 Do you ready? Yeah, I'm good. Hello. Hey, auntie. Hey Son, how you doing? You at work? No, I'm just at the house. Oh At your house in Oakland. Yeah, so the one she's on the other one, too You met the ones. Yeah, Kwanzaa a few years ago. Oh, yeah We how you doing? He's great grandma. Hello Nice to talk good. Yeah, you guys too. This is amazing So I'm excited to get some of the family history now and to hear more about your story. My story. You want family history? Where you want me to start? The first question I'll get I'll help you out. Okay, you ask me a question. This is Tales of the Town, a podcast about black Oakland. I'm Delancey Parham. And I'm a boss on the team. We're two organizers who are building for revolutionary change in Oakland. We both got deep roots in this city and this rich history of radical activism. We got on some uncles who are black Panthers in a community of people who are doing the work today. All of them fighting for black liberation. All of them shaped by Oakland. And me and Delancey, we've been organizing together for years on college campuses and in the streets of Oakland. Through our organization, people's programs, we've been providing resources for those who are going through houselessness and building community educational programs and a whole bunch of other programs So this work in this town is who we are. So if you value community, family, black culture and history, we know you're gonna like this show. We're excited to share light on stories and people you may have never heard of. And to also provide a more intimate look at events and moments you may have only witnessed on the news. And maybe you know nothing at all about Oakland. But by the end of this season, we hope you have the same love and appreciation of Oakland that we do. And maybe it will encourage you to dive deeper into the history and the culture of the city that you live in. Oakland is this window into things that are probably happening in your backyard. Protests over police, the pandemic, issues around housing and gentrification. And a lot of times, these things that become national issues, they were popping off here in Oakland months or even years before the rest of the country knew about them. And Oakland's black community is usually ahead of the curve too. We is literally in the birthplace of the Black Panther Party. The man doesn't have us out. Nobody have us out organized. Come on now. I have absolutely no power as an individual. The power is with the people. So the real question is, what are the people going to do? We don't hate nobody because of their color. We hate oppression. We hate murder of black people in our communities. So no matter where you live, if you care about justice, about radical change, you'll learn something from this show. Because that tradition has started with the Panthers. It continues in Oakland till this day. If a group of young people can feed other members of the black community, why can't the state? In the community here in Oakland, Janet, I am Oscar Grant. It created a movement throughout this nation. Because the power really is in the people. If we can organize the people and rally the people around this cause, then we've already won. And D, you know, you, me and our comrades, I like to think we're continuing that tradition too. We're continuing this fight for revolutionary change. Plus, we're going to be talking to musicians, athletes, organizers and activists, all these people who make the culture here so special. So this show is not only a historical documentation of the town, but it's a letter to Oakland and a dedication to the Africans and indigenous people who make it what it is. So this is Tales of the Town, a podcast about black Oakland. Over the next 12 episodes, we're going to tell you the story of black Oakland. But Oakland, it didn't start with hella black people. In 1940, Oakland was just 3% black, 3%. The black community here, it was hella tiny. But in just a few decades, Oakland went from being 3% black to being a hub for black culture and black liberation. And by the 80s, black folks will make up just about half of Oakland's population. So y'all is probably wondering, how did this all happen? We're going to tell you how it happened. Almost all those new black folks came from the south. And what was known as the second great migration, the first great migration was earlier. And that had black folks heading north to cities like New York, Chicago and Cleveland. What made the second great migration different is people weren't just moving north anymore. During the 40s, 50s and 60s, hundreds of thousands of black Southerners moved west. And this is the historical event that created black Oakland. So to understand the town, you have to understand that a lot of older black Oaklanders, they started their lives as black Southerners, including how you doing? Good, good. My auntie Anita. I'm talking to you. I know I get to talk to you a lot recently. I know you need to talk to me more. Yeah, you right. You right. My auntie Anita was in her late 80s. And she transitioned to an ancestor not long after recording this episode. Even though