The Color of Power: Racial Coalitions and Political Power in Oakland

2 Blacks Come to Power

Like many other American industrial cities, Oakland had to face severe economic , social, and political problems in the mid-1960s. As Watts burned in 1965, many experts were worried about the city’s situation, considering it the next potential candidate for urban rioting. The massive injection of federal funds limited the risk of violence in the city that nonetheless witnessed the birth of the Black Panthers. Organizing to distribute federal assistance fostered the emergence of a black leadership that, because of the unrelenting resistance of the white oligarchy in power, took a long time to win office. It was not until 1977 that blacks succeeded in coming to power. In American Babylon, Robert O. Self argued that the long postwar period was defined by three major developments which, in Oakland, overlapped and shaped one another: “the emergence, flowering, and retreat under considerable opposition, of the century’s major struggle for racial equality; the articulation of the New Deal welfare state into the fabric of urban life, economy, and politics; and a thirty-year suburban economic boom linked to a white middle-class-centered federal urban policy.”1 In the early 1960s, Oakland became a focus of national interest, for experts in the federal government as well as for academic specialists. The questions raised by Oakland’s experience in the 1960s reverberated thirty years later, at a time when economic and social problems were still just as acute and demographic changes produced new political alliances. How could the injection of so much federal money into a city turn out to be so ineffective in dealing with social and economic problems? How could the administration of federal grants by community associations empower black political activists and foster their participation in the local political system, thereby forcing the political desegregation of the city? What sort of local resistance were they faced with? 2 Blacks Come to Power 38 The Color of Power What kinds of coalitions were necessary to break racial barriers and enable a divided political minority to accede to power? What can we learn from blacks’ accession to power in the late 1970s, considering that in 1998 the mayor’s office was again won by a white candidate, Jerry Brown, who held it until 2006? Oakland, a Powder Keg? In 1968, a major participant in the program of the Economic Development Administration (EDA) published a book titled Oakland’s Not for Burning.2 The federal government, alerted to the disastrous economic and social condition of the city, particularly for minorities, had decided to assist Oakland with a massive injection of money starting in spring 1966. For the year 1968 alone, the municipal budget was $57.9 million and federal aid reached $95.5 million; adding defense budget expenditures, federal aid to the city is estimated to have been $487.4 million.3 Oakland benefited from many federal programs developed simultaneously; the two major ones were the program of the EDA and the Model Cities program . Oakland did not burn, but the ingredients for a catastrophe were present , as they were in other American cities. Oakland was in a situation of “urban crisis,” with a large and rapidly growing population of color, widespread ethnic and geographic segregation, acute tension between groups, and a high unemployment rate, particularly among minorities. The population of the city declined by 4 percent between 1950 and 1960, as the black population grew by 70 percent. In the next decade, the total population continued to decrease (by 2 percent) and the minority percentage increased by half. By 1970, nonHispanic whites were no longer an absolute majority of the city’s population. The white exodus had begun in the late 1950s, and according to the 1970 census, Oakland was tenth among cities with a population greater than 250,000 in percentage of racial minorities. The question of minorities was therefore at the heart of the concerns about the city’s future. The University of California at Berkeley used it as a laboratory and published a series of books in the 1970s as part of the Oakland Project, painting a bleak picture of the miserable results of federal assistance. It constitutes an incredibly detailed source of information on the power struggles between the federal government, municipal authorities, and emerging black power.4 In 1966, the university’s Survey Research Center considered the question of poverty and, using census figures, established the composition of the population : 55 percent non-Hispanic whites, 10 percent whites with Hispanic names, and 30 percent blacks...