cineSOURCE magazine

Dear Oakland: Why Doth Thou Forsake Our Freedom Fight?
by Doniphan Blair

The Pergola on Oakland's Lake Merritt is the place for drumming, skating and people-watching on weekends. photo: D. Blair

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Jump to Dear Oakland, Part 2

OAKLAND, O OAKLAND, MY HOME FOR
over half my life, my aboriginal town, full of my fellow tribal members: How could you turn against our traditions of multiculturalism and democracy—as well as little ol’ me—especially as the future of freedom and artistic life is under existential attack worldwide?

Oakland was doing great until Covid, its best decade since the 1940s, with booming business, art and filmmaking and low murder rates. A couple hundred people strolling around a few art galleries on a Friday afternoon in 2006 blew up into a massive monthly street fair on Telegraph Avenue, a half a mile from downtown. Eventually featuring over a dozen new galleries as well vendors, food trucks, performers, group paintings and drum circles, First Friday attracted up to 25,000 people a month, including many bridge-and-tunnel folk, which stimulated business and tax revenue as well as culture.

Another big Oakland booster was Jerry Brown, mayor at the time. Born into a San Francisco political dynasty—his father was California’s governor from 1959 to 1967, and he held that post 1975-’83 and 2011-’19—Brown crossed the Bay Bridge to Oakland in 1995. That was just after the “Crack ‘80s,” when the population dropped by a quarter and murders peaked at 165 in 1992, which made Oakland one of America’s deadliest cities.

Seventy-three shots were fired in a West Oakland gang war on the street behind my building on October 15, 2021. photo: D. Blair

I saw the results one sunny morning, shortly after I moved to West Oakland in 1989 and started building a live-work studio there. Racing to pick up a print job for an aromatherapist, who was flying out to a convention, I found the building surrounded by cops and the entrance spattered with blood. A guy working next door to the print shop had gone on an all-night crack cocaine bender and, when his boss showed up in the morning, stabbed him repeatedly. The victim was a father of three; the client and I were devastated, although she made her flight; and my printer friends, who often donated their services to liberal causes, soon moved to Berkeley, four miles away.

West Oakland suddenly seemed like the Old West: wild and dangerous but with wide open spaces and incredible people—mostly—a fecund mix of working class, intellectual and renegade, as well as race.

After Jerry Brown moved to Oakland, he started We the People, a novel political organization given it was also a radio talk show by the same name, which he hosted. “We the People” ranged widely and was a big hit on lefty radio. I heard the Gore Vidal episode when they both laughingly admitted, halfway through their cogent critique of capitalism, that they were both upper-class Whites. A brilliant politician as well as four-term governor, Brown was the brains behind modern California. But he was not presidential timber, I was dismayed to note, after meeting him in 1999, when he and my band inaugurated a park in north Oakland. That was due to his egghead demeanor and propensity to scowl, although Brown was perfect for an over -hyped and -extended California as well as traumatized, underperforming Oakland.

“The two-party system is deeply corrupted,” Brown said at the time, so he ran as an Independent in 1998 and won in a landslide, 59% against eight other candidates. “He’s our royalty,” a middle-aged, middle class, very-well-put-together Black woman told me, while we waited on a supermarket line. Brown lived on the street-fair section of Telegraph Avenue for most of his time here, in an airy loft with pretty good art, I noticed at an open house.

Jerry Brown, the four-term governor of California, was also the two-term mayor of Oakland, in 2024. photo: unknown

There was one scandal, however. His close friend but also political consultant and bodyguard (licensed to conceal carry after moving to Oakland) was a heavily-tattooed French hipster named Jacques Barzaghi. After he got into a shoving match with the fourth of his five wives, and she called the police, Brown fired Barzaghi, although no charges were filed.

A more discrete hipster, although he pardoned Timothy Leary in 1976, Brown spoke of Oakland during his mayoral campaign as an “Ecopolis… both in harmony with the environment and in harmony with itself." He emphasized Oakland's northern California location, replete with bay views, redwood glades and woodsy campsites overlooking Lake Chabot full of European travelers, while also applying substantial political muscle. After switching Oakland to the “strong mayor” system, Brown shepherded through Measure Y, which funded many new programs but also an expensive Rand Study to monitor them.

Oakland’s already ample non-profit sector expanded. To mention a few I knew personally from designing their graphics: Youth Radio moved from Berkeley and remains an award-winning education and media creation program; the East Bay Perinatal Council, run by the indefatigable Dr. Barbara McCullough, still provides excellent support for young mothers, and the Center for ArtEsteem (previously Attitudinal Healing), started by African immigrants Aeeshah and Kokomon Clottey in 1989, continues its sophisticated self-help and restorative justice as well as artistic work in West Oakland (see their site).

Unfortunately, socialist largess is hard without capitalist success, which Oakland desperately needed, after many of its industries and the large Army base faded or closed. City elders bet on housing, always cheaper in Oakland than elsewhere in the bejeweled Bay Area but especially during Silicon Valley’s decades-long mega-boom. Housing was also a good physical partner to Oakland’s spiritual selling point: multiculturalism.

Uptown's Telegraph Avenue has murals, clubs and theaters and, a few blocks further, the monthly street fair/gallery crawl, First Friday. photo: D. Blair

Brown’s pet project was revitalizing Oakland’s downtown, long a ghost town after five o’clock, by investing in an arts district called Uptown, a few blocks up Telegraph Avenue, and building 10,000 new dwellings. His successor, Ron Dellums, born and raised in West Oakland, and the district’s long-term liberal U.S. Congressperson turned one-term mayor, factored that up to 100,000. While Brown built 90% of his projected units, only a third of Dellums were completed over the decade after he left office, with only seven percent “Fair Share” subsidized housing.

