The 1924 Hillsborough Mob and the Fight for Repair

On a summer night in 1924, cars began rolling up the winding roads of Hillsborough, California. Headlights cut across manicured lawns and half-built mansions. By the time the shouting started, as many as 500 white residents had gathered outside one house. Inside were Sidney and Irene Dearing, the first Black homeowners in this wealthy Bay Area enclave, and their 6‑year‑old son.

The crowd did not wear hoods. They did not have to. They had the law, the banks, and the town’s unwritten rules on their side. Within days, the Dearings would be gone. Their house would be sold under pressure. Hillsborough would go back to being what it had been built to be: white, rich, and closed.

In 1924, a white mob in Hillsborough, California, forced the first Black homeowners, Sidney and Irene Dearing, to sell their home and leave town. A century later, their descendant is suing the town and related entities, arguing that the forced sale and racial terror created a loss that still ripples through the family’s wealth and opportunity. To understand that lawsuit, you have to understand how the Dearings got there, why the mob formed, and how one night of terror fit into a much larger system of housing segregation.

How did a Black family buy a home in all‑white Hillsborough?

Hillsborough was not an accident of geography. It was a project. Incorporated in 1910, the town was carved out of the San Mateo Peninsula as a residential retreat for San Francisco’s wealthy families. No commercial districts, no apartments, no sidewalks in many areas. Just large lots, winding private roads, and a quiet understanding: this place was for white elites.

Like many such suburbs in the early 20th century, Hillsborough relied on a mix of formal and informal exclusion. Some deeds in the region carried racial covenants that barred non‑white buyers. Real estate agents steered Black, Asian, and Latino families away. Local custom did the rest. By the 1920s, the Bay Area already had clear racial lines: Black residents were clustered in parts of San Francisco and Oakland, not in the new automobile suburbs.

Into this world stepped Sidney and Irene Dearing. Sidney was a Pullman porter, one of the better‑paid jobs open to Black men at the time. Pullman porters crisscrossed the country on luxury trains, serving white passengers while building their own national networks and savings. Many used that income to buy property when they could. Irene worked as well, and together they had enough to think bigger than a rented flat.

In 1924, the Dearings bought a house in Hillsborough. The exact details of the sale are still being reconstructed by historians and lawyers, but the basic fact is clear: they legally purchased a home in a town where no Black family had ever owned one. There is no evidence the seller told them they were violating any covenant. There may not have been one on that particular parcel. What they did violate was the unwritten racial code of the town.

For a brief moment, the Dearings had what the American dream promised: a single‑family home in a wealthy suburb, access to good schools, safety, and the chance to build intergenerational wealth. That is what made their presence intolerable to many of their new neighbors. The Dearings’ mere existence in Hillsborough threatened the racial order of Bay Area housing, so the town moved to erase them.

Why did a 500‑person mob form in Hillsborough in 1924?

White mobs driving Black families from their homes is often associated with the Jim Crow South. In the 1910s and 1920s, however, northern and western cities saw their own eruptions of racial violence. Chicago, Detroit, and East St. Louis had bloody riots. Smaller, more targeted campaigns happened in suburbs and towns that wanted to remain white.

Hillsborough’s mob did not appear overnight. Local residents complained. Some pressured the seller and real estate agents. Others contacted town officials. Newspapers in the Bay Area carried stories about the “Negro family” who had bought a home in the exclusive suburb. The language was careful, but the message was not: this was a problem.

When soft pressure did not work, harder tactics followed. According to later accounts, white residents organized a mass meeting. They framed their anger as a defense of property values and community character. This was a familiar script. White homeowners across the country argued that Black neighbors would bring crime, lower prices, and social decline. It was racism dressed up as real estate theory.

