Reid’s Records, one of the oldest African American businesses in the Bay Area, survived redlining, the crack epidemic and the collapse of the physical record industry at the end of the 20th century.
But it won’t survive 2019.
Reid’s Records’ owner Diara Reid announced this month that she would close the store in October. Her mother, Betty Reid Soskin, opened the South Berkeley shop in June 1945.
“当我们close our doors, that’s it,” Diara Reid told me. “All of my competitors have gone out of business.”
The fact that Reid’s Records survived for almost 75 years is itself a small miracle — one that was made possible by the East Bay’s African American community.
When Reid Soskin started Reid’s Records, she told me, it was so Berkeley’s growing postwar African American community would have somewhere to buy “race records,” as African American music was then called.
None of the white-owned record shops in the area would sell these records, Reid Soskin said, so she and her then-husband, Mel Reid, knocked out a hole in their duplex apartment on Sacramento Street and started their business.
“我们有一个注册的雪茄盒,橙色的板条箱for records,” Reid Soskin said. “We were just being introduced to formal bigotry and segregation in the Bay Area, because of the influx of so many African Americans to work in the shipyards. No one would insure us. We started the business as kind of a defiant act.”
Owning the business for so many decades allowed Reid Soskin to trace the trajectory of the Bay Area’s black history — and, at times, to get involved herself.
“In the 1960s and ’70s, Sacramento Street became central in the drug trade,” Reid Soskin said. “There was a period when Mel was being robbed every three months or so, and when he’d go to the Police Department to complain, they’d say they liked to have an area in the city where they knew all the culprits would be. I didn’t like the fact that our neighborhood was being used as a catch basin for crime.”
So she got involved in local politics.
“As a small-business woman, I was able to get on the board searching for affordable housing sites in Berkeley,” she said. “I convinced (then-Mayor) Gus Newport to develop the sites across the street from us, which were being used for the drug trade. And when I took over the store again in the 1970s, I befriended some of the local drug dealers, and they’d occasionally help me do voter registration in the area.”
Reid Soskin, who at 97 years old is theoldest ranger in the National Park Service, has had a remarkable life. One of her impressive decisions was to reinvent the trajectory of Reid’s Records in the mid-1970s, then on a downward slide after bad business decisions by her former husband.
The days of “race records” were over, and the megastore record-shop era had begun, so Reid Soskin decided to focus on a different underserved audience.
Out with the R&B, blues and jazz records, in with gospel music and church supplies.
The “new” Reid’s Records became an important place for African American churches and those who worshiped at them. Another Reid family member — Paul Reid, Mel’s uncle — had been one of the Bay Area’s leading gospel radio DJs.
By pivoting toward the African American church, the shop was able to survive for far longer than it otherwise would have.
“In the 1990s, we were one of California’s top sellers for Murphy Cap and Gown’s church choir robes,” said Diara (born David) Reid,who took over store operations during that decade. “The black church kept us alive, and it’s interesting — this was when Walmart was making a big push to corner the market for all things gospel. We survived then because people would come by to talk to us, and to talk to each other.”
Still, in the end, even Reid’s Records couldn’t survive the twin forces of technology and gentrification.
“Over the last 20 years, most of my customers have collected their retirements and moved to places like Texas and Louisiana and Florida,” Diara Reid said. “San Francisco’s down to what, 6 percent African American now?”
“Probably less,” I said.
“Yeah, and Oakland’s not what it used to be,” she said. “There’s a full-circle thing happening, when you consider why my parents opened the store. People found out the opportunity they were looking for wasn’t here, and now they’re leaving. Between that, and the fact that you can buy everything on Amazon now, there’s just not enough room at the table anymore.”
I asked Diara Reid what the future held, and she wasn’t sure. Once Reid’s Records closes, she’ll start searching for a new tenant.
If there’s a lesson I take from their family story of resilience and renewal, whatever comes next for the space that now holds Reid’s Records will need to be a positive force that’s engaged in the life of South Berkeley.
In the meantime, Reid’s Records has earned its place in Bay Area history.