To reassure home buyers so soon after the Crack ‘80s, even though murder rates were low by the end of the '90s, Brown recommended expanding the Oakland Police Department by 14%, from 625 to 725 officers. But Oaklanders didn’t vote to fund his initiative, even after murders jumped back to Crack ‘80s levels in 2006. Their anti-cop attitude dated from the Black Panther Party, which became famous for their generous social services, aggressive politics, and savvy use of media but started with police monitoring in West Oakland. Their first few members would drive behind patrol cars, observe police stops at a legal distance, and brandish long guns, in case anything went awry (until "open carry" was outlawed in California in 1967, see my article on the Panthers). Such sentiments were reenforced by the Riders, a gang of corrupt White cops, also based in West Oakland, and probably whom I saw a few times standing over young African-American men spreadeagle in the street.

Oakland had a large, hardscrabble White community including Okies, Dust Bowl-era immigrants from Oklahoma, Hells Angels, who had a large compound in East Oakland, and much of its police force, which was well over 95% White until the late-‘60s. The Riders were finally arrested in 2000 for extortion, planting evidence, kidnapping and torture but not murder and only a few served time, although the OPD was placed under federal receivership, meaning oversight, where it remains today.

Brown also hustled hard for education and the arts during his two terms. The Oakland School for the Arts opened in Uptown, in 2002, and became the flagship for Oakland’s unique charter school system, developed here in 1993. The art school continues to serve some 800 sixth through 12th graders well today. The California College of Arts and Crafts, home to the nationally-known Bay Area Figurative Movement in the ‘50s, dropped “crafts” from its name in 2003 and expanded its curriculum and enrollment, albeit mostly in its San Francisco campus. After decades of dust gathering, the Fox Theater switched from film to music, reopened in 2009, and became a major Bay Area venue.

Filmmaking took off after a two-person Oakland Film Commission opened and began offering tax rebates and concierge production services. A bunch of commercials, scenes from a few Hollywood films, and a slew of amazing indies were soon shot, which brought spending on hotels, equipment rentals and extras but also professional and creative opportunities. Three funky building in the old army base became the Oakland Media Center, which housed over 30 production, gear or related companies. A mile away, some friends and I started cineSOURCE magazine, a monthly paper tabloid covering film, art and politics, which went digital-only in 2010.

Jerry McDaniel plays an Oakland everyman in Frazer Bradshaw's feature 'Everything Strange and New' (2008). photo: courtesy F. Bradshaw

One phenomenal local feature was “Everything Strange and New” by Oakland cinematographer and San Francisco Art Institute graduate Frazier Bradshaw, which starred his neighbor and my friend, Jerry McDaniel, as a professional clown, carpenter and father of two (see my article). “Everything Strange and New” featured “the two saddest blowjobs in film history,” according to one critic, and won the prestigious international critics’ association (FIPRESCI) award in 2009. Then came “Smoked” by Jamie de Wolf, in 2012, a colorful comedy about weed and thugs and, the same year, “Licks” on just thugs and one of the most brutally honest films on the subject I’ve ever seen. “Licks” was directed by Jonathan Singer-Vine, a White twenty-something from Berkeley with immense assistance and star-turns from his large cohort of Oakland friends, actors and actual gangsters. Don’t see it if you are allergic to the N-word (see my article).

The following year, “Fruitvale Station” provided an art-film look at an actual young Black man, Oscar Grant, killed by a BART cop in Oakland on New Year’s Eve, 2009. That was the freshman feature from the very Oakland Ryan Coogler, who became instant Black royalty in Hollywood, 350 miles to Oakland's south, a position he turned platinum five years later with his third feature, “Black Panther”. About the Marvel Comics’ character not the political party, although a secondary story set in Oakland does connect the two, “Black Panther” became the nineth highest-grossing film of all time! In fact, 2018 was a banner year for Oakland film. It also included the well-reviewed “Blindspotting” written by and starring Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs, Oakland homies who met at the world-class Berkeley High School, also about a cop and a killing but centered on their Black-White bro-ship and rendered romantically as a musical, and the striking, surrealist satire “Sorry to Bother You” by Boots Riley, a local rapper-rocker turned writer-filmmaker, starring the now-famous LaKeith Stanfield.

Oakland’s art and film efflorescence combined with its urban amenities, like its large downtown lake, haute cuisine popping up all over and monthly First Friday street fair, to attract cannabis entrepreneurs, queer women, Burning Man devotees, and other alternative lifestyle aficionados as well as young families and single techies. The possibility that Oakland would become another tech hub, as Uber and other big players planned on setting up shop, contributed to its bull market. So did the halving of the murder rate, which went from 146 in 2006, when First Friday started, to 74 in 2019, although that was the peaceful year neighboring Berkeley had none.

Florencia Manóvil shooting a scene from her 2015 internet show, 'Dyke Central', see cineSOURCE article. photo: courtesy F. Manóvil

Gentrification priced people out, cutting Oakland from half Black in the ‘60s to a quarter and causing resentment among some people I talked to. Oakland’s African-American culture stayed strong, however, from its large population of Black intellectuals to wildly inventive music, slang and dress (like the style of wearing pants half-off, usually displaying colorful underwear) and the infamous “sideshows.” Consisting of automotive tricks like “donuts,” sideshows can take over an intersection or street, draw a large crowd and become an incredible spectacle, a people's public art performance. Unfortunately, they can get dangerous, especially when large, due to auto accidents and weapon discharges (into the air or people), until enough cops arrive “to effectuate an orderly dispersal.”