I call her auntie Anita, she's actually my great aunt, my granny sister. Back in the 30s, she and her family, they all lived in rural Louisiana. It was during Jim Crow, which meant segregation was legal and violence from groups like the KKK was rampant. Black people worked and paid their taxes. And in return, they got second class schools, no voting rights and a whole bunch of other oppression. Anita and her family lived in an all black town. And she went to an all black school where she studied from used beat up old textbooks that a white school didn't want anymore. For fun, she and her friends, they will all go to the movies. But we had to go we had to go up in the balcony to go to the movies. You know, they had a division between whites and blacks. That movie theater wasn't a white town nearby. And as it turns out, it actually wasn't that nearby. It was we used to walk it sometimes. Maybe 10 miles. That's wild. I just looked it up. It's like two miles. It's about a two hour walk. 10 miles wasn't bad for kids that. That's why you so quick on your feet still, huh? So how did Anita get from rural Louisiana to Oakland? Well, I need his dad, my great great grandfather. He was college educated. And he learned cutting edge farming techniques in school, stuff like how you have to plant soybeans every so often to put nitrogen back into the soil. His expertise helped find him a good working job for the state of Louisiana. It was solid middle class work. As my auntie Anita remembers it, they paid her dad to drive around and to share his knowledge with rural farmers who were both black and white. The black farmers, they listened to him. You know, they did what he told them to do. And the black farmers crops came out so well. But these white farmers, they didn't take his advice and that led to trouble for Anita's dad. Anita's son, Freddie, who was my uncle, Freddie picks up the story from here. A couple of seasons into it, they, their crops weren't as robust and they blamed it on him. And they threatened them and they, they, my grandfather didn't go into specifics, but they said they, they did something in it on his house. I don't know if it was graffiti or it was a cross or something like that, but they did something at the house and he knew it was time to go. Uncle Freddie says his grandpa never told him if it was the KKK, but he thinks that it was. Obviously, that sort of white supremacist terrorism, it was common in places like Louisiana at that time. And it's a big reason why so many black people fled the south, including Anita's dad. Anita's dad feared for his life, so he convinced a friend with the car to drive him all the way to California. Once he got to Oakland, he stayed with a relative and made plans to send for his wife and his kids. It was too risky for him to return to Louisiana by himself. So he sent his friend to pack up the rest of the family. And that's how on one day in 1939, Anita and her six siblings got all their things together, crammed into an old Ford and said goodbye to their hometown. What do you remember about that day? I wrote on, or I wrote on the house, I wrote big letters, going to California and not coming back. And my little, my girlfriend, my little friends, we were in the car leaving and they were just running behind the car and crying. It was sad. It was really sad. Sometimes my friend and I be talking and she'll say something to me and that will make me go back in my mind. Ooh, I remember that. That's my great granny, Charlene. Around the same time that your on Anita and her family were driving to Oakland, my great grandma and her family were leaving the South too. Too young to bring up some of that stuff that Barbara and I have talked about. You're too young. Because we both 91 years old, but hasn't much changed being youngsters. Really? So like she said, my great grandma was in her 90s now. But back in 1941, she was just 12 years old and living in Port Arthur, Texas. Port Arthur is a small city on the Texas-Louisiana border down in the Gulf of Mexico. When Charlene lived there, it was an industrial town with giant oil refineries in a busy port. Charlene liked living in Port Arthur, but the rest of her extended family, her mom's six siblings and all of their kids, they had already moved west to California. For years, Charlene's aunts and uncles pressured her mom to join the family out west. Finally, in 1941, Charlene's mom, my great-great-grandmother, Jewel, caved in. And so, 12-year-old Charlene, Jewel and the rest of the family got their things together and hopped on a train to Oakland. Let me tell you about that train. Oh, this is what's amazing. We was all on that train. There was nobody on that train, but just black people. She was sitting in a segregated train car heading west toward California. Then the train stopped and all these other people started getting on the train. White people. And I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. We all was in here just up at the black people. And all of a sudden, just getting mixed with everybody. They got a conglomerated black, white and all of us together. That's what I found out about