Learning in Public

LIKE MANY CITIES THAT have become hip, Oakland is attractive for the very reasons it is also plagued by inequity and hypocrisy, and the resentment born from both.

It has cultural cachet via its rich history (birthplace of the Black Panthers and Bruce Lee) and its contemporary treasures—great, relatively affordable food (including BBQ, Burmese, and Ethiopian), fantastic music venues, gorgeous beaches and hikes within a short distance of the city center, and so much else.

It’s the second most racially diverse city in the nation (nearby Stockton is the first).1 According to the Census Bureau, there are over 400,000 people living in Oakland, and 35.5 percent of them are White, 27 percent are Latinx, 23.8 percent are Black, and 15.5 percent are Asian. The median household income, despite being in proximity to all the tech money of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, is just $73,692, and 16.7 percent of people are living in poverty.2

Oakland is also known for being profoundly progressive. In Alameda County, only 10 percent of the population identifies as Republican, so pro-choice bumper stickers and billboards for weed-delivery services abound, and Pride marches are packed. There’s a general consensus, so widely held that it’s rarely articulated explicitly, that its residents are anti-Trump, anti-yuppie, and anti-racist.

Oakland, like so many cities, is also deeply segregated—not by accident, but by design.

The World War II era defined Oakland’s contemporary neighborhoods in many ways. A predominantly White region became far less so during the boom times of war, when the population as a whole increased—almost 100,000 new people arrived between 1940 and 1945, many of them from the South—and the Black population went from 8,462 to 21,770.3 All these new Oaklanders had to live somewhere, of course. Enter the Federal Housing Administration.

The federal government built more than thirty thousand public housing units in the East Bay. Black families were steered toward poorly constructed housing near the shipyards where they worked, near railroad lines, or in the flatlands. White families were steered toward new suburbs and farther inland to the hills, where the houses were sturdier. Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, writes: “Racially explicit government policies to segregate our metropolitan areas are not vestiges, were neither subtle nor intangible, and were sufficiently controlling to construct the de jure segregation that is now with us in neighborhoods and hence in schools.”4

The flatlands and the hills are real places but also mythic constructs in the Oaklander’s imagination. The hills are quiet and full of money; spacious homes built vertically clutch the earth that reaches for the sky, with views of the Pacific and industrial Oakland far below; you need a car to get down and around. The flatlands are, well, flat as hell. You can ride your bike block after block, find vibrant murals alongside abandoned grocery carts filled with what look like all of someone’s worldly possessions, grab an IT’S-IT ice-cream sandwich at the corner store, and have a sweet chat with the guy behind the counter. The homes, at least the original homes, are pretty small. It’s never quiet. But the sun almost always shines.

Almost every American city has hills and flatlands—the part of the city where the White and upwardly mobile folks go, and the part where the Black and economically marginalized stay. We find ourselves on one of these dividing lines, not by accident or desire, but by design. Our cities were planned this way. Which means our schools are planned this way. As the educational historian Jack Schneider writes, “Buying a home means buying a school.”5

Between 1961 and 1966, Oakland lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs, and people fled.6 The city’s overall population fell by about 23,000 between 1950 and 1970; the majority that left were White.7 A group called the Oakland Redevelopment Agency spearheaded new construction in the middle of historic, and almost entirely Black, West Oakland, as well as the expansion of Interstate 880, which cut through the neighborhood. Between 1960 and 1966, more than 7,000 housing units in Oakland were destroyed, and almost 5,100 of them were located in West Oakland. Many of those displaced moved to East Oakland.

Amid this destruction and the outrage that followed, together with the larger fomenting of the civil rights movement, the Black Panther Party was born. It was founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, both students at Merritt Community College. Newton and Seale were intellectually radicalized by their involvement in the Afro-American Association and other groups on campus and by reading the words of Malcolm X.8

But it was their paid jobs running youth service programs at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center that first planted the seed that caring for kids, what they would come to call “survival programs,” could and must also be part of the revolution.

Their famous free-breakfast program, established in 1969 at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in West Oakland, quickly grew. Eventually Black Panthers were feeding tens of thousands of kids in the U.S.—from Des Moines to Detroit—before they went to school every morning. It wasn’t just about meeting a fundamental need; it was also about shining a light on how inadequate the government efforts were to show up for hungry children—the most innocent of America’s victims.9 Put to shame by the Panthers, the federal government eventually committed to feeding kids breakfast at schools with high poverty levels. A direct line can be drawn between Newton and Seale’s vision in 1966 and the little carton of milk that sits in front of kids every morning in Title I public schools today all over the country.

Black Oakland wasn’t the only community being radicalized. In the Fruitvale neighborhood, Latinx folks were organizing, pushing back against police violence and army recruitment, and creating community clinics and other programs to weather increasing poverty. The Brown Berets, as some activists were known, collaborated with the Black Panther Party on bringing free breakfast to their kids.

In the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, the city hemorrhaged jobs—particularly in manufacturing, transportation, and utilities—as was the case in so many industrial cities.

More White families left (90,000 between 1970 and 1990), and now quite a few Black ones have, too. Downtown Oakland was gutted—department stores disappeared and storefronts stood vacant for months. There was a sense that the radical sparkle of the late 1960s, the cohesiveness of so many communities, was fading. Oaklanders were strained by the systematic disinvestment in the city—again, not a naturally occurring phenomenon but a choice on the part of policy makers from the federal level on down.

Where there is economic deprivation, there is collective vulnerability and precarity. Oakland was brutalized by gang-controlled drug operations and violence, starting in the 1970s. By the end of that decade, Oakland’s per capita murder rate was twice that of New York City.

But in the 1990s, crime began to decline steadily. After three decades of the city’s population dwindling, Oakland got bigger again—going from about 339,000 in 1980 to over 430,000 in 2010.10 The Latinx population surged, and recent immigrants from a wide range of countries showed up. Oakland Chinatown, which had also been decimated by the creation of Interstate 880 and years of disinvestment, started to revive.

The East Bay—like so many cities across the U.S.—grew attractive to White and/or privileged folks who might have passed it over in earlier decades. There was a resurgence of interest in living in cities, particularly by those whom the economist Richard Florida dubbed “the creative class”—designers, artists, writers, photographers, architects, and the like—who clustered in urban centers once eschewed by their parents.11 They valued walkability, not white picket fences.