Other people I talked to enjoyed leaving Oakland for suburbia or the new services and opportunities on offer from the city’s ever expanding blended family. Oakland’s schools were integrated in 1872, but the Ku Klux Klan was around until the 1920s, and White, Black, Asian and Latino communities probably didn’t mix much until World War Two, when the younger generation danced together at the jumping jazz and blues clubs of West Oakland.

That golden age crashed post-war and Oakland had a depressed ‘50s and ‘60s, but it carried on to become one of the most mixed cities on earth: 30% White, 29% Hispanic, 21% Black, 15% Asian and 1% Native, according to the 2020 census, which also notes 11% multiracial but not interclass involvement. The Oakland hills are known for their beautiful bay views, multi-million-dollar homes, and well-off People of Color but also as Oakland’s tax, investor and volunteer base. The latter is personified by Rajni Mandal, a Hindu-American doctor I met recently, who worked in West Oakland and lives in a nice but view-less portion of the hill neighborhood of Montclair. She started getting involved in municipal politics last year, after a shooting on her street, notably issues involving supporting the police (see my interview with her here). East and West Oakland have some of the most blighted corners in California, but those areas still have decent parks, some middle-class homes, flourishing churches and adequate government services, as I experienced during my three decades attending the West Oakland Health clinic and East Oakland’s Highland Hospital, a public facility nationally known for gunshot surgery.

Roller skating in DeFremery Park has been happening every Thursday night during the summer for a few years. photo: D. Blair

In the 2010s, Oakland’s entrepreneurs, artists, activists and civic leaders doubled down on its new economy and progressive ethos to create a vast variety of businesses and programs but also esoteric projects like street-front art incubators, a T-shirt store/municipal movement called Oaklandish, THUG Therapy, a men’s mental health group run by hip hop star Mistah FAB (AKA Stanley Cox), and skateboard parks. K-Dub (AKA Keith Williams), a popular muralist who had a studio in my building, organized the secret, late-night installation of old, wooden skateboard structures in a corner of West Oakland’s DeFremery Park, the site of many Black Panther rallies. Eventually awarded permits and rebuilt in concrete, with funds raised by K-Dub, it remains well attended by kids of all colors and genders, one of whom recently told me, “It’s still the best skate park in Oakland.” An older crowd began roller skating on the nearby basketball court, one night a week, replete with skate rentals and lights, while a woman’s roller derby team uses it for practice, and all the above are soliciting funds for a properly-paved skate area.

Talking to my friend Harvey, who lived most of his life in a large Victorian across the street from DeFremery—it was a drug park in the Crack ‘80s, he told me, and a big dealer was the son of the city’s first Black mayor, Lionel Wilson—we agreed the transformation was remarkable. Indeed, many “old gangster” Oaklanders, often a cynical lot, had begun to admit that “The Town,” as Oakland is sometimes called (in contrast to San Francisco’s “City”), might make good on its perennial promise to become a cultural and multicultural Mecca as well as hipster paradise.

Until Covid. After the biological pandemic came the intellectual plague. Conspiracy theories blaming excessive quarantine or Chinese lab leak cover ups on corrupt Democrats emerged from Oakland’s large cohort of alternative therapists and radical vegans, while some on the left felt we were under threat from revanchist racism, which required increased identity politics. Oaklanders went all out against George Floyd’s grotesque murder and for Black Lives Matter, naturally, and protestors covered the city with signs, murals and marches. Although the riots of May 29th and June 1st, 2020, trashed Downtown, decimating Brown’s dream and some minority-owned businesses, the rioters were of diverse ethnicities and philosophies, from radicals and anarchists to hooligans and gangsters, some from Oakland, others from out of town, the vast majority young men. Other protesters, however, opposed their vandalism, helped shop owners clean up and promised renewed patronage, a Yemini-American smoke shop proprietor told me, although he closed a few months later.

Since 2004, St. Columba Catholic Church at 6401 San Pablo Avenue has been erecting a named and dated cross for every murdered Oaklander. photo: D. Blair

Unfortunately, the crimes committed by cops were overshadowed by those by Oaklanders or residents of the surrounding region who liked the city's sense of adventure and lax law enforcement. There was another BART police killing of an African-American, Sahleen Tindle in 2018, in West Oakland, although years have passed without a police murder but over 100 civilian killings annually. There have been 3938 killings, by my count, since I arrived in 1989, which is a lot for a city of under a half mill, almost one percent of the population. When enthusiasm for Black Lives Matter obliged authorities to make good on the protestors’ preferred chant and policy, “Defund the Police,” Libby Schaaf, Jerry Brown’s assistant and acolyte, who was elected mayor in 2014, refunded the OPD on the down low, in an eleventh-hour attempt to stem the Covid crime tsunami.

The OPD was fairly functional in the 2010s, having recovered from the Riders police gang scandal and instituted many reforms, according to “The Force” (2018), by Oakland documentary filmmaker Peter Nicks, an African-American who made “The Waiting Room” (2012), the Independent Spirit Award-winning film about Highland Hospital. Regrettably for Nicks, another major police scandal broke in 2016 which not only contradicted his film’s conclusions but provided an Oakland story so steamy it could have turned “The Force” into a breakout hit, if Nicks hadn’t already locked edit.

To summarize: a bunch of cops fell in mad love with a smoking hot but underage Nicaraguan-American sex worker from East Oakland, who went by the name Celeste Guap and whose mother was a police dispatcher. After her White cop boyfriend committed suicide, and his note revealed sex trafficking as well as romantic love and anger about her infidelities, three OPD chiefs resigned in one week. The first to go was Sean Whent, the seemingly decent chief from “The Force”, who must have known something. The second came five days later, because he had a well-known extramarital affair, and the third three days after that, probably for sexual peccadilloes, in light of Schaaf’s statement, “As the mayor of Oakland, I am here to run a police department not a frat house.” Admittedly, 2016 was the height of the MeToo movement’s cancellation of abusive men, and racist texts between Oakland cops leaked around then, muddying the blame game.