On the night the mob gathered, estimates say around 500 people showed up. For a town with only a few thousand residents at the time, that was a huge share of the adult population. They surrounded the Dearing home. Some shouted threats. Others demanded that the family leave. There are no reports of the house being burned or the family being physically assaulted, but the threat of violence was unmistakable. When hundreds of your neighbors show up at night to tell you to get out, you do not need them to swing a torch to understand the message.

The local authorities did not disperse the crowd. There is no record of mass arrests or prosecutions. Instead, the pressure turned to the Dearings themselves. They were urged, then forced, to sell. The mob showed that even in a wealthy California suburb, racial terror could be a tool of housing policy, so the Dearings’ removal became a community project rather than a crime.

How were the Dearings forced out, and what did they lose?

Within days of the mob action, the Dearings agreed to sell their Hillsborough home. The sale price, according to later legal filings and historical research, was far below market value. This is a pattern historians see again and again: when Black families were driven out, they rarely received fair compensation. Buyers knew they were dealing with people under duress.

The Dearings left Hillsborough. Some sources indicate they moved back into San Francisco, where Black residents were confined to more modest, segregated neighborhoods. Whatever dreams they had of raising their son in a wealthy suburb were gone. The house they had bought as a foothold into a different future became a symbol of what they were not allowed to have.

What did they lose? Start with the house itself. Hillsborough property values rose dramatically over the 20th century. A single‑family home bought in 1924 and held for decades could easily be worth millions today. That is not just a number on Zillow. It is college tuition for children and grandchildren, seed money for businesses, a cushion against medical bills, the ability to help relatives in need.

They also lost the social and educational advantages that come with living in a wealthy suburb. Schools in places like Hillsborough had better funding and networks. Children who grew up there had easier access to elite colleges and job connections. The Dearings’ son did not get that. His descendants did not inherit those ties.

Finally, they lost security. Being driven from your home by a mob is not just a financial event. It is trauma. It sends a message to your children that they are not safe, that their efforts can be wiped out by white anger. That shapes decisions about risk, investment, and trust for generations. The forced sale of the Dearing home was not just a bad real estate deal, it was a deliberate stripping of wealth, safety, and status that would echo through the family’s story.

How did this fit into wider housing segregation in the Bay Area?

The Dearing case was shocking, but it was not isolated. In the early 20th century, American cities used a toolkit of policies and violence to keep Black families out of white neighborhoods. The Hillsborough mob was one blunt instrument among many sharper, quieter ones.

Racially restrictive covenants were common in California. These were clauses written into property deeds that barred sales to “non‑Caucasians” or specified groups. They were private agreements, but courts enforced them. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that such covenants could not be enforced by courts, but by then they had already shaped entire regions.

Redlining came next. Starting in the 1930s, federal agencies and banks drew maps that graded neighborhoods for mortgage risk. Areas with Black residents were marked in red and labeled hazardous. That meant fewer loans, higher interest rates, and disinvestment. White suburbs like Hillsborough, by contrast, were graded as safe and showered with cheap credit. The government subsidized white homeownership while starving Black neighborhoods.

Local zoning laws did their part. Towns like Hillsborough adopted large minimum lot sizes and banned multifamily housing. On paper, these rules were about density and character. In practice, they kept out anyone who could not afford a large single‑family home, which in a racially stratified economy meant most Black families.

Violence and intimidation filled in the gaps. When Black families managed to buy in white areas despite covenants and steering, they faced harassment, bombings, and mobs. The Dearings in Hillsborough. The Sweet family in Detroit in 1925. Countless others whose names never made the papers. These incidents were warnings to both Black buyers and white sellers thinking of crossing the line.

By midcentury, the result was clear: the Bay Area had a patchwork of wealthy, overwhelmingly white suburbs and segregated urban neighborhoods. The Dearing eviction was one early brick in that wall, so their story helps explain why racial wealth gaps and housing segregation in the region are not accidents but the product of deliberate choices.

What is the modern lawsuit about, and what is “reparative justice” here?

