Community

Port of Oakland

If you want to know how a mouse would feel if it got caught beneath a stampede of elephants, ride your bike around the Port of Oakland at 11 o’clock on a Thursday. All sense of scale is lost against a limitless stream of 18-wheelers rumbling to pick up their cargo container. They join the half-mile line of idling trucks, with acrid fumes drifting from their smokestacks, comingling with the lung-stretching heaviness of blacktop in the sun. Santiago Diaz, from Woodland,…

Union members protest proposed construction of a Hampton Inn in downtown Oakland

Protestors chanted “Living wage, not poverty wage!” and “Downtown Oakland not for sale!” to the lively rhythm of music played by a five-piece band featuring a tuba, saxophone, trumpet and drums as they took the streets of downtown Oakland on Tuesday evening. “We’re at the site of the hopefully-never-built Hampton poverty hotel,” shouted Wei-Ling Huber, president of UNITE HERE Local 2850, into a megaphone. Organizers and members of UNITE HERE, a union that represents East Bay and North Bay hotel and…

Oakland Tech celebrates centennial

This year, Oakland Tech turned 100, and its alums have planned a celebration lasting an entire year.
The Centennial Celebration, organized by staff, students and alumni, included a gala over Memorial Day weekend, a talent show for students and alumni in February, and the creation of a book, video and website commemorating the anniversary. “This centennial was kind of a fun opportunity to show off the school and how well it’s doing, especially to its alumni, who might have become disengaged over the course of the years,” said Dan Williams, a parent of three Oakland Tech alums and a key player in the planning process for the celebration. Williams said his children “were very different, and did different things, academically were in very different places, but all had a great time,” he said. “And as I quickly found out, Tech’s an amazing school with an amazing history.”

Nia Imara sheds light on Oakland through art

Born in East Oakland and raised in the Bay Area, Imara is an astronomer and a researcher at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, holding the prestigious title of a Harvard-MIT Future Faculty Leader Postdoctoral Fellow. Not only was she was the first African American woman to get a Ph.D. in astrophysics from UC Berkeley, but she is also a self-taught painter.