I am from a different era - an era of an older, Blacker Oakland.
We came of age in the late 60’s, and about the 1st thing I can remember is riding with my Big Daddy in his pickup, as James Brown told me to “Say It Loud, I’m Black & I’m Proud.” Black was beautiful, and our Afros were a visible symbol of our people’s transition from Negroes marching for Civil Rights to powerful Afrikan peoples grabbing and demanding Black Power to Free Huey. We were in a housing crisis as OHA built ugly, cheap buildings to warehouse Black folks and heroin flooded in from SE Asia, payback for taking war to those foreign lands.
Those were tumultuous times. I was only a young child and the first ideas of racial & political consciousness I drank were of Black Power and Revolution for Black People. Black peoples first, last, in-between & always. I saw my Big Brothers put on the uniform of leather jackets & berets and patrol our neighborhoods to protect us from OPD. I felt safe & proud. I tell folks that Oakland between 68 & 72 was the best time and place in the history of America to come to consciousness as
a Black child.
The 1st Oakland Panther Breakfast Program opened 2 blocks from my primary school, the long-torn down Durant elementary. We were not yet GhostTown. I got tested for sickle cell anemia - most folks don’t know the Panthers started the 1st sickle cell awareness and testing campaign in the world - and as White folks poured out of Oakland as they accelerated their flight to the vanilla suburbs, 7th Street was gutted and the heart of downtown was ripped open for the laying & overheading of BART tracks, destroying hundreds of Black Businesses & displacing thousands of Black families as highway 24 was extended to 27th St laying the stage for the final encircling of Black West Oakland. The Black commercial and entertainment corridors along 14th St, San Pablo, and Grove were left to wither as the encircling freeways - built along the historic redlining borders - choked the economic vibrancy out of our historic communities.
We was still in a housing crisis.
In Berkeley, Mama Howard had made sure BART went underground.
The SLA assassinated Marcus Foster & kidnapped Patty Hearst before going out in a blaze under the guns of the newly formed LAPD SWAT unit, the assassins of the Panther chapter in LA, who got a TV series named after them in recognition of their murderous actions.
Oakland kept getting Blacker & the Soul Patrol wore Silver & Black as we got our 1st Black mayor & gained electoral political power. Black folks were heads of City departments, as manufacturing closed up & headed offshore, and the great industrial employers of Emeryville & East Oakland laid off Union blue collar workers by the tens of thousands.
We had an unbroken Black belt of neighborhoods from East Oakland to the Front in Berkeley. Our culture thrived here and when Funkadelic tore the Roof off the Sucka no one could tell me Chocolate City wasn’t about us.
Reagan got elected & America turned away from its action to affirm the economic security of Black folks, to address the historical & institutional theories & practices of White Supremacy that had undervalued & underdeveloped our communities.
We owned homes, and rental properties - mainly duplexes and triplexes - because the Southern migrants whose values shaped our culture learned under Jim Crow that land ownership was the only way to control our communities. We ate Flint’s & Emma’s fish & we housed & fed each other in hundreds of little Black businesses. We ran all the corner markets in our neighborhoods.
Growing up Black in 1970’s Oakland was Right On.
And then it changed.
Crack hit & devoured our communities. Young folks got rich selling poison to their manas & uncles before they got murdered or locked up. Businesses closed and jobs went away as annual body counts soared to 200.
We lost Ronnie Newton.
Eventually, some Black folks that could fled to the suburbs, getting their kids to safer harbors away from navigating random deadly turfs to and from school. It was a housing crisis.
Still we stayed. Keeping culture & holding space, nurturing the traditions of them Southern migrants that arrived in the Great Migration. We fought apartheid & crack, two sides of the same White Supremacist coin as social safety nets were laid threadbare by repeated tax cuts for the wealthiest.
We loved, and buried, and raised families & friends, insecure in the neighborhoods we inherited & navigating treacherous streets watching the homies backs at all times. Our communities were in crisis.
The OHA Police scandal preceded the Riders by a decade.
Dotcoms boomed & busted and our neighborhoods began to change faster. There was people that didn’t look like us. Lifelong friends packed up and left in search of greener pastures in the suburbs & in the south. Great Recessions receded and Black folks was in the same housing crisis we had been in since C.L. Dellums got off the train here in the 1920’s.
Black folks have always been in a housing crisis in Oakland. And now - once again - the City is trying to solve it on the backs of Black folks rather than hold accountable the corporate speculators whose capital pools have distorted our housing market.
Ain’t nuthin changed. Racist housing policies from the City are as old as racist real estate deed covenants. But this one hit different because it’s so-called Progressive allies slipping the knife in our backs.
The racist neo-colonialists now running Oakland have played their next card to displace multi-generational Black landlords to make way for the newcomers.
These White Supremacist State actors have used segregation, redlining, disinvestment, crack wars, corporate speculators and predatory lenders in their perverse plot to undermine us from controlling our communities, and to prevent the accumlation of Black wealth.
Issa reason Nipsey told Black folks to “Buy the Block”, and a reason he was assassinated for it. The ultimate goal of these White Supremacist neo-colonizers putting forth these policies has been, and always will be, to prevent Black folks from controlling our own communities.
The American State dropped physical bombs on Black Wall street in Little Rock, and on the brothers and sisters of the MOVE movement in Philadelphia. Now, the neo-colonialist members of the Oakland City council and their gentrifying supporters are dropping a legislative neutron bomb on muti-generaion Black landlords in the flats who escaped the Jim Crow south decades ago only for their heirs & descendants to find the same land-grabbing legislative vultures opposed to Black community control on our current Council as there was down home. They claim a different intent, but the impact hits the same way - only in death & bankruptcy would we be allowed to transfer our ancestors rental property to other Black folks hands. Otherwise, the State will decree who shall have the 1st - and last - rights to acquire our lands. Colonized peoples globally recognize that who controls the land is who controls the culture.
The Council used their legislative power to kill the Black businesses on 7th St and in West Oakland, to employ a tank to demolish hundreds of Black homes, and to enable lending institutions to prey on our most vulnerable property holders. The once solid Black belt that once existed from East Oakland to the Front in Berkeley is no more. Only a remnant remains.
And now they coming for us the remnant.
I will resist these neo-colonial gentrifiers coming for our remnant with all the fight, smarts, nerves, and guts of my grandparents who came here from the Jim Crow south to Oakland during WWII and heaved up a couple pieces of rental property from the segregated & redlined Oakland flats to make a way out of no way for them & their generations.
I will resist them in the name of Fred Korematsu, Lillian Love, Mama Howard, C.L. Dellums and A.V. & Lucille Ervin.
We will prevail in the fight to sell our properties to Black people of our choosing rather than be forced to sell to the gentrifiers with the means to snap up houses in our historic communities at market rate. What part of the game is it when a White tenant gets to match the offer of a Black buyer, and thereby steals property that has been in Black hands for generations?
Malcolm AND Martin warned us about these White Liberals. First they sent the virus to kill us, and next they send the legislation to steal our history and legacies in the land.
SMASH WHITE SUPREMACY! RESIST THE NEO-COLONIALISTS! PROTECT BLACK COMMUNITIES!
