Community
Over 100 students were awarded medals during the final showcase of the 39th Martin Luther King Oratorical Fest. The performance categories this year ranged from famous to not-so-famous speeches, dramatic scenes, published poems and students’ original work. Each performer in the showcase was a finalist from their individual school’s competition.
On Tuesday, author Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke at a screening of Marvel’s Black Panther in front of 250 high school students at Oakland’s Grand Lake. The action film, which stars a nearly all-black black cast and imagines an Afrofuturist world untouched by white supremacy and colonialism, had a record-breaking opening weekend.
Proposition 64, which voters passed in November 2016, not only legalized the adult use of cannabis, but also established protocols for reducing, dismissing and sealing old marijuana-related convictions. That means Californians convicted of cannabis crimes can wipe them away—if they file a petition.
To commemorate Black History Month, the news teams from Oakland North and our sibling site, Richmond Confidential, spent a morning observing some of the spaces in our two cities that have been important to the East Bay’s black community—past and present.
Oakland’s City Hall sticks out like a sore thumb. The rectangular building, a beautiful pearl, is surrounded by the sounds of construction in a gentrifying city. Pigeons fly above me as the nearby construction sounds pause. I hear their wings flapping against their bodies. On the amphitheater steps outside of city hall, the circle is divided in two: a shady part and a part in the sun. The shade comes from the official Oakland oak tree. This is the plaza…
The BART train whirrs by, leaving MacArthur station as cars exit the freeway. Nobody notices the bit of history below. Under the train tracks at the speedway intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and 58th Street in North Oakland is a salmon-colored building spanning the length of five blocks. It is the original site of Merritt College, where the Black Panthers met for the first time. Prominent leaders like Bobby Seale and Huey Newton met while organizing the Soul…
On a Monday morning, about 10 people sat around a big table in the Oakstop office, a shared working and event space in Oakland. Most of them were looking at their laptops and wearing big headphones while typing on their keyboards. One guy was talking with someone on the phone. “Okay, I’ll email you by tomorrow,” he said. Everyone was surrounded by art pieces hung on the walls. “All of the artwork within Oakstop is done by local artists of…
The soundtrack of Telegraph Avenue at 29th Street is composed of the roar of cars, trucks and the number 6 and 800 buses. There aren’t many passersby on this summery morning. A white car blaring hip hop music stops at the intersection, breaking the monotony of the traffic sounds. The driver stares to his left at a red wooden building: St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church. It’s closed. It’s 11 am on a Monday, and even God has a schedule. Meanwhile, on…
The It’s All Good Bakery smells like sweets. There are all kinds of baked goods on display, such “sock it to me cake,” “7-Up pound cake,” chocolate chip squares, coconut cake, yellow cake, banana pudding cake, and sweet potato cake. There are also Black Panther Party posters up on the wall and pictures from the civil rights movement. One of the posters says: “The Black Panther Party for Self Defense Opened the Party’s first office at this location.” In October,…