Chief Anne Kirkpatrick (lft) and Mayor Libby Schaaf before firing her for lying on a report, said the city, or revealing corruption, in Kirkpatrick's view. photo: Darwin BondGraham

Mayor Schaaf tried to solve her sex scandal imbroglio by enlisting Anne Kirkpatrick, previously Spokane, Washington’s police chief. Despite her brave game face, Chief Kirkpatrick suffered from whiteness, was unprepared for Oakland’s quirky people and troubled cops, and was fired in 2020, for making false statements about a West Oakland raid, according to the city. Kirkpatrick, however, claimed it was for calling out corruption in the Police Commission, and filed a whistleblower law suit she eventually won. “Kirkpatrick maintained she was fired for elevating what she described as concerning abuses of power by two members of the Police Commission,” according to the Oaklandside website (5/18/2022), and was awarded $1.5 million in July 2022.

Guap, the star of what could have been a telenovela titled “OPD in Love”, also sued the city and won a few million but declined to go to Hollywood with the salacious details Oaklanders are still dying to know, probably because of her family’s deep ties to the police.

Covid in Oakland was tough, see my 2022 article. Health-wise, the Town did fairly well for a city with perennial budget problems, but there were significantly more fatalities among People of Color. This was especially true for Latinxes, many of whom had to work through the pandemic, or elderly POC, sometimes due to gathering without masks, as was the wont of many Black families or friend groups on weekends, in the north-eastern corner of Lake Merritt.

Young people took the opportunity to run wild (I saw a still-smoking, upside-down car on a West Oakland side street, which had been flipped and flown through the air by a young woman). A 12-year-old boy shot and wounded a classmate at a charter school in East Oakland (8/29/2022). Traffic law was largely suspended in East and West Oakland, which swelled annual pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities to about 30, a massive number. Uptown was covered with “diamonds” (broken car window glass) and West Oakland with graffiti and bags of garbage, dumped by cheapskates saving on garbage removal fees. Text-organized flash mobs robbed large stores wholesale, many of which closed, while the smaller ones remaining open often went credit card only. One in 30 Oaklanders had their cars stolen. Theives stripped out the copper wires connecting the street lights in front Harvey’s house and elsewhere, leaving many blocks dark. Stickups were legion.

A young woman joined the Covid 'wilding' in 2023 by stealing a car, driving down a West Oakland side street around 80 mph, flipping it and hurtling through the air about 60 feet—she survived and fled, according the young man whose brand-new car she nicked on the way through. photo: D. Blair

An employee at Oakland’s largest cannabis dispensary, Harborside, recently told me there were quite a few armed robberies during the Plague Years, but things are better now, obviously due to two well-armed guards. I myself was jumped leaving an Uptown bank, one sunny high noon in June 2022, by four seasoned professionals, 18-to-25-year-old African-American men, including an in-bank spotter and expert get-away car driver. Having a gun in my stomach was shocking, but the cops who took my report seemed sent from central casting to restore my Oakland esprit de corps: an older, tall and wise African-American, a short, mustachioed, tougher-talking White, and a softspoken, clean-shaven Latino rookie, who did the interviewing.

The Covid murder increase, which transpired nationwide and was influenced to some degree by Black Lives Matter, since it disparaged and decreased police activity, was the largest homicide increase in American history, a penalty borne largely by the Black community. In Oakland, it seemed driven not by drug dealing or gangs but social media, I was surprised to learn, chatting with neighbors, educators and on neighborhood blogs. “Young men are obsessed with respect” was an oft-heard observation. Stuck at home during the Covid lockdown and looking at Facebook and Instagram, they evidently became enraged seeing their girlfriends with other men.

In 2021, an African-American twenty-something was shot to death next to my building’s parking lot, while trying to pick up his kid from his baby momma, who was in the car of her new boyfriend, with whom he had words. My neighbor, an emergency room doctor, saw it from her window and raced down, but he was already dead. Another neighbor, an educator who knew the victim, told me he was middle class and from Berkeley but ran with a wild crowd, another way of earning respect but the dread of African-American parents, after cop stops.

Police encounters are recipes for “respect contests,” both between young men and the cops but also with their peers, who are watching or see videos later. On one of my medical visits to Highland Hospital, I saw a young man being raced into the emergency room, on a wheelchair by his friends, while proudly announcing into his phone, “I’ve been shot! I’ve been shot!”

Traffic law, suspended in West Oakland during Covid, has not been restored, as illustrated by young men on motorcycles popping wheelies and plowing through red lights. photo: D. Blair

Racism and violence against Asians exploded, including a couple of horrific hate-crime killings, one five blocks from my building. They seemed inspired by President Trump’s China Covid claims but also BLM, since racism against one group encourages it against others. The BLM movement worked wonders illuminating historical wrongs and inspiring governmental and corporate change, and related movements worldwide, but it privileged race. Focusing on ethnicity, heritage or nature more than ethics, actions or nurture, without reinforcing the “all humans are created equal” standard, devalues morality and inflates intergroup tension.

A friend of mine’s son who attended the Oakland School for the Arts was harassed for being White starting after BLM summer, even though his father was a Venezuelan immigrant. I felt racist vibes in Oakland for the first time after invading a man’s space in West Oakland’s only Starbucks, or so he thought when I reached past him for the cream, although his friends restrained him and apologized, which was reassuring.

