In May of 1924, the same year an equestrian statue depicting Confederate general Robert E. Lee on a horse was dedicated in Charlottesville, Virginia, a mob of 500 angry white people massed outside the home of the only Black resident in the East Bay city of Piedmont.  

What happened next is the story behind a new public memorial the city is commissioning this year. It is meant to acknowledge the city’s history of racially motivated discrimination and condemn the pain and suffering it caused to Sidney Dearing, as well as celebrate his life and family.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.