the what they called the Mason Dixon line. My great-grandma Charlene and her family were officially out of the south. Soon, they'd be in Oakland and they would meet all these other black Southerners who had also moved thousands of miles to find their new home. Every year, they would see more and more black folks fleeing the Jim Crow south, arriving in the town. And in the years to come, these black families would transform Oakland. They'd also face a lot of new forms of injustice. And how black Oaklanders responded to this injustice will make history. Oh, well, when we came into California, it was so beautiful. I mean, it was just so it was like going to heaven. And it was cool. It was cool in the evening. And it was just nice. I thought it was so so good. That's my auntie Anita again. She was one of about 150,000 black people who came to Oakland during the second great migration. Over three decades, waves of black Southerners will move to Oakland like Charlene and Anita. Our families, they was a part of the first wave. And unlike a lot of folks that came later, that first wave was mostly middle-class families. We learned about this by talking to Donna Merch. She's a historian who has written about how the first and second great migrations shaped Oakland. A general rule of migration is that the people with the most resources leave first. So it makes sense. The people that have saved money moving across the country or across the world is expensive. So people tend to be more affluent who go first. Many in this first wave were skilled workers. And those skilled workers had just entered a new job market. The US was just entering World War II, which meant a lot of the Bay Area's current labor force was being shipped off to Europe and Japan. For these new arrivals from the South, this meant jobs. And these wartime jobs were amazing during World War II. This is one of the biggest periods of African-American economic development. Robert Weaver, who was a black policy intellectual in 1930s, compares the increase in opportunity to World War II saying it's the greatest black increase in opportunity next to emancipation. So that gives you the scale. Some of the best wartime jobs were found at the Port of Oakland. Today, the port is one of the busiest in the United States. All day, every day, containers come on and off ships. But during World War II, there was really only one thing happening down there. That's where ships were being built, like battleships and cargo ships. Charlene's husband, my great-grandfather Clarence Sr., got one of these jobs. Later, their son Clarence Jr., who was my uncle Clarence, will also work at the port as a longshoreman, loading and unloading ships. Here's my uncle Clarence talking about what an opportunity like the jobs at the port meant for his father. There were very few opportunities for black people to work, even those who had education. And so those jobs became some of the most important jobs for blacks. And so I know that from my own father's perspective, he really was looking forward to one day becoming a longshore worker because he knew that the longshore job provided the opportunity for disposable income. That income allowed the family to buy a house in North Oakland, where generations of my family have been born and raised. My great-grandfather held on to his job at the port after World War II ended. But a lot of black workers weren't so lucky. With the war over, those jobs, building ships, disappeared. And white soldiers returning home needed to find work, which made the job market a lot more saturated due to segregation. On top of that, black families continued migrating to Oakland from the South. Charlene remembers year after year how people kept showing up. The people used to go down to the train station to see who was coming in on them trains. They didn't have no suitcases, they had boxes. It was amazing. It was like it was coming and running from somewhere to freedom. They were coming from somewhere to freedom. We'll get to how free California actually was for these black southerners. But for now, we want to talk about where these folks were coming from and why. Like we've said, to understand Oakland, you have to understand the great migration. And we feel like there's something that gets missed when people use that word, migration. Which brings us to a segment on the show we call Let Me Put You On Something. Put me on something. Put me on something. Put me on something. Put me on something. Yes, sir. Let Me Put You On Something is where we go deep on one important lesson from the story that we is telling. So today, let me put you onto this. All these black people who fought the South during the great migration that wasn't migrants, they were refugees. And something I find funny, really both funny and frustrating is that sometimes people talk about the great migration as if it was just some enchanting excursion. They talk about it as if all these black folks who were heading north or west were just jumping on the Harry Potter train to Hogwarts or riding the Soul Train. And that's really not what it was at all. You know, we got to think