The city of Richmond, a few miles north of Oakland, had been the site of several major shipyards during World War II. Many blacks migrated to the area for wartime jobs but found themselves unemployed and underemployed during the postwar demobilization and deindustrialization. Much of the postwar black community lived in ghettos consisting of public housing units built by the federal government during the war. North Richmond, a town of six thousand people stuck between a garbage dump and the toxic-fume-producing Chevron Oil refinery, was almost entirely black. As an unincorporated area, the community received no public services from the city. Instead, North Richmond came under the jurisdiction of Contra Costa County, including the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department. Extremely isolated, the area had only three streets on which to enter or exit. On occasion, county police blocked those streets, sealing off the entire area.