Nearly a century after the mob gathered outside the Dearing home, one of the family’s descendants decided that a historical wrong did not have to stay in the archives. In the 2020s, a Dearing descendant filed a lawsuit against Hillsborough and related entities, arguing that the town and its predecessors had participated in an unlawful taking driven by racial discrimination.

The legal theory is part of a broader movement sometimes called “reparative justice” or “reparations through the courts.” The basic idea is simple enough: when the state, or actors backed by the state, took property from Black families because of race, that was not just morally wrong, it was a violation of property and civil rights. If the harm can be documented, and if there is a clear line between the wrongdoers and current institutions, then courts should order some form of repair.

In practice, it is hard. Statutes of limitation, questions about standing, and the passage of time all complicate cases like the Dearing lawsuit. Defendants argue that current taxpayers should not be held liable for what their predecessors did. Plaintiffs argue that the benefits of those past actions, in the form of higher property values and exclusive communities, are still being enjoyed today.

One recent example shows that this is not purely theoretical. In Manhattan Beach, another wealthy California coastal town, officials in the early 20th century used eminent domain and racist pressure to seize a Black‑owned beach resort known as Bruce’s Beach. In 2022, after years of activism and legal work, Los Angeles County transferred the land back to the Bruce family’s descendants. They later sold it back to the county for a reported $20 million.

The Hillsborough case is not identical, but it sits in the same family of efforts. The Dearing descendant is not just asking for symbolic recognition. They are asking for material repair for a specific, documented loss. The lawsuit argues that the forced sale and mob intimidation were not private squabbles but part of a broader pattern of state‑sanctioned discrimination that should have legal consequences today.

Whether the Dearing lawsuit succeeds or not, it pushes the conversation from abstract debates about reparations to concrete questions: what is the value of one lost house, one stolen opportunity, one family’s forced exit from a wealthy town, so the case tests how far American law is willing to go in treating racial dispossession as something that can be repaired rather than just remembered.

Why does this 1924 mob still matter for Bay Area inequality?

It is tempting to treat the Dearing story as an ugly but isolated episode. Hillsborough is still wealthy and overwhelmingly white. The mob is gone. The house has likely changed hands many times. Yet the consequences of that night in 1924 are not just personal, they are structural.

Homeownership is the main way American families build wealth. A house bought in a desirable area and held for decades becomes a store of value that can be passed down. When Black families were blocked from buying in those areas, or driven out when they did, they were cut off from that engine of wealth creation. The racial wealth gap today is not just about wages, it is about who got to own appreciating assets in places like Hillsborough.

Segregation also shaped where public resources went. Wealthy, exclusionary suburbs used property taxes to fund high‑quality schools and amenities for their residents. Poorer, more diverse neighborhoods had fewer resources and more environmental burdens. Those patterns did not vanish with the Fair Housing Act of 1968. They hardened.

The Dearing case puts a human face on those abstractions. Instead of talking about “structural racism” in the housing market, you can point to one family, one address, one mob, and one forced sale. You can trace the lost equity and the lost chances. You can see how a town’s determination to stay white translated into a century of advantage for some and loss for others.

There is also a political dimension. When current residents of exclusive suburbs argue against affordable housing or new zoning rules, they often insist that their towns are simply protecting character or property values. The Dearing story is a reminder that those values were built on a foundation that included racial terror and exclusion. That does not mean every modern homeowner is personally guilty, but it does mean the history is not neutral.

Finally, the lawsuit itself matters as a test case. If courts begin to recognize specific historical housing injustices as actionable harms, that could open the door to more claims. If they refuse, it will signal that, for now, most of the repair work will have to happen through politics rather than litigation. Either way, the Dearings’ fight, first for a home and now for recognition, forces the Bay Area to confront how its wealth was built and who was pushed out along the way.

The mob that gathered in Hillsborough in 1924 thought it was settling a neighborhood dispute. What it actually did was write one small but telling chapter in the story of American segregation, a chapter that a descendant is now trying to reopen in court.