In 2004, I attended a community meeting at the Café on A in downtown Oxnard to learn about the Oxnard Police Department and the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office’s declaration to implement a civil gang injunction. Over twenty concerned residents sat on white, plastic chairs around folding tables. Among an eclectic covey, one was an African American man in his mid-seventies, the eldest in attendance. With a pensive countenance, he listened and spoke with laconic precision.
As a US historian in my late thirties at the time, who grew up in a much more diverse Oxnard, I focused on him and said to myself, “This person has a story.” And he did. Both a unique, but not an uncommon one. His name was William “Bill” Terry.
Bill passed on Thursday, January 15, at the age of 95.
He was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1930. Like so many Blacks in search of the warmth of other suns during the Great Migration of the twentieth century, his mother, a nurse, and father, a blacksmith, moved the Terry family from the terrorist racial violence of the Jim Crow South to Oakland, California, when Bill was ten. He graduated from Berkeley High School and San Francisco City College. During the Korean War, he left San Francisco State to enlist in the Navy.
After the war, he moved his own family to the San Fernando Valley before arriving in Oxnard in 1965.
As an avid reader, Bill understood the systemic dynamics of racism at home and abroad. He co-founded a Harambee Uhuru (Swahili for unity and freedom) chapter in Oxnard to challenge Sundown Town practices in which the police expelled Black and Brown residents from White neighborhoods after work hours. People of color who did not serve Whites as domestic servants and gardeners were harassed and removed from northern and western districts all day long.
During the late 1960s, Bill and his fellow Harambee Uhuru comrades shared office space with Chicano Brown Berets at the corner of Colonia Road and Oxnard Boulevard.
Independently, both organizations struggled to end unequal education policies of the Oxnard Elementary School District. Harambee Uhuru also promoted community workshops on the history and culture of their communities, since this was not being taught to students, and published the Black Voice of the Community newspaper.
When Oxnard residents challenged racial segregation in the schools, Bill joined civil rights activists who championed an equitable and culturally relevant education for all children.
This resulted in the 1971 summary judgment of federal Judge Harry Pregerson of the Ninth Circuit, in Soria v. Oxnard School District Board of Trustees, that school officials must integrate.
But the district resisted by appealing the ruling. Hence, Bill, along with others in the community, condemned the school board’s refusal to remedy a problem rooted in racism. After an ordered trial, Judge Pregerson found that the district unconstitutionally practiced both de facto and de jure racial segregation.
Bill also served on the Oxnard City Council’s Community Relations Commission during the 1970s. As a commissioner, he advocated for the civil rights of residents in relation to charges of police brutality and abuse.
As I attended the Oxnard City Council’s Tuesday night meetings regularly from the early 2000s to the 2010s in opposition to Oxnard’s civil gang injunction, ultimately ruled unconstitutional in the courts, Bill and his life partner of 47 years, Gloria Roman, arrived early every session to claim front-row seating. The two addressed the council with prepared statements on community issues: the restoration of Ormond Beach, simultaneous translation for Spanish-speaking residents, opposition to a liquified natural gas line running underneath the city’s streets, and the non-privatized operation of its parks.
Since 2009, Bill volunteered his time at the Oxnard United Methodist Church’s community garden not only to cultivate fruits and vegetables but also to help develop youth within Oxnard’s City Corps program and under juvenile probation. Produce from this patch was then distributed at the food pantry that he and Gloria have operated at their Pleasant Valley Mobile Home Park in South Oxnard for over twenty years.
He exemplified the ideals of a civically engaged citizen, making Oxnard a better community. Bill Terry presente!