Brenna Walker-Osuegbu could barely contain herself five years ago when she and her family closed escrow on their dream home, 3,000-plus square feet of hardwood floors, exposed beam ceilings and expansive views spread over 1.3 acres just south of Fallbrook.
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She, her husband and their three children moved into the custom-built hilltop house and set about exploring their new community.
But within months, repeated incidents of racist bullying and outright bigotry began to dim the bright hope that the family, who are Black, had nurtured when they first moved to north San Diego County.
All three children were subjected to discrimination and racial slurs at school, Walker-Osuegbu said.
One classmate made primate sounds and called her youngest son “monkey” earlier this year — days after Donald Trump posted and then deleted social media images depicting former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama as apes, and refused to apologize.
Separately, another student called the child “N,” an epithet he understood as shorthand for the N-word.
And in an unrelated incident, a White teacher relied on videos and other materials that included the N-word in class. Walker-Osuegbu met with the vice principal to outline her concerns and was told the word had become a routine part of the American vernacular.
“I left that meeting deeply disturbed,” she said. “Before leaving, I explained that I believed his comments relied on harmful stereotypes. I made it clear that not every African-American family uses or accepts that word. My family certainly does not. We find it deeply offensive.”
The family experienced a series of slights and worse over several years, Walker-Osuegbu said. She said her complaints generally led to apologies and assurances that appropriate disciplinary actions had been taken but union contracts and privacy rules prevented officials from publicly disclosing those actions.
It wasn’t enough, she said.
“Rather than being welcomed into his new school community, my son encountered racial hostility that reinforced feelings of being different, unwanted and unprotected,” Walker-Osuegbu said about her youngest child, 12-year-old Jovah.
Walker-Osuegbu has now removed Jovah from his Fallbrook school — the fifth time one of her three children has left a school in Fallbrook or Bonsall after officials failed to take stronger steps to address her concerns.
She’s not sure where she will enroll him this fall.
The experiences reported by Walker-Osuegbu and another Black family have raised fresh questions about the troubled history of racism in Fallbrook and how community leaders fall short in serving an increasingly diverse population.
Camille Williams’ children also began experiencing racist bullying, slurs and other slights almost as soon as they moved to Fallbrook in 2022. When her oldest reported the language to teachers, nothing was done, she said.
“They hear it, they don’t care,” Williams said her daughter told her.
Her two younger sons were also subjected to racist language in Fallbrook schools, Williams said. School staff would alert her to the abuse, but she said there were few repercussions.
“I appreciated receiving phone calls each time incidents occurred, but I often felt the consequences were not meaningful enough to discourage repeated behavior,” said Williams, who works for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Officials at Fallbrook Union Elementary and Bonsall Unified school districts issued statements saying they do not tolerate discrimination in any form and hold violators to account.
“District and school leadership have met with Ms. Walker-Osuegbu regarding her concerns and have offered to continue meeting with her to better understand any ongoing concerns and identify additional supports,” spokesperson Raul Raygoza wrote. “That invitation remains open.”
Bonsall Unified Superintendent Heather Golly said a thorough investigation of Walker-Osuegbu’s complaint did not turn up any evidence of racist bullying.
But “the district took appropriate corrective actions to address the findings that were substantiated by the evidence,” she said by email. “Due to employee privacy rights, the district is legally prohibited from sharing specific personnel actions.”
Walker-Osuegbu took her concerns directly to the Fallbrook school board in November, telling the elected trustees in a public meeting that her son was being repeatedly bullied by classmates, with racist comments like he “stayed in the oven too long.”
“My son faces that every day,” she said during the public-comment portion of the meeting. “What my son has to go through just to get to school every day, to muster up the courage to come to school every day — it shouldn’t be.”
Emails show she reported her concerns to leaders from both districts. Officials who replied said they understood and pledged to make sure they were addressed, but little changed.
“Thank you for including me in this email,” Fallbrook Union school board Trustee Frank Golbeck wrote to Walker-Osuegbu in March. “I am so sorry that this happened to your son, again.”
The elected school board member also mentioned a dark history that has hung over the community for decades – a record of White supremacist extremism and discrimination against Black and brown people.
“As you probably know, Fallbrook has a legacy of racially motivated hate that I want to see us heal and completely leave behind,” Golbeck told Walker-Osuegbu. “This may be the work of our generation, and I am so sorry that your son is suffering because that work is not yet complete.”
Unwelcome past
Fallbrook schools were the subject of a recent federal civil-rights investigation. In 2020, the Department of Education found high school administrators failed to properly respond to threats against two Black students and racist graffiti on campus.
Offensive language appeared four separate times in late 2019 and was left visible for days, found. The school’s failure to do more may have contributed to a race-related fight that broke out early the next year, investigators said.
