turned to civilian life, cars rolled from the Ford plant; Shipyard Three became the first campus for Contra Costa College and later the Port of Richmond. Plans to level everything in sight, including Brooks Island, followed in the next decades. Congress recognized Richmond’s national significance in 2000, passing this law: “In order to preserve for the benefit and inspiration of the people of the United States as a national historical park certain sites, structures and areas located in Richmond, California... there is established the Rosie the Riveter /World War II Home Front National Historical Park.”

    Today Richmond has a national park, the channel murmurs of the past and Brooks Island listens again to a chorus of seabirds.