By Nora Sawyer, Sausalito Historical Society
Golden Gate NRA, Park Archives
Late on November 20th, 1969, a cold night exactly fifty years ago, a crowd assembled in the dark outside the No Name Bar. Inside, regulars chatted quietly as Wednesday night became Thursday morning. Manager Peter Bowen, at his station behind the bar, looked up as two men entered. “One was large, not particularly tall, but broad across the beam,” Bowen would later write. “He wore a flat brimmed, high, round-top black cowboy hat with a colorful feather stuck in its band, and a red serape. The other, bareheaded, burly and compact, carried himself with a kind of tough swagger, under which lurked a smoldering dignity they both shared.”
The men, Al Miller and Richard Oakes, represented a group of Native people from more than 20 tribes from across the continent, united under the name Indians of All Tribes. Earlier that month, as part of a group that had occupied Alcatraz overnight, Oakes had read a proclamation “re-claiming Alcatraz Island in the name of All American Indians by right of discovery” and offering to purchase “Alcatraz Island for 24 dollars in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man's purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago.”
Building on the success of that one-day occupation, the group planned a more permanent residency, with a larger group of people who would not easily be removed from the island.
Miller had reached out to Bowen earlier seeking transportation to an “undisclosed location” on the Bay. Recognizing the significance of the request, Bowen had agreed, as long as the trip could wait until he closed the bar at 2 AM. In addition to his own boat, Bowen enlisted the help of two friends: Brooks Townes in his 38-foot cabin cruiser, and Mary Crowley in a 30-foot sailboat.
As Miller, Oakes and Bowen sat at the bar, about a dozen more Native men and women came in, “young, some underage to be in the bar, and some in traditional Indian dress.” Bar patrons – some of them reporters -- stared as Oakes ushered the group outside, instructing them to keep a low profile.
Once his duties at the bar were done, Bowen led the way outside, where he encountered a large crowd “assembling – and disassembling – in the big parking lots along Sausalito’s downtown waterfront.” Patrol cars passed, shining lights into the fog, but the group kept out of sight.
Making his way down to the yacht harbor, Bowen saw a crowd of ninety-two people “with blanket rolls, sleeping bags, knapsacks of belongings, bags of food, bundles of cooking gear,” enough to weigh down the floating docks until their feet were under the water.
Suddenly, someone in the crowd pointed out into the bay, where “it appeared Alcatraz was ablaze with dozens of very bright white lights.” As “visions of confiscated boats danced in the air,” Brooks took off in a borrowed skiff to investigate. After a tense half hour, he was back. Alcatraz was dark, he reported. The lights were from a sand dredge at work out in the bay.
Later, Bowen wrote,
Bob, Mary and I agreed it was wise to head out first toward Belvedere/Tiburon, leaving the dredge and Alcatraz well to the west, then – when the boats’ running lights would be lost in the clutter of lights ashore in Berkeley and neighboring towns -- we’d douse our running lights and make for The Rock.
Mary Crowley’s boat was having engine trouble. As the boats pulled out of the harbor, she unfurled her sails. Bowen writes, “sailing at night, overloaded with Indians, braving the notorious black currents around the Rock and making a safe landing would be a challenge for any skipper. Mary wasn’t ‘any skipper.’”
Though only eighteen, Crowley was a skilled and confident sailor, and soon all three boats pulled safely alongside a water barge on the lee side of the island.
As their passengers disembarked, Alcatraz came to life. The island’s new occupants gathered around the fireplace in the former warden’s residence, playing drums and singing songs as day broke and Coast Guard helicopters circled overhead. Oakes would later recall, “We did a lot of singing in those days. I remember the fires at nighttime, the cold of night, the singing around the campfire … songs of friendship, songs of understanding.
Oakes biographer Kent Blansett writes,
It was this type of unity that drove hundreds and thousands to Alcatraz, which soon became a “Mecca of Indian Country”. . . The occupation called upon a revival of traditional ways, an awakening of Intertribal unity that had not taken place since the Ghost Dance of the late 19th century. Solidarity was key to creating one of the most powerful symbols of the 1960s Red Power movement: Alcatraz.
Join the Commonwealth Club and the Sausalito Historical Society November 21st at The Outdoor Art Club in Mill Vallley for Alcatraz Occupation at 50: Richard Oakes and Red Power, featuring Kent Blansett and moderated by Rose Aguilar. For more information, visit https://www.commonwealthclub.org