Valley Truck Farms

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St. Mark’s Missionary Baptist Church

259 E Central Ave, San Bernardino

St. Mark’s Missionary Baptist Church was at the center of Valley Truck Farms, a rural refuge for Black families from the 1930s to the 1970s that was destroyed by city zoning decisions and the expansion of a warehouse economy. 

Black families bought small plots of land in Valley Truck Farms where they could build homes and grow big gardens that made many southern migrants feel right at home. These farms also insulated their families from economic insecurity over the decades as racism continued to confine Black workers to low paying and unstable jobs. They founded vibrant churches, built a Black-led school, and forged a community that sustained generations of families who fled the Jim Crow south and the confined segregated neighborhoods of Los Angeles. The Valley Truck Farm has a layered history of environmental justice struggles, shaped by city planning decisions & the neighborhood’s proximity to Norton Air Force Base. When San Bernardino slowly annexed the community after the 1960s, city officials couldn’t see the value of the homes, businesses and small farms across the rural landscape and searched for more “profitable” uses of the land. Now only St. Mark’s Missionary Baptist Church and a few scattered houses remain, surrounded by warehouses. Photos and many shared memories help us remember the story of this vibrant rural Black community. The erasure of this rural residential community serves a warning to other communities in the IE where warehouses encroach on residential developments.

From the Archives

by A People’s History of the I.E.

Click on the images below to uncover the story.

Remembering the Valley

by Tamara Cedré

Church Portraits

by Jonathan Arthurs

Resources