about the violence that these folks were fleeing. And I think it's important that we touch on that, right? Because what they were fleeing was the Jim Crow South. They were fleeing white supremacist terrorism. And so, yeah, there's just joy and a sense of opportunity and new beginnings that Anita and Charlene might have felt as kids. But the driving force for so many of our ancestors and elders was looking for safety. Thousand percent. You know, when you hear the word migration, you often think about birds migrating. You feel me? Or whales migrating up the Pacific coast to go mate, right? And that was completely different from the situation that black folks in Jim Crow South was facing. When we talk about migrating, there's this element of choice and free will that's often associated with the word. So if we're not careful, we can reference a context that didn't actually exist for many of the black folks that were leaving the South. For many of them, it was a matter of life or death. For others, they were so desperate for a glimmer of hope that they left behind all they knew and had. Does that sound like choice and free will? And these words matter, bruh, because it's like, look how some people literally say that all black people are immigrants, bruh. Like literally they'll use the words all black people came from Africa as immigrants. And this is purely just white supremacist propaganda. And that's why the word and calling it refugee is so important, because then we're actually talking about the full history of what has happened and not erasing the white supremacist violence that people have faced. I mean, even as we use the word refugee, when you think about refuge, it's like finally arriving at your place of solace. Black folks in America have not reached that destination. We haven't found refuge. We're in constant search of it. Of a place to feel safe on stolen land and stolen people. And now, if we look at black people here in Oakland, it's still a refugee-like situation when we're experiencing the vast amount of gentrification that we're experiencing. We go to these household camps, right? These household camps remind me of shantytowns in South Africa. There's no doubt that Oakland is a beautiful place. There's no doubt that the Bay Area is a beautiful place. But when you look at the living conditions that black people have been subjected to, it's very clear that the white supremacist violence in Crow's South also found its way here to Oakland. Before we go any further, we got something dope we want to share with y'all. In addition to the Tales of the Town podcast, we put together an album featuring artists from all over the Bay Area. Artists such as Rex Life-Rodge, G-Eazy, Pelo, Jane Hancock, LaRussell, Guapdad 4000, and more have come together to produce 11 original songs for the Tales of the Town album releasing October 14th. All proceeds from the music go towards supporting people's programs, a grassroots organization here in Oakland. Here's a sneak peek at the first single off the album, Fuck 12 Freestyle by LaRussell and Guapdad 4000. Releasing this Friday. Now, let's get back to the story. Like my granny Charlene was saying. This is like it was coming running from somewhere to freedom. All these black people were showing up in Oakland thinking they found freedom. And I guess in some ways they had. They were quote-unquote free from Jim Crow. But as the years went by, it became clear, especially to these refugees' children, that for all that they had escaped in the South, they would still find white supremacy and racial segregation in Oakland. Let's bring back historian Donna Merch. As the black population rose rapidly, you see a codification of segregation. It's not a legal Jim Crow segregation. It's in practice. So black children being concentrated into particular high schools and, you know, junior high schools and grade schools. At the same time the schools were becoming segregated, so were Oakland's neighborhoods. Charlene remembers white flight starting just a few years after her family moved to North Oakland. She could see it happening right through her front windows. Carl's 54th Street over there, but nobody over there. Carl's 54th Street over there by the, what do I call it, that hot dog hamburger stand, but nothing over there but white folks. All of a sudden that changed. I mean, you can watch it and see it change, you know? It changed fast right in my face with me sitting here. Black white folks being here, next thing you know they was gone. And the unjust policing of black people that had been a hallmark of the Jim Crow South, it found a new life in Oakland schools through harsh disciplinary codes. Disciplinary codes in which black children are treated different than white children. Saying that black children, it wasn't safe for them to meet in assemblies because they could develop the fever and become unruly. You have expulsions, you have physical discipline, incredible, brutal authoritarian practices. These racist disciplinary codes pushed a lot of black children and teens into what we now call the school-to-prison pipeline. Many were confined to juvenile