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“OCR found the failure to address the school climate relating to the threats made against African-American students, in addition to the racial graffiti discussed above, may have exacerbated racial hostility on campus, leading to the January incident and the use of the N-word during the fight,” investigators wrote.
The case was closed later that year after the Fallbrook Union High School District board adopted a resolution calling for increased teacher training, stronger communication with staff, students and parents and a schoolwide self-evaluation plan.
Long before that investigation, Fallbrook had gained a reputation as an epicenter of White supremacy.
The region famous for avocados and wineries has become known in other circles as the home base of Tom Metzger, a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan who later founded White Aryan Resistance, a neo-Nazi group with the deliberate acronym WAR.
Metzger presided over his White supremacist empire for decades, running a television repair business while recruiting young people into his fold and developing a White Power movement among so-called skinheads.
In 1988, three Metzger followers beat an Ethiopian immigrant to death in Portland, Ore. The Southern Poverty Law Center of Alabama sued Metzger in civil court and won a $12.5 million legal judgment that eventually forced him to sell his home in Fallbrook.
Still, Metzger remained in San Diego County until 2006, when he relocated to his home state of Indiana. He grew weary of the Midwest, however, and returned to Southern California a few years before dying in 2020 in Hemet.
Long before Metzger planted his White Power flag in Fallbrook, none other than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to San Diego County in 1964 to speak against a state ballot measure that would overturn the Fair Housing Act.
Met with protests upon his arrival, the civil rights leader told people that the time had come to choose a side, San Diego State University professor of anthropology and historian Seth Mallios told The San Diego Union-Tribune in a 2023 interview.
“This is not the tone that you often hear from Dr. King, in terms of peace and nonviolence and everybody coming to their own decision in due time,” he said. “He’s given people a sense of urgency. This is the San Diego Dr. King arrives in, that was known as the ‘Mississippi of the West’.”
In recent decades, North County has become far more diverse — but most of that has come from a growing Latino population.
U.S. Census data from 2020 show fewer than 900 Black people among the 52,000 residents in the Fallbrook division — less than 2% of the area’s population, compared with almost 5% countywide. White people accounted for almost 30,000 of the Fallbrook population, and nearly 21,000 people described themselves as being of Hispanic origin.
Lila Hargrove, who grew up in Fallbrook and now runs the chamber of commerce, said the community has been changing for the better in recent years. But she acknowledged racism still impacts her hometown — and her work promoting local businesses.
“It’s always going to be a very large elephant in the room,” Hargrove said. “That’s in our past, and I feel like our community advocates, residents, educators and community leaders have worked really hard to foster a more diverse and inclusive environment.”
Walker-Osuegbu and her husband Daniel Osuegbu were only vaguely aware of Fallbrook’s reputation when they moved from Maryland in 2021.
They knew San Diego County, having lived in Oceanside years earlier and never encountered serious trouble. They expected to acclimate smoothly, like they had in other neighborhoods over the years.
The couple, who run a staffing and recruitment service based over the Orange County line in Irvine, were shocked months into their new life when Jovah began shaking and crying during a routine drop-off at his new school in Bonsall.
The boy told his mother he didn’t want to go into class because his teacher had been singling him out, grabbing the top of his head and forcing him to look down at his desk or up at her, Walker-Osuegbu said. She said this followed the racial taunts and discussion of the N-word and presumed the treatment was because he is Black.
“It’s too rough, and I want her to stop,” Jovah said.
Walker-Osuegbu immediately contacted the principal, demanding consequences and a change in teachers. Jovah was moved to a new class, but after months passed with no response to other complaints, his mother complained to district officials.
Administrators opened a formal investigation that substantiated many of the allegations but also defended the educator.
The teacher “has made physical contact with Jovah during the course of interactions, yet as is typical within this grade level setting,” then-human resources chief Allen Williams wrote in his findings.
Based in large part on those findings, the family decided to transfer Jovah to another school in hopes of securing a more promising education for their son.
Five years after walking into her dream house for the first time, Walker-Osuegbu now says the weight of constant struggle has her thinking about selling their home and moving someplace new.
Jessica T. DeCuir-Gunby is a professor of education at the University of Southern California and also runs the school’s Race and Equity Center. She said experiences like the ones the Fallbrook family shared are common — and not always shocking.
DeCuir-Gunby reviewed the Bonsall Unified School District investigation findings following Walker-Osuegbu’s complaint at the Union-Tribune’s request. She said insensitivities and off-hand comments — “micro-aggressions,” she called them — can do a lot of damage.
“Those are micro-cuts that over time are very harmful,” she said.
“People assume that for something to be racist it has to be overwhelming — a racial slur or a racist symbol,” she said. “People underestimate the more subtle things, the dog whistles — but that’s what’s happening most of the time.”
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