Pullman porters, Seventh Street, the Black Panthers and the oldest Black bookstore in the country.
The End Of The Line
In 1869 West Oakland became the western end of the transcontinental railroad, and many African Americans there worked as porters for the Pullman Palace Car Company. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the union of those porters, had its headquarters at Fifth and Wood Streets. By 1930 Seventh Street was lined with jazz and blues clubs, and in the 1940s the shipyards of the Second World War brought a new wave of workers.
The Cypress Freeway later split West Oakland in half and cut it off from downtown, and other projects, the BART station among them, displaced thousands of residents.
The Black Panther Party
In late October 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland. Their Ten-Point Program ended with a demand for land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.
The Panthers ran programs for their community. The most famous was the Free Breakfast for Children Program, which started out of an Oakland church, and the party went on to open free medical clinics in 13 places across the country before it dissolved in 1982.
Books And Archives
Julian and Raye Richardson founded Marcus Books in San Francisco in 1960, and in 1976 they opened a second store at 3900 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Oakland. Still family-owned, it is the oldest bookstore in the country specializing in African American literature.
The African American Museum and Library at Oakland grew from a private collection started in 1946, became part of the city in 1994 and moved into the old Carnegie library building in 2002. Its archives cover Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and more.
Black Oakland Today
Black-owned restaurants, bookstores, salons and brands are part of everyday Oakland.
Shop Black-owned businesses in Oakland on CashBlack.
Photo Credits
West Oakland, with the port and San Francisco beyond. Photo: Bohao Zhao, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons The old Oakland Public Library, now the African American Museum and Library at Oakland, on a 1909 postcard. Photo: Newman Post Card Co. (V14), Public domain, Wikimedia Commons