Oakland’s murder rate hit 137 in 2021 and 126 in ’23, two years after the national Covid crime spree had faded, suggesting extra pathology. In 2024, a friend of mine had his back window shot out on the freeway after a minor infraction by a road-rager who was young, male and White. The OPD was unable to investigate so much violence and theft as well as homicide, or maintain the legally-mandated response time for 911 emergency calls, as I noticed on hold for over 20 minutes one night trying to report a murder on my corner (10/20/2022). The nation’s oldest Black organization, the NAACP, rebuked Oakland for poor police services.

Crime penalizes the rich mathematically less than poor people, who are robbed of cash, cars and possessions they can ill afford to lose and algebraically more friends and family. Unsolved murders can devastate communities and families, especially when there are multiple killings in one area or family, or by bullets randomly flying through windows or walls. As bad as West Oakland can be, the murder rate is much worse in East Oakland, I’m always astounded to note, even after 17 years reviewing the city’s murder lists for my periodic cineSOURCE article about Oakland.

Although West Oakland had almost no Black Panther murals or graffiti until 2016, there is now quite a bit, often in this style. photo: D. Blair

But what could the municipality do, aside from juggling existing funds to new programs, which may or may not work, and Oakland often tried anyway? Community members were not forthcoming to detectives; community leaders didn’t organize night marches, as they did during the 2006 return to Crack ‘80s’ murder levels; and there was no Curtis Sliwa-style Guardian Angels, which could have been organized by old Black Panthers, reformed gangsters and street-wise clergy—like the big, burly Pastor Lankeford (for whom I did graphics)—as well as celebrity rappers. Mayor Schaaf’s $50,000 bonus for enrolling in a police academy hardly replenished the cops quitting out of frustration, fear, or concern about their record. Eligible recruits from Oakland evidently don’t trust the cops, don’t want to offend their anti-cop neighbors, or have better opportunities elsewhere in the super-rich Bay Area, since almost 90% of OPD officers are from out of town.

After Mayor Schaaf fired Kirkpatrick and installed two placeholder chiefs, she didn’t get a permanent chief until February 2021, but it was worth the wait. A West Oaklander born and bred, LeRonne Armstrong lost a brother to gun violence and held a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and a masters in organizational leadership. He also pioneered a number of reforms and spiritual practices, notably a moment of silence at his press conferences, one second for every murdered Oaklander, which lasted an uncomfortable two minutes by the end of the year. Armstrong also liked to ask: Why are Oaklanders so vocal protesting cops who kill but quiescent about the young men.

Oakland’s civic collapse comes from flawed liberal programs but also intentionally evil ones, according to some intellectuals on the hard left dating back to Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). A German-Jewish sociologist who fled Nazi Germany, was accepted by the US, and worked for its intelligence services, Marcuse settled into the deluxe California lifestyle of a University of California professor, in San Diego, as well as a bestselling author, of "One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society" (1964). Marcuse had ample opportunity to observe and interact with the hordes of hippies and activists who flooded California in the ‘60s, and he concluded that Californian liberalism was a bribe to distract the people from their desperately-needed revolution and a front to cover capitalism’s impending turn toward totalitarianism.

Generational poverty, inadequate education, addiction and homelessness defy simple solutions, to be sure, especially amid the fantastic wealth and opportunity of California, now the fourth largest economy in the world. That stark contrast and the elevated cost of living drives some people to drop out and try to live off the fat of the land, like the hippies, although they should not be confused with the “working homeless," regular folk maintaining hygiene and decorum and often holding down jobs, or the intellectually disabled, denied institutionalization in California in the 1970s by Governor Ronald Reagan.

Claims that current methods are counterproductive—that we should defund or abolish the police or prison system and suffer the consequences until the new system achieves success, rather than instituting more methodical reforms—are belied by Oakland’s many innovative government and private sector programs, the people who benefited, and those who created or are running them. Chief Armstrong, for example, helped start or worked on Ceasefire, a violence intervention program, Stop Data Collection Project, which reduced racial profiling, and the OPD’s interaction with the SPARK program, an academic-professional collaboration developed by Stanford University. Unfortunately, ultra-progressives as well as conservatives might retort that Oakland has had liberal programs for 60 years, and where did they get us?

This large Afrofuturist mural of Black Panther leaders Bobby Seale (lft) and Huey Newton (rt) is directly across from Oakland Police headquarters. photo: D. Blair

The '60s were tumultuous, sometimes violent times, and evolving through them was tricky. An older Black Panther leader and Air Force veteran, Bobby Seale, mounted a respectable run for mayor in 1971 and won an impressive 40%. After conceding gracefully and promising cooperation, Seale inspired many people to join the civil service and paved the way for Oakland's first Black mayor, eight years later. A successful lawyer and respected judge as well as minor league baseball pitcher who grew up in West Oakland, Lionel Wilson largely ended White Republican domination of Oakland's politics and served three terms scandal free, aside from the skyrocketing crime of the Crack ‘80s and his son’s alleged involvement.

Many Panthers were enthusiastic activists and good Samaritans, happy to help their fellows while trying to reform if not violently overthrow the government, but others were more revolutionary or Machiavellian. They deployed shows of force, like arriving en masse to community meetings, in their stylish black berets and brown jackets, to push a preferred policy, or walking around with long guns, which frightened people, including one of my West Oakland neighbors, when she was a girl. Nevertheless, no shots were fired during the Panthers’ year of open carry patrols and their cinematic seizure of the California Legislature in May 1967, which suggests good discipline or luck.

