Just over 100 years ago, a prosperous West Oakland family bought a home in Piedmont. The small East Bay enclave, carved out of the center of Oakland by a few hundred voters who didn’t want to be annexed by the East Bay’s expanding metropolis, had already garnered the nickname “city of millionaires” thanks to its profusion of mansions and wealthy residents. It was a desirable place to live.

But this family was black, and Piedmont, like many California cities in the 1920s, used racial covenants, redlining, and even violence to exclude non-whites.

Upon moving into the two-story house on Wildwood Avenue, just half a block from Oakland’s city limit, Sidney Dearing, his wife Iréne, and their two children were immediately subjected to a campaign of vicious harassment.

In May 1924, four months after arriving, a mob of 500 menacing Piedmont residents surrounded the Dearing home and threatened to riot unless the family pledged to sell to a white family and leave, according to reports in the Oakland Tribune.

After Sidney Dearing refused, unidentified assailants committed a drive-by shooting, striking the house and cars parked in the front with a fusillade of bullets. Other random terrors became common. Bricks were thrown through the windows. Letters from the KKK, whose membership roles were surging in the Bay Area at the time, threatened to hang the Dearings whether they sold or not.

Then came a series of bombing attempts. Dynamite was placed near the home, enough to blow it to splinters. The bombs were discovered before anyone died, but the city of Piedmont soon officially joined the mob effort to push out the Dearings.

Piedmont officials claimed they wanted to purchase the house in order to build a new street connecting Wildwood to Fairview Avenue just to the north. By condemning the house, the city could seize and demolish it, making room for the new street. The city took steps to move ahead with the plan in state court.

A 1924 Oakland Tribune report quoted then-Piedmont Mayor Oliver Ellsworth saying that condemning the Dearing’s home to build the road was “for the improvement of the city as well as to make the negro move from Piedmont.”

The Dearings resisted but ultimately gave in. First, Iréne and the children escaped, moving back to Oakland. Finally, Sidney decided to sell his home to Piedmont, but only after the city had initiated a condemnation.

The road was never built.

Now a descendant of the Dearings has filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging that “the true goal of the city’s condemnation action was to oust Dearing and his family from Piedmont because they were black people.”

Jordana Ackerman, the great-granddaughter of Sidney Dearing, filed the lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court on Feb. 2, accusing the city of fraud when it falsely claimed it was condemning the Dearing home to build a road, requiring the family to sell. Ackerman is represented by Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit civil rights law firm founded in 1940 that was formerly affiliated with the NAACP.

Ackerman’s lawsuit also alleges the city violated the California Constitution’s equal protection clause when it denied the Dearings their right to live in and enjoy their home and benefit from its appreciation in value, access to good schools, and other municipal services. The state constitution prohibits government officials from discriminating against certain groups, including on the basis of race, and treating them differently and unfairly.

“The taking of land from black people through government action, the violence that has often accompanied these land thefts, and the harms that flow from it, have a long and shameful record in the United States, including in Piedmont, California,” Leah Aden, a senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said in a statement.

Ackerman and other members of the Dearing family were not available for comment, a spokesperson for the Legal Defense Fund told The Oaklandside.