My junior year of college was spent abroad as part of the Education Abroad Program, my first time living away from home, but I returned again to the family home in Oakland. I knew a good deal of the city, covered on foot and by bicycle, far beyond the immediate area where we first lived, the house with 32 steps across Broadway from Oak Tech, my high school. I think of Oakland as being as much my true home as Cleveland once was when I was a child. Although I was born and partly raised in Cleveland, my teenage years were spent in Oakland where I attended Westlake Junior High near Lake Merritt and Oakland Technical High School (42 nd and Broadway) before enrolling at U.C. I might add here that my family moved to Oakland from Ohio when I was twelve years old in the summer of 1960. I could have gone home to my parents’ house that night but I did not want to enter the cycle of fear provoking fear, of “anticipating trouble” which might lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy: a crowd’s dangerous mood igniting and sparking widespread civil unrest. Sure, in retrospect it might have been better for me (and the others) to have made a quick departure for the weekend. I refused to believe Oakland was going to explode, at least not without a major spark, and decided to trust my instincts.
I hoped nothing bad would happen and nothing did but whether this was luck or fate, who is to say? There was more to understanding the rising level of tension, of course-it just wasn’t a roll of the dice. They can prove strong allies under such unknown and trying circumstances. How ill-equipped youth are to deal with assessing unexpected real-life situations, but going forward with hope and trust made sense to me. What was the purpose of the course if not to experience daily life in the community? How would running away at the first sign of danger fulfill that purpose? Perhaps I was foolish in not taking it more seriously but I preferred to spend the night sleeping on the mattress in the second floor apartment of a house in the heart of West Oakland. There was enough racial unrest going on, however, in Oakland and other cities across the nation, including full-blown riots elsewhere, to make the warning seem dire. Indeed we got through our entire eight week program without major incident for ourselves, the West Oakland neighborhood, or the whole city of Oakland for that matter.Ĭertainly, something “ could have happened” but nothing did, at least not at that time. Yet nothing happened to us that night, neither on the way out nor returning. We could readily see why the University of California was worrying about our safety. Sandy began to get nervous but did not say anything other than to remind me to “go!” when it was my right of way and I was too slow hitting the gas. As we got to larger streets with stop signs and lights, we could see young Black men gathering on the corners, exhibiting a somewhat dark and somber mood. I blithely ignored the warning although I did seize the opportunity to invite one of the other students on a date to go dancing at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, one of the prime locales of the hippie music scene.Īs Sandy and I left the ghetto early that Friday evening, we drove through the streets of our summer neighborhood past sad-looking but still sturdy houses. Indeed, on one particular weekend when the racial tensions appeared particularly high, we were advised to leave and go elsewhere: “Do not spend the weekend in West Oakland because it could explode!” This was to be one of those “long hot summers” as they were then called, where the threat of an eruption in the ghetto was considered possible at almost any moment.
(The entire course had been proposed and organized by a young woman, fellow classmate and friend). The three of us were part of a small class of eight students enrolled in a Sociology class with a built in field experience. He came to the apartment where I and two other college classmates were staying in West Oakland, a predominantly Black neighborhood. I first met Huey Newton a lifetime ago, in the summer of 1967.
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