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| 69 2 Trying to Get up the Hill “What I see in Oakland is everyone doing this shift up the hill.” Liz Walker explained that parents in the Laurel district often drove their kids up to Montclair Recreation Center in a wealthy enclave in the hills and tried to get their children into schools farther up the hill. Families from the flatlands did the same thing, coming into the lower hills to find safe spaces and schools for their kids. “Everybody’s trying to get up, up, and up. . . . I don’t want to drive my kid up the hill for everything. Why don’t we have anything going on right here?” Liz and Robert Walker first moved to the Laurel district in 1991, happy and surprised to find a house they could afford in this “vibrant neighborhood ” in the lower hills. When they first drove through the neighborhood of small bungalow houses and storefronts, Robert thought, “Oh my God, look at this.” There was everything they might need along MacArthur Boulevard: a bank, a veterinarian, a drugstore, a karate studio, a hardware store, and a couple of restaurants. Soon the World Ground Café opened and quickly became a new center of community life. Robert, a tall and lanky African American man in his late thirties, with dreadlocks grown just to his ears, was raised in a mostly white neighborhood in San Francisco and marveled at finding “a true black community” with a thriving black middle class in Oakland. An interracial couple raising a young son, Robert and Liz particularly appreciated that the Laurel district seemed like a racially mixed, but stable neighborhood “where people were settling down and staying.” As Liz, a white woman in her late thirties, explained, “We seem to have a pretty diverse working-class population that isn’t necessarily going to be displaced. It’s not all black and turning white. It’s mixed.” Liz and Robert bought a house right next to Laurel Elementary School, where they saw on a daily basis the effects of Oakland’s decaying public infrastructure on children and youth. The Laurel school had only one old kindergarten play structure for its five hundred students and no organized afterschool recreation program. The school yard was often “packed with kids after 70 | Trying to Get up the Hill school, but there was no instructor, no balls, no bats, nothing to do.” Robert bought three basketballs and told the kids where to find them next to his house. They could borrow them as long as they kept bringing them back. “I have become a Rec director just by having balls and bats. That’s what gave me entree to the kids. If they are cutting up, smoking or drinking, I am going to come out, and I am going to have a lot to say. But they also know that I’m not going to call the cops on them unless they are doing something highly illegal.” Robert became frustrated with the complaints of many neighborhood merchants about “all the kids, walking up and down the street.” He imitated an older business owner, his voice dripping with indignation: “They walk into my business, spending money. . . .” In his own voice, Robert explained, “Well, at least they are spending some money. People don’t want kids around, that’s what I see. Especially when they’re not their kids, and they tend to be black and brown. There is just ‘a problem.’” He asked merchants, “If you don’t want them around, where do you want them? What do you want them to do?” “The answer was deafening silence, which meant to me that a lot of people come out to attack these kids, but when it came down to tangible solutions, no one was talking tangible solutions. Let’s look at our neighborhood . There is nothing for these kids to do.” “We’ve lost a couple of generations in Oakland.” Unless they went to school in the hills, Robert explained, children in Oakland had been “robbed of education” and now risked being tossed aside by the wave of gentrification sweeping across the city. Liz added, “They just haven’t had a thing in schools. It’s just stripped down to nothing. It’s pitiful. It’s just disgusting. It makes me so angry. And of course, the people that suffer the most are people of color.” Liz and Robert both became deeply engaged in the local public schools and in trying to rebuild...

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