When Black People Lived in Oakland

• In Event: Resistance and Disruption II

Abstract

When Black People Lived in Oakland
Benjamin P. Bowser
California State University East Bay
& Felton Institute

Introduction: Since 1989, I have been engaged in HIV epidemiology and prevention, mapping of heroin and crack cocaine drug trafficking and prevention, and community needs assessments in East and West Oakland, California. This work has been sponsored by the U.S. CDC, NIH, Robert Wood Johnson, and Hewlett Foundations, and the University of California, Universitywide Research Program. I have conducted hundreds of interviews and focus groups, as well as several ethnographic studies with follow-ups. This work, drawing on detailed census analyses from 1890 to 2020 and historical background research, presents a historical sociology of Oakland, California, to be published in the spring of 2026 by The University of California Press.
Purpose: The purpose of my paper is to highlight When Black People Lived in Oakland (University of California Press, 2026), which examines the experiences of African American communities during the political struggle that made Oakland famous. It focuses on the communities at the center of the struggle and on how they survived and maintained amidst HIV, heroin, and crack cocaine epidemics. The book also describes where Blacks, who were pressured out of Oakland, have fled.
Finding Highlights:
• Oakland, the racial Apartheid City, prior to 1930.
• Contribution of the pre-1930s Oakland School District to the Eugenics movement.
• Post-WWII, advancement of Blacks due to corporate and federal government divestment.
• Impacts on the community of the rise of a Black underclass due to racial discrimination in work and job flight.
• Black population flight was specific to drug-dealing blocks.
• Black displacement to Antioch, Tracy, and Stockton, California.
• Potential sites of new Black ghettoes in the East Bay suburbs.
• The great inversion of race and class in the Bay Area.

Author

• Benjamin Paul Bowser