They eventually did resort to violence, mostly against the police but also fellow Panthers, government infiltrators and others, which petrified middle-class Oaklanders of all melanin levels. Black Panther rallies in West Oakland’s DeFremery Park were mostly White kids, in fact, from the counter culture centers of Berkeley, four miles down Adeline Street, or Haight Ashbury, nine miles across the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, because most African-American parents forbid their kids to attend. They feared arrest, drug use or violence by Panthers as well as police. Indeed, Black community leaders didn’t allow Panther murals or memorials in West Oakland until in 2017 (see my article), although there are many now.

Church-goers also decried Panther drug use and sexuality, admittedly hard to avoid next door to Berkeley and San Francisco, where many men as well as women were enamored of Panthers. Panther leader Huey Newton, who led the police monitoring—after he realized how to do so legally in a community college law class taught by Edwin Meese (future attorney general for President Reagan)—became best friends with Bert Schneider, a Jewish-American Hollywood player. Schneider produced “The Monkees”, “Easy Rider” and other iconic ‘60s work and began subsidizing the Panthers. When Newton was acquitted of killing a cop in West Oakland and released from San Quentin’s death row, Schneider chauffeured him in a Cadillac to a rally in Oakland, where he hopped on a car, stripped to the waist and showed off his prison buff.

A strong writer and speaker, despite his high voice, Newton obtained a PhD in Panther history from UC Santa Cruz and became America’s leading revolutionary. He toured the world giving speeches and meeting leftist leaders and intellectuals, as well as a few rightwing ones, like William Buckley on his “Firing Line” television show in 1973, where Newton acquitted himself well (see episode). Newton remains revered by the Left, including in a recent book about Oakland’s extensive activist and union history, “The Pacific Circuit” (2025), by respected Oakland journalist and radio host Alexis Madrigal, although Madrigal notes he “struggled with the valorization of Huey Newton,” because he was “violent and abusive.” Many Oaklanders caught bad feelings after Newton became a gangster and used extortion, arson and some murder, until he himself was murdered in 1989, during a coke deal in… you guessed it, West Oakland.

Two-thirds of the Modern Lovers commune circa 1977: (lft-rt) Doniphan Blair, David H., Alison S., Steve S., Tootie A., David W. and Nicholas B. photo: J. Slon

Oakland’s secret sauce is opposites attract and fructify, I learned from Wetback, an African-American hippie I met in the late 1970s. Tall, muscle-bound and with blue-black-skin, he earned his multicultural monicker growing up in a California border town and in prison. Wetback liked to wear dashikis and red-bandana headbands, read spiritual books, work out, and sell cannabis by the joint, often accompanied by his much younger, blonde girlfriend, Donna, the daughter of an Oakland cop. Wetback and Donna periodically visited the Modern Lovers' commune where I lived in San Francisco and once invited us to a cookout at their small place in the flats of East Oakland. Five of us went and met their neighbors and friends, including some Black Panther and Hells Angels types, and heard their music, which featured Oakland’s top acts of the day: Tower of Power and Sly and the Family Stone (Sylvester Stone just passed at 82, 6/9/2025), both multiethnic bands with White drummers. There was also Creedence Clearwater Revival, an all-White band from North Berkeley who sounded Black and were the biggest band of the San Francisco scene, with 16 top forty hits between 1968 and ‘70.

After Mayor Schaff termed out in 2022, Oaklanders elected the BLM-friendly Sheng Thao, America’s first mayor of Myanmar (Burmese) national and Hmong tribal descent, through “rank choice” voting (the second ballot choice provides plurality if there’s no outright majority). The president of Oakland’s City Council for two years but also a single mother who experienced homelessness, Mayor Thao had a minor in city planning from the University of California, Berkeley, four miles down Telegraph from Oakland City Hall, and a mandate to increase progressive programs like MACRO (Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland). When that non-emergency service run by the fire department was announced, it got over 1000 applicants but hired only 26, who are legally restricted from responding to all but a few types of calls, due to liability concerns.

Although Oakland was still surfing the Covid crime wave, Mayor Thao’s first major move was to fire Chief Armstrong. Allegedly, he failed to properly investigate a rogue cop who happened to be Chinese-American—he may have been trying to maintain good relations with that distressed community—but a BLM red flag, nonetheless. When Mayor Thao didn’t install a temporary chief, the city went chief-less for a year and half, additionally handicapping the department. More troubling, Thao herself came under investigation for corruption and was recalled by voters in November 2024, along with District Attorney Pamela Price, who was seen as soft on crime during the Covid-era wildings.

“Thao promised to commit the City of Oakland to purchase housing units from the Duongs,” two Vietnamese-American brothers who followed their East-coast mafia colleagues into waste management, and “extend the City’s contract with the Duongs’ recycling company, and appoint city officials selected by the Duongs,” according to California’s indictment (1/17/25, get more info here). The Duongs also “promised to and did fund a $75,000 negative mailer campaign targeting Thao’s opponents in the mayoral election, and made $95,000 in payments to [Thao’s African-American boyfriend Andre] Jones for a no-show job with their housing company, with the promise of additional payments.” Perhaps predictably, Thao’s supporters claimed the charges were trumped up or fabricated. Coincidentally, Thao’s salary went up $13,000 in 2023 to $216,000, and reports emerged that some directors of the Black Lives Matter nonprofit organization had embezzled millions of donated dollars.

Mayor Sheng Thao (lft) and her new police chief Floyd Mitchell, 2024. photo: courtesy Oakland Mayor's Office

Murders did drop under Mayor Thao, to 86 in 2024, undoubtedly assisted by her belated appointment of Floyd Mitchell as police chief. A strikingly handsome African-American, Mitchell ran the cop shop in Lubbock, Texas, where he did a form of community policing he called “coffee with a cop,” although California still required 160 hours of recertification and “diversity, equity and inclusion” training. Mitchell is flourishing in Oakland, I assume, considering his broad smile at photo ops, which seems to say “It’s not Lubbock!” as well as the minimal news about him. One small article noted he had to start supervising OPD’s Internal Affairs department, which he found time consuming.

