Piedmont seeks dismissal of lawsuit over its racist history 10%
By Darwin BondGraham7%
7/16/2026, 4:30:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 34 faulty reasoning types, including Self-Serving Bias, Negativity Bias, and Anchoring Bias, with Confirmation Bias as the most egregious example at 9% saturation with 190 hits. Analysis detected 1,949 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,102 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 27.5% and a BS Rank of 10% (16,973 of 18,786 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 90.30% of the article peer group.
The city of Piedmont is asking a state judge to block a lawsuit filed by a descendant of a Black family that was forced from their home over 100 years ago in a campaign of racial terror.
Sidney Dearing, who was Black Seminole, and his wife, Irene, who was Black, moved from Oakland in 1924 with their two children into a spacious Piedmont home on Wildwood Avenue.
Soon after, a mob of 500 white neighbors massed on their lawn and demanded the couple sell and leave.
The Piedmont police — led by Chief Burton Becker, a leader of the local Ku Klux Klan — were accused of looking the other way while the Dearings suffered two attempted bombings and threats of lynching.
Attorneys for the city said in a recent court filing that the statute of limitations for the alleged fraud Piedmont engaged in to uproot the Dearing family expired in 1928.
The city maintains that anyone harmed by the past actions of its officials should pursue justice through other means.
Founded in 1907, Piedmont was, by design, an exclusive community.
The city’s residents resisted annexation attempts by their larger and more diverse neighbor, Oakland, and strictly prohibited the construction of apartments and hotels.
Realtors used deed restrictions to ban nonwhite people from buying homes.
For much of the 20th Century, the only Black and Asian people living in Piedmont were butlers, nannies, and cooks living in servants’ quarters.
The Dearings held out against threats of violence for months, but the city’s power structure was set on removing them.
With the blessing of Piedmont’s mayor and city council, the city attorney initiated a condemnation action against the Dearings’ home, claiming the city needed to seize the property to build a road.
In 1925, the Dearings relented and agreed to a settlement, selling their home to the city and moving out of Piedmont.
The violent saga was largely forgotten until 2020, when Piedmont resident Meghan Bennett built a website chronicling the Dearings’ expulsion.
City leaders then began to grapple with how to atone for the past.
Later that year, the city council passed a resolution in which Piedmont said it “acknowledges, apologizes for, and condemns all racially motivated, discriminatory or exclusionary aspects of the City’s history, and deeply regrets the pain or suffering such policies have caused to any person.”
The unearthed story and the city’s discussions of building a memorial to the Dearings led Piedmont officials to track down some of the Dearings’ descendants.
One of them, Oakland resident Jordana Ackerman, said it was the first time she’d learned about how her great-grandfather, Sidney, had been mistreated.
Ackerman filed a lawsuit in February, accusing Piedmont of fraud when it claimed it was seizing the Dearing home to build a road.
She argued that her forebears were denied the benefits of owning a home in one of California’s most affluent communities with highly rated schools.
The Dearings bought their home for $10,000; Today it’s worth over $2 million.
The street is lined with similar homes valued up to $3 million, according to Zillow.
BMWs and Teslas are parked in driveways.
Ackerman is seeking compensation, punitive damages, and other relief.
In June, Piedmont issued its first public response through its lawyers in the form of a 14-page demurrer, essentially a request to the judge hearing the case to close it without any compensation to Ackerman.
The city did not respond to an interview request about the lawsuit.
In their legal brief, Piedmont’s attorneys acknowledged that the Dearings were “subjected to an indefensible campaign of harassment, threats, and violence for simply owning a home in Piedmont as Black people.”
But Piedmont is opposed to resolving the Dearing saga through the courts: “While there is much work for the City to do in this regard, as a matter of well settled law, that path does not run through the Courts,” the city’s attorneys wrote in their response to Ackerman’s suit.
Would the courts have been a fair venue for the Dearings in the 1920s?
According to contemporaneous newspaper accounts of the Dearing saga, Piedmont’s attorney at the time, Girard Richardson, said the purpose of condemning the family’s home was to build a road.
But after the Dearings left under duress, the house was sold to new, white owners.
No road was ever built.
Richardson repeated false claims about the city’s reason for trying to seize the Dearing home in court, Ackerman alleges in her suit.
In their request to have her case closed, the city’s attorneys don’t dispute that Richardson’s century-old statements were false.
They even call the expulsion of the Dearings a “stain on Piedmont’s history.”
But they argue that the three-year statute of limitations on fraud has expired.
“Mr.
Dearing was aware of and on notice of the alleged fraud…,” Piedmont’s attorneys wrote.
“Accordingly, the three-year statute of limitations on Mr.
Dearing’s fraudulent inducement claim expired over 100 years ago.”
The city’s position is that Sidney Dearing should have filed a lawsuit against Piedmont before 1928 to recover damages.
Ackerman’s attorneys told The Oaklandside that this ignores the reality of what the Dearings were up against.
“The city is saying they should have gone back to Piedmont and known the road wasn’t built there,” said Arnold Brown, a San Francisco attorney with the Seyfarth Shaw firm.
“So they’re putting a lot of burden on the victim here, which is really unacceptable.”
“Piedmont was a sundown town,” said Leah Aden, senior counsel with the Legal Defense Fund, who is also representing Ackerman.
Sundown towns were cities that overtly banned Black people from entering them through laws and threats of violence.
“It was physically unsafe for Black people to live in Piedmont,” she said.
“That they were supposed to be coming back and forth to Piedmont, risking their lives, takes this case out of the context the Dearings lived in.”