prisons, including Huey Newton, who would one day go on to co-found the Black Panther Party. Being mistreated in school, being locked up as 13 or 14-year-old kids, these are the types of things that radicalize people. And that radicalization will combine with unrest that was growing across the country to create a new movement for black liberation that was rooted in Oakland. Firemen were harassed by snipers and brick-froing hoodlums as they attempted to control the fires, many of which were left to burn... It was the mid-60s. Things were shifted. The images on TV and in newspapers were no longer just of city-ins at lunch counters and non-violent resistance in the South. Instead, cities in the Northwest were burning. We're put at $200 million. Anger from decades, really centuries of injustice spilled into the streets. Windows were smashed. Cars were overturned. Buildings were damaged. Thousands of people were arrested or beaten by police in cities across the country, from Harlem to Newark to Detroit to Chicago, and in 1965 to Watts. Six days of rioting in the Negro section of Los Angeles left behind scenes reminiscent of war-torn cities. Just 400 miles north, a group of young organizers was watching Watts burn. They watched all this raw anger rage in the streets. Black people in Watts, black people across the country, they was clearly fed up. And these young organizers, they believed that they could channel this rage into revolution. This new group, it was more radical than Dr. Key. And the people that they looked up to was Malcolm X, Kwame and Krumah, Marx, Lenin, and Mao. These organizers were going to take those revolutionary ideas and build something new. It was the start of a new era in the struggle for black liberation. And it was all going down in Oakland. Chairman of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale. Bring him on. Of all the things that you've heard in the press, of all the derogatory statements that's been made in the press about brother Hughie P. Newt, to guide you away from seeing this basic platform that Hughie was talking about for his own people. I say, me, hate a white person? I say, wait a minute, man, let's back up a little bit. We hate the oppression that we live in. We hate cops beating black people over their heads and murdering them. That's what we hate. We're being killed through the lack of medical care, lack of funds because of unemployment. So violence can take many forms. Police officers told me to stop moving around. You're making me nervous. I told him he didn't have any reason to be nervous because he had a gun and I didn't. He said, well, I might go off. I might have to shoot you. So I told him to go ahead and shoot. Every black man in this house should be against the war in Vietnam. He's got to be against the war in Vietnam because they're killing our black brothers over there. I don't believe this country will be able to fight every country in the world and also fight a revolutionary war at home. That's what we're really banking on. All right, brothers and sisters, I want to thank you. My uncle Clarence, who we heard from earlier, he joined the Black Panther Party at a pretty young age. And one thing that's easy to miss with the Panthers, with all the guns and berets and captivating speeches that they're known for, is that a lot of the work they did wasn't always glamorous. It was the day-to-day behind-the-scenes stuff, the administrative work that kept the programs running. And it could be hard for a group of young black revolutionaries to find a place to meet. So when Uncle Clarence joined and the group needed different places to gather, Clarence offered up my great-grandma, Charlene's house. I asked her about this. What would you like to have them have in meetings in your house? Yeah, it would be quite a few of them. Yeah, they'd come in and be in that back room. A bunch of young folks? Yeah, mm-hmm, yep. They would be very peaceful and delightful and do what they have to do, talk, have their meetings. And they'd finish, they'd get up and they'd go. I told them, well, they ain't doing nothing bad. They ain't doing no worse than these pickle rules out here. So, like I said, they had some good people, some good, some of them, you know. Just think about it for a second. 25 years earlier, Charlene, Anita, and so many other black folks had fled to Jim Crow South. Then, after escaping that racism, there was a system of white supremacy in Oakland continuing to develop around them. Segregated schools, redlining, racist policing and disciplinary codes. This, in many ways, mirrored the racial segregation of the Jim Crow South. These refugees' children saw this oppression up close. And so, here was my Greg Granny Charlene 2,000 miles away from our hometown, sitting in the next room as young people plan for revolution. It's fitting that the Panthers would sometimes meet in my great-grandma's house because even though the party started in Oakland, its roots are Charlene's roots. Its roots are the South, the rural South. This came up in our conversation with Donna Merch. She's the historian we heard from earlier. This thing that