In addition to Internal Affairs, there's the ongoing federal oversight of the OPD, which is expensive, and extensive civilian review. The latter is divided into three parts, the Police Commission, that Chief Kirkpatrick complained about, and its investigative and audit branches, which is inefficient as well as expensive, according to Dr. Mandal.

Another one of Mayor Thao’s achievements was getting help from Governor Gavin Newsom, another Jerry Brown acolyte, who abided his mentor’s love for Oakland by quadrupling its California Highway Patrol shifts to 162 a week. That was invaluable for investigating the many freeway shootings, but it increased accidents from high-speed chases, which Oakland outlawed and is a major complaint of the Police Commission. Dr. Marvin Boomer, a popular math teacher from East Oakland’s tough Castlemont High, was recently struck and killed by a fleeing driver (5/28/25), although active police pursuit had already stopped. Six people were killed by police chases over the last decade.

Unfortunately, Thao’s administration missed the deadline for a big grant application, was hit by a severe cyberattack, and was hemorrhaging revenue from the unpaid rent and taxes remaining from Covid-era eviction moratoriums and bankruptcies.

On the other hand, restaurants were opening at a record pace. In fact, Oakland was voted America’s best cuisine city in 2024 by the readers of Conde Nast publications. Evidently, cutting-edge Bay Area restauranteurs priced out elsewhere had gobbled up Oakland leases depreciated by the Covid recession, crime and building glut, as the Brown-Dellums gentrification plan hit full speed.

Property values fell from their all-time high in 2022, and 2024’s 15% budget deficit hurt Oakland’s failing schools and potholed streets. City-wide construction of colorful bike lanes and complicated pedestrian islands continued apace, however, despite overruns, both in budgetary terms and by drivers running over unmarked islands. But the new lanes are beloved by the increasing number of bicyclists, and they made Oakland look like a normal progressive city, a selling point for the real estate agents.

A foot deep pothole (rt) broke axels for years, 75 feet from an expensive urban redesign of bike lanes, pedestrian islands and curb cuts. photo: D. Blair

Oakland’s film industry was largely gone by then. It started slowing in 2012 when the Media Center closed for the Army base rebuild and the Film Commission cut its two-person team in half, firing the popular rainmaker Ami Zins. City councilors failed to convince Oaklanders that tax breaks for middle-class filmmakers brought substantial spending, jobs and internships, not to mention culture. Location filming also disappeared as crews were increasingly robbed. Other important businesses and cultural organizations moved, from the California College of the Arts to all three professional sports teams, although the multi-championship-winning basketballers, the Golden State Warriors, did so pre-Covid.

A lot of people left Oakland, including progressives fed up with the frequent gunfire and occasional gruesome murder. The May 2nd shooting and wounding of two at Pierre Pierre, a “bold, elegant, unapologetically Black” restaurant in the iconic Tribune Tower in Downtown, “shook the foundation of everything we've worked to build," Chef Cleashaun Hill told reporters, hence, they were relocating to a "safer environment."

Nevertheless, Oakland’s population remained around 435,000, as people snapped up reasonably-priced units in design-y buildings with arty exteriors, high ceiling and big windows. In fact, a small two-bedroom can still be had for under a half a mill, a bargain in the Bay Area, due to surplus construction but also proximity to tough corners or homeless encampments, which increased by about a quarter during Covid, as one percent of Oakland residents were forced to live on the streets.

A half mile from my place was the gargantuan Wood Street encampment, almost ten blocks long and with some 400 people in tents, cars, RVs and Tuff Sheds. Those are the tiny dwellings, set up in pods of 20 to 30 units, about ten thus far around Oakland, with Wi-Fi, shared toilets and kitchens and social services. Oakland has over 300 encampments, about ten of which are open air drug markets, Wood Street being the largest and most egregious. Its denizens were notorious for running wild, settling disputes by setting each other’s residences on fire, and “homeless mafia” drug dealers, although some of its denizens mentioned substantial community cooperation. Wood Street was cleared, starting in April 2023, but most residents moved to other undeveloped side streets of West Oakland.

Wood Street now runs through Oakland’s hottest new hood with scores of new buildings, including The Black Panther, a five-story, blue and silver condominium on 7th Street, the center of the ‘40s club scene, and Raimondi Park, a minor league baseball stadium and home to the new Oakland Ballers (see article)—although Lionel Wilson Park may have been a better name, to honor our pitching mayor. Across the street from the stadium is an upscale, multiethnic food court replete with a microbrewery and large patio, which is often packed with people and kids of all colors.

A mile and a half away on Telegraph Avenue, First Friday, which restarted in 2022, is bursting with commercial, artistic and Oakland energy, including group paintings and drum circles, but only about a third of the pre-pandemic attendance. In the Mayor’s office, the Department of Race and Equity, which opened in 2016, is doing some laudable initiatives, like fast tracking marijuana store licenses for people imprisoned under the old drug laws, but also some ineffective ones.

Rich regions invariably have poor districts where illegal goods and services are on offer and low-paid workers, artists and rebels like to live. America itself enjoyed that service from San Francisco, during its 19th century debauch and the ‘60s, but as the Bay Area became fantastically wealthy and NIMBY, nonconformists were pushed to Oakland.

