"When white people say 'a bad neighborhood,' " an anonymous wise woman once said, "what they really mean is 'a black neighborhood.' " So it has been for Marin City since its inception more than half a century ago. For decades this unincorporated slice out of Marin's exponentially white demographic has been the telltale crack in the county's carefully pristine landscape—a source of neglect, anger, pride, survival, fear, patronizing platitudes, creeping gentrification and an indestructible sense of community.

Originally this grassy, crescent-shaped gulley between Sausalito and Tam Valley was pastoral farmland dotted with oak trees, a large Miwok shell mound and a few ridgetop houses. But when the United States entered World War II, nearby Pine Hill was more or less deposited into two miles and 200 acres of northern Sausalito marshland to create a shipyard where a fleet of prefabricated "Liberty ships" and tankers could be built quickly and efficiently. Twenty-six thousand piles were driven into the landfill, then 21 buildings, six shipways, seven piers, a ferry slip and 24,000 feet of railroad track were built and a mile-long channel was dredged by the Bechtel Corporation in a matter of months. Over the next three and a half years, 20,000 workers toiled 24/7, building 93 vessels—one of them (the S.S. Huntington Hills) in a mere 33 days, a world's record. The likes of Bing Crosby, Marian Anderson and the commander in chief himself dropped by to pay their respects.

To assemble the vessels, a draft-depleted workforce was recruited from near and far. Many were African-Americans from the Midwest and the South, attracted by a sense of patriotism, the timeless allure of California and paychecks far heftier than anything available in Dixie. Over 4,000 women were employed in every craft and capacity and, like their black, Asian and Latino colleagues, were paid $1.20 per hour, same as the white men they worked alongside (President Franklin D. Roosevelt had forbidden discrimination on government projects). Before long Marinship was known as the best-integrated shipyard on the West Coast, with women and minorities making up one-third of the workforce.

To shelter all of this newly arrived personpower, and with wartime housing worse than scarce, a makeshift community was fashioned on 356 acres of that bucolic farmland. In just over three months, 700 apartments and dormitories for 1,000 singles covered the valley, with 800 detached homes built into the hills to take advantage of the bay vistas. All were identically crafted of low-slung redwood with green and brown roofs to camouflage them during enemy attack. The new community of Marin City achieved a population of 6,000 by Christmas 1943, making it the second-biggest municipality in Marin. One-room apartments went for $29 per month including utilities and 'round-the-clock medical care; a six-room house set you back $43.50.

Marin City couldn't house all 20,000 Marinship workers (most of the other 14,000 found lodgings in San Francisco's now-vacant Japantown), but in practically every other respect, the community was a success. Chief of Project Services was onetime Socialist Party gubernatorial candidate Milen Dempster, who instituted a wide range of social services as well as a strict nondiscriminatory rental policy, making Marin City the first integrated housing project in the nation. There was a weekly newspaper, a duly elected city council, a post office, a library, nursery and elementary schools, a grocery store, a barbershop and beauty salon, a hospital, a laundry and a drugstore. A visiting Massachusetts congressman called it "the best administered and best organized war housing project that I have seen."

All was not absolutely idyllic, however. Although peaceful coexistence was the order of the day, simmering endemic racism reared its ugly head on occasion, both at Marin City and Marinship, where despite the equal pay there was practically no room for advancement for women and minorities. The four Marin County deputy sheriffs charged with keeping the peace in Marin City were accused of bigotry and police brutality. There was a teen gang problem, the ongoing disdain of neighboring Sausalitans (Marin City was regularly referred to as "Okietown"), and the unpaved streets and sidewalks flooded and filled with mud at the first drop of rain.

As the war drew to a close and Marinship crafted its last vessel, Marin City's population was cut in half. Although a few workers returned home to Texas or Louisiana or Minnesota, the great majority remained in the Bay Area. Most whites found new jobs and homes and moved out of the community, but it was a different story for the African-Americans who made up 10 percent of the project's populace. The few jobs available were menial and paid half what Marinship had, and Marin's real estate market was rigidly anti-black. (Before the war, one family comprised the county's entire African-American demographic.) Marin City was the only inclusive community around.