gets called Arm Self-Defense in 1966, historians always thought of this as being a uniquely Northern urban form. Civil disobedience was practiced in the South and then Black Power was really a creature of Northern and Western cities. But if you go back and you look at the histories, the people that found the party, both the leadership and the rank and file in the Bay Area and then in other parts of the country, were Southern migrants and many of them understood themselves as Southern. The two men who founded the party, Huey Nguyen and Bobby Seal, they were both born in the rural South. After Bobby's family moved to Oakland, they still take trips back home to small town Texas. And on those trips, Bobby's cousins, they would take him hunting. And that's how we learned how to handle a gun and that's how we learned how to aim and fire. Not in Oakland, but in rural Texas. Fast forward to the 60s, when Huey and Bobby decided to start something, one of their main inspirations was a radical group in rural Alabama called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. It was co-founded in the mid-60s by a pad African revolutionary who began organizing during the Civil Rights Movement by the name of Kwame Turei, who at the time was known as Stugley Carmichael. We wanted to say that this is a student conference as it should be held on a campus and that we're not ever to be caught up in the intellectual masturbation of the question of Black power. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization helped Black people register to vote, but that wasn't all. They were also armed and made a point of open carrying their weapons, sending a message to white races across the country. Huey and Bobby also noticed the group's logo and decided to make it their own. That logo was a Black Panther. Over the next couple of episodes, we're gonna go deeper into the Black Panther Party and the impact it had. For now though, you gotta understand one thing. There is no Black Panther Party without the Great Migration. And there's no Black Oakland without the Great Migration. Everything we're gonna talk about on this show, from the Panthers to struggles today over gentrification and policing and COVID to all the beauty that's come out the town. The music, the sports fans. You can trace it all back to Anita and Charlene and all these other families who left everything they knew to come here. The fact that I can get on the phone my grandma for an hour, my great grandma and have a phone call about some stuff that happened 75 years ago. That's wild. It's beautiful. It's really beautiful. Well, baby, I've seen a lot of changes. And I keep hoping that they change and get looked like to me. They'll come up and be better for better and get better, you know? We're resilient people, proud people like you said. Oh, God. That's the thing that they hate about us. All that you do to them, you still prosper and keep moving. This season on Tales of the Town. We're fighting for each other. We're fighting for all of us. Surveillance, wiretapping, those kind of things actually did happen. The murder of Oscar Grant was that moment when people even outside of our community were like, nah, like we saw what happened and we got the video to prove it. Fear of black and brown students is so embedded in our curriculum in schools that it drives administrators and adults to call police on children. Even if you have a lease, they're going to find a way to get you out of there. And then I had to figure out where I'm going to stay, where I'm going to sleep at, because I slept in my car for eight months. The only thing you should be doing in the community is asking the community what they want, what they need. So just understand that a lot of the things you listen to are heavily influenced by Bay Rap. And I can sit and trace it and say, this is just this. And then when I do it, people will be like, damn. Then when I show them the year, they'll be like, damn. Oakland is, it's the duality and seeing the beauty through the messiness. Tales of the Town is hosted and executed produced by me, and boss, Muta Keem, and the ones he parted in. Our senior producer is Maya Cueva. Fact-checking is done by Daniel Soleiman and Bashira Mack. Mixing and sound design is done by Pat MCD Miller and Warren Newsom. The theme song was produced by Cheyenne G and Carrie Lynn. The music from the Tales of the Town album that we featured on this episode is from LaRussell and Guapdad 4000. Special thanks to Donna Merchant-Ruckers. Be sure to check out her book, Living for the City, Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. Thanks to my Uncle Freddie and of course my Auntie Anita. Dee, anyone you want to thank? Yeah. Thank you to my Granny Merly, my Uncle Clarence, aka Uncle Buzz, and of course to my great-grandmother Charlene. If you like what you heard on this episode, please be sure to subscribe to wherever you get your podcast at. Give us a five-star review and tell all your people about it. So this... Okay, let's see. This is Tales of the Town, like there's literally four T's in a row, bro. It's like... Alright, let me just try, let me try.