Volunteers hand out candy on Halloween, 2011, at the Oakland Occupy in front of the mayor's office. photo: D Blair

Given Oakland already had established communities, some conservative, the Town became inherently tribal and hard to govern. The 2011 Occupy Movement filled the plaza in front of the mayor’s office with a flourishing encampment and provided a forum for municipal dialogue, but neither Mayor Jean Quan, an old ‘60s activist herself, nor the anarchistic Occupiers figured out how to channel that enjoyable exercise into meaningful reform or intercommunal cooperation. I heard a few strange suggestions at the discussion circles I attended, like letting young people express themselves through property damage, since insurance covered it anyway, but most people seemed reasonable and rational, as did most Oaklanders I knew.

Until Covid.

The plague years, the BLM riots, the near doubling of the murder rate, the diminished police presence, the collapsing economy, the corrupt mayor and peak “wokism” infected Oakland with a textbook case of “the liberal dilemma.” When liberal societies fail to deliver on implied or actual promises, they’re besieged by radicals from the Left and the Right, so-called “horseshoe politics.” The hard right appellation can also be applied to gangsters, corrupt officials and capitalists who oppose liberal democracy, a hostility shared by hard leftists, hence the horseshoe. A multi-front war is never easy, but liberals are additionally challenged by having to organize committees, do studies and inspire action from citizens too busy enjoying liberalism’s good life to recognize the danger or even participate. Competition for moral ascendency is common in all communities, but virtue signaling is force multiplied among those long assured of their moral superiority or desperate for a status boost or quick political fix.

As if the problems plaguing Oakland were not deleterious enough, the liberal dilemma is part of the inevitable decay of the liberal era we’ve enjoyed since World War Two, which blessed California, despite its plethora of problems, more than almost anywhere on earth. Naturally, we had a bumper crop of revolutionaries, from the Berkeley free speech movement, Black Panthers and antiwar protestors of the ‘60s to the less well-known and much smaller movements surrounding multiculturalism, which started in the ‘80s, and critical race theory, intersectionality and the trans revolution, which came with each succeeding decade.

Postmodernism and multiculturalism fascinated me when I studied them in the ‘80s at the San Francisco Art Institute with the brilliant art historian Raymond Mondini and Angela Davis, a titanic activist and socialist thinker as well as member of the Black Panthers and star student of Herbert Marcuse. Aspects of those ideas helped answer some of the questions nagging at me after five years of traveling and living in Asia and South America, but other aspects were contradicted by what I learned on the road.

Materialism, money and class struggle are not more important than spirituality, art and equality, I realized. Having grown up with classical lefties in New York City's Upper West Side and lived among more avant-garde ones in a commune in San Francisco, I was familiar with the inherent dysfunctionality of Marx's engineering mindset, command economies or a unicultural society built around an all-powerful political party. Indeed, the viability of emphasizing group identities over individual rights is refuted by the individuality of the cultural Marxists themselves and the obvious fact that almost all people, families and communities are cultural hybrids, which adopt any tool, concept or commercial operation benefiting them.

“Rock and roll does not sound right in Portuguese,” explained my friend Leche, a street musician and surrealist painter living in Salvador, Brazil, when I asked why he sang in English, which he could barely speak.

All cultures as well as humans are created equal, I concluded, but how people appropriate, mix or ignore them depends on utility, taste and dreams more than economics, politics or traditions. Virtually all the artists I met in Peru, where I lived for seven months, or in Delhi, India, where I stayed for a month with the director of the art school, Om Prakash Sharma, a great multiculturalist as well as abstract painter and classical musician (see my article), or in Timbuktu, Mali, where my daughter visited in 2010 and I interviewed the director of the Festival in the Desert, Manny Ansar, use whatever they like and can afford, often scrimping for years to overcome the up to 300% tariffs on already expensive equipment. The Tinariwen, Mali’s biggest "desert blues" band and the Festival in the Desert’s standard closer, started with guitars made from metal boxes but soon graduated to Gibson Les Pauls.

Poster from the 1981 Tropical Civilization show at Ancient Currents Gallery, San Francisco. illo: D. Blair

To describe Leche, Om Prakash Sharma and the Tinariwen, I developed the term “abstract aborigine,” suggesting we’re all legitimate intellectuals of cultures native to this planet. And I debated those ideas with Professor Davis in her class and the students interested in cultural Marxism at our school. We also exhibited artists exploring related themes in my commune’s art gallery, Ancient Currents. The hippies, punks and post-modernists argued fiercely in the Bay Area in the 1980s, and my critics sometimes dismissed my philosophy or lived experience unfairly, it seemed to me, but we were all part of a vibrant avant-garde, discussing and disputing politics, culture and spirituality. Rational utilitarianism and classical liberalism would eventually prevail, I assumed, as it usually did among artists and progressives, while ideologues and extremists would remain confined to academia or fringe communities—until Russia invaded Ukraine.

After visiting Ukraine in the fall of 2022, I was surprised to find myself being denounced by a couple friends and neighbors and many strangers, in person and on Facebook, who accused me of supporting a fascist regime, NATO expansionism or American imperialism. I tried to explain Ukraine’s complex, sanguineous history in person and writing—notably in my article “Meet the Kids of Maidan: My Journey into Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution”, published by two news sites and cineSOURCE—but attracting readers or convincing zealots is not easy, even among friends. The Bay Area was famous for protesting wars in South Asia and the Middle East or South African apartheid, but Ukraine’s tens of millions murdered over the last century, their ‘60s-esque democratic revolution of 2014, and their invasion by actual fascists did not touch my community that deeply, perhaps because Ukrainians are mostly White (although there are Romani, Muslims, Jews and a few African immigrants).

Article continues at Dear Oakland, Part 2

Doniphan Blair is writer, filmmaker, musician, world traveller and artist based in Oakland who can be reached .
Posted on Sep 04, 2025 - 03:28 PM