And the place did maintain much of its rollicking interracial spirit into the postwar years. (In On the Road, Jack Kerouac called it "the only community in America where whites and Negroes lived together voluntarily; and that was so, and so wild and joyous a place I've never seen since.") But the makeshift housing had only been designed for five years of use, and as the roofs leaked and the plumbing broke down and the propane stoves exploded, matters came to a head. In 1952 the Marin Housing Authority purchased the town from the federal government with the notion of tearing down the temporary housing and building a modern community for Marin City's low-income residents. A redevelopment agency was formed, measures were passed and a 40-year federal loan was secured.

Plans called for 300 units of low-rent public housing, 134 mid-income private "pole houses" and 398 apartments plus 224 lots for more expensive housing, as well as a community center, churches, a shopping complex, an elementary school and a high school. The pink-concrete housing was built first, but the rest of the construction dragged on into the 1960s while the future occupants remained in the now extremely dilapidated WWII-era shacks. Meanwhile, the public buildings that had been the community's cynosure—the general store, the cafe, the grocery—were razed to make way for a new road. (The developer had been sold prime ridgetop property at far below the market value in return for rebuilding the shopping area, a deal upon which he never made good.) All that public housing meant little or no property taxes for the community. Marin City's unincorporated status translated into virtually no self-government. The Sausalito School District chose what to teach Marin City's children, and the Marin City Library contained no books on African-American subjects. The population dropped to 1,300 in 1970 as unemployment rose. Community development and revitalization ceased for three decades as the county's housing revenues soared. And in a scenario straight out of medieval England, the developer with the nice ridgeline property built high-profile, high-priced condos high above the dust-blown flats where Marin City's shopping area had once flourished.

Two decades of systematic racism were taking their toll (Marin City was now 90 percent black—the rest of the county was 1 percent black; "Marin's ghetto" was the favored new epithet), and the community, trapped within its looming hills and 101 overpass, felt more segregated and disenfranchised than ever. There was arson and vandalism. Rocks were thrown at cars passing along 101. Gunfire wasn't a rare occurrence, and a night of firebombs and sniper fire erupted in the summer of 1967. Black Panthers Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael told residents to defend themselves, by violence if necessary.

But this very sense of isolation served to unite the community, to etch and elevate that resolve and pride and commitment that has defined Marin City since the '40s. There were rallies and picnics and a flourishing street life, and the local citizenry included Beat poet Lew Welch, Tam High student Tupac Shakur and the great bossa nova guitarist Bola Sete.

In 1980, residents took matters into their own hands and organized the Marin City Community Development Corporation, purchasing in the process the last remaining 42 acres of undeveloped Marin City property—the "bowl" where a windswept flea market took place every weekend for over a decade—and earmarking the land for a $110 million housing/retail development. With support from the Marin Community Foundation, United Way and several local banks, a 187,000-square-foot shopping center, a new high-tech Marin City Library, 225 apartments and 85 townhouses—40 percent of them sliding-scale low-income—were constructed and now dominate Marin City life.

The new housing, attractive and pleasantly landscaped, adjoins the Gateway shopping complex, where locals get first refusal of most job opportunities. Marin City's population has risen above 3,000 in recent years, and several community assistance programs help residents improve their way of life. But problems remain. Several decades of neglect and resentment can't diminish overnight; violence and drug abuse continue. The Gateway Center's job opportunities offer generally low wages, and even the new "below-market-value" housing is beyond the reach of many longtime residents. Marin City's African-American population dropped from 58 percent in 1990 to 39 percent in 2000 while the white population grew to 33 percent and the threat grew of Marin City's heritage being gentrified out of existence. There's no community supermarket or movie theater or hangout, just chain stores like Longs and Starbucks.

But the new Marin City also has the Manzanita Recreation Center, sports facilities, a community garden, a childcare center, parks and ponds and new roads and six churches—undoubtedly the county's highest per-capita spirituality count. And there are plans for a new Marin City Center encompassing teen and senior centers, recording and broadcasting studios, classrooms, a gym, swimming facilities, a dance studio, an amphitheater, a game room, retail development and new housing. This proud, troubled, vibrant community, in other words, is reinventing itself once again.

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