After leaving Piedmont, the Dearings divorced in 1925.
Sidney died in 1953 in Oakland.
There’s no evidence that the Dearings ever returned to Piedmont to see what became of their home.
“Before this year in Piedmont, Dearing and his family were wealthy,” said Aden.
“They bought into a millionaire community.
After this, he’s impoverished.”
Ackerman’s lawsuit references Sidney’s death certificate, which says he died of starvation.
Ackerman’s lawyers said the idea that the Dearings should have sought redress in the courts also ignores how unfairly they were treated by the justice system of the 1920s.
They pointed out that when the Dearings responded to the city’s condemnation action, they asked a judge to allow them to introduce evidence of racial discrimination.
They wanted to show in court that the real reason their home was being seized was that they were Black.
Then-Piedmont Mayor Oliver Ellsworth was quoted in press coverage at the time as saying that the condemnation action was to build a street, but also to “make the negro move from Piedmont.”
Piedmont asked the judge to block the Dearings from mentioning racial discrimination.
The judge agreed, striking that line of argument as “sham and irrelevant,” according to Ackerman’s lawsuit.
Whether Dearing could have sued Piedmont in the three years after he and his family were pushed out of their home and gotten a fair hearing in the courts is questionable.
Although California didn’t have laws against Black people serving on juries, they were routinely excluded from service in the 1920s.
The state’s first Black judge wouldn’t be appointed to the bench until 1941.
And the state had racist laws on the books, like redlining, which was outlawed in 1968, and a ban on interracial marriages, which wasn’t overturned until 1948.
In the broader context, Black people had fewer rights in California in the 1920s.
Piedmont’s current attorneys also argue that Ackerman herself has waited too long to sue.
Under state law, a person can file a fraud lawsuit within three years of their discovery of the fraudulent act — regardless of when the act occurred.
Piedmont’s attorneys argue that Ackerman became aware of how the city allegedly defrauded her grandfather in September of 2022 when Piedmont officials reached out to her about its planned memorial, a park and structure to be built on the street where the old Dearing house still stands.
“The purpose of the memorial project was to acknowledge the City’s role in the harm done to the Dearing family,” Piedmont’s attorneys wrote, “so Plaintiff clearly had reason to suspect injury caused by wrongdoing at that time.”
Accordingly, Ackerman should have filed her lawsuit before September 2025, the city’s attorneys argue.
Ackerman’s attorneys say she only became aware of the city’s false representations in March 2025 as she was doing research related to the memorial project.
Another reason that Ackerman’s lawsuit should be dismissed is due to what’s known as the “litigation privilege,” according to Piedmont’s attorneys.
The false statements that Piedmont City Attorney Girard Richardson made in the press and to the court in 1924, that the condemnation of the Dearing home was to build a road, aren’t part of a fraud because these statements were made as part of the city’s lawsuit against the Dearings, they say.
Under state law, statements made in court or as part of a lawsuit cannot become the subject of litigation.
The point of the litigation privilege is to allow people to participate in court processes without fear that their words will result in further legal troubles.
Aden, the attorney for Ackerman, disagreed.
She said the fraudulent statements in question were made by other city officials too, not just Richardson, and that they lied to the Dearing before filing their lawsuit and made other false statements outside of court.
Piedmont has commissioned a sculpture to honor the Dearings
To reckon with the Dearings’ story, Piedmont has plans to build a memorial on a triangular island across from the old Dearing home.
Three years ago, designer Walter Hood was hired by the city to come up with a sculpture.
The city gave final approval for the project in January.
“They can fulfil their desire to have this public memorial alongside compensation,” said Aden.
“If they have the will, they could do the work to make both happen.
We’ve seen other localities in California confront similar racial takings.”
Brown said a good example of what Piedmont should do is visible in Los Angeles County in the case of Bruce’s Beach.
In the early 1900s, Willa Bruce, a Black woman, purchased oceanfront real estate in Manhattan Beach.
Her family turned this land into a successful seaside resort catering to Black people, who were banned from many other public beaches in the county.
The same year Piedmont was busy driving out the Dearings, white locals in Manhattan Beach petitioned their city to condemn the Bruces’ property through eminent domain, claiming it was needed for a park.
The Bruces moved away in 1927 and were forced to settle and sell their land in 1929.
No park was ever built.
Starting in 2021, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors began a process of returning Bruce’s Beach to the descendants of the Bruce family.
The transfer was completed in 2022 and included an agreement that the county buy back the land for a price not to exceed $20 million, the assessed fair market value.
“Is the memorial going to become a symbol for stonewalling, almost art-washing justice?”
asked Brown.
“Is it going to become a lightning rod itself if they don’t provide redress for this family?”
In their legal response, Piedmont’s attorneys say the city is “firmly committed to acknowledging its past,” but its preferred solution is through new legislation and policy.
According to the city, two recent bills in the state legislature show that lawmakers are trying to devise a way to create compensation for people whose ancestors were pushed out of their homes and off their land.
Both bills were vetoed by the governor.
But Piedmont’s lawyers say the attempts demonstrated “recognition that existing law does not provide necessary relief for many such claims, and that any expansion of available remedies is more appropriately accomplished through the legislative process and policy solutions.”
Aden and Brown said they plan to respond to the city’s demurrer, and a judge will decide whether the lawsuit proceeds in August.
According to Piedmont, construction on the Dearing memorial will begin later this year.
It will include a tall, enclosed structure with a seat at its base and a mirror and a window toward the top, which will allow visitors to view a mailbox that has the Dearings’ name on it.
The project will cost $417,000.
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