Roots For The Future

By Jamilah King, February 20, 2008

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West Oakland, California's Black New World club forges a fresh artistic community in the shadows of a once-thriving district.

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It's just past midnight and the crowd at Black New World wants an encore. Dynamic, the band that's been playing soul and funk music all night, climbs back onto a small stage that's decorated with African masks and an altar. Beneath the lead singer's confident smile and olive skin is just the slightest hint of uncertainty at what this last performance might entail. To her left is the drummer, whose energy seems as free-falling as the dreads hanging loosely down his back. He starts up the baseline and the others follow.

Toward the front of the stage, 30 to 40 people are gathered, everyone finding their own rhythm. Soon it's hard to tell who's part of the band and who isn't as singers, beat boxers and drummers make their way to the stage, some who have just come in from the rain for their own impromptu solo performance.

Half an hour later, the only person sitting is one little boy at the front of the crowd. His head is nodding, despite the music, and big brown curls fall down the front of his face. He's been dancing too hard.

Inspired movement and music are just some of the creative outgrowths to blossom at West Oakland, Ca.'s Black New World community arts space. The venue is a testament to one man's convictions and a resurgent neighborhood's cultural history.

Black Dot Collective

The Black New World Social Aid and Pleasure Society, as it's formally known, is part of a larger vision of community revival and self-healing. More than just a performance venue, Black New World is also a mutual aid society where members pool together their resources to buy local real estate in the area before developers and culturally curious white folks beat them to the punch.

At BNW's philosophical and organizational center is artist and organizer Marcel Diallo, who, along with his supporters, is working hard to build a black-owned cultural district.

Diallo has previously described the area as the black equivalent to Oakland's Chinatown or the Fruitvale district, which is home to the city's vibrant Latino community. Already, they're making tremendous strides: in addition to Black New World and the Black Dot Café, the collective recently opened a bakery, Ghetto Boutique Flowers and have pooled their resources together to purchase 13 properties in the area.

"Your life should be your greatest work of art," says Diallo, working in his garden one afternoon. "When we started the Black Dot Collective, it wasn't just so that artists could perform or so that activists could be loud. It's all interchangeable -- that's what the Black Dot theory is about."

The Black Dot theory roughly refers to the collective unconscious and the belief that black people worldwide share a common struggle. It's a struggle Diallo has embraced throughout his years as a poet, visionary and community activist.

Diallo grew up between Richmond and West Oakland, and was the first in his family to go to college. It was after he earned his degree in philosophy from Cal Poly in 1995 and returned home that his vision for a black-owned cultural district began to take shape. Slowly, he accumulated property in the area from relatives and investments.

He's also a controversial figure. While his efforts are largely heralded as being against gentrification, he disagrees. "I'm not against gentrification," he says. "I'm riding gentrification like a seven-headed horse."

In a move that seemed contradictory to many, Diallo formed an alliance with local developer Rick Holiday. In his mind, it seemed like a useful way to have more community influence on multimillion dollar development. Still, the move raised more than a few eyebrows.

"Gentrification is more complicated than just saying it's us against them," he says. "Part of this whole process is to challenge ourselves to get out of our dichotomous ways of thinking. Black people left The Bottoms [West Oakland] long before gentrification was an issue, mainly because we were afraid of ourselves -- crack hit, and then the violence started, and we didn't know what to do. So we left."

After waving to a neighbor, he adds, "What [the community] is really asking for is a return of the black gentry, a return to the days of the 1940s and '50's when The Bottoms was all black and people were just having fun." Diallo understands that Black New World's present and future are intimately linked to West Oakland's past.

The Black Gentry

There's a black and white photograph on the wall at the Black New World of two women on their way out for a night of fun at one of the local blues clubs. The women are Diallo's great aunts, who moved to West Oakland in the 1940s to work in the nearby shipyards. The caption beneath the picture reads "Bottoms up!"

"We're building off of what they started," Marcel says.

Another popular club of the era was the Continental Club. Today, it still stands, quietly, and plays hosts mainly to private functions like Quinceañeras and wedding parties. Yet in its heyday, it hosted dozens of legendary blues artists, from Etta James and Marvin Gaye to The Whispers and Big Mama Thornton.

The club's owner, Curtis Christy, has managed the venue for 65 years. He recounts the club's beginnings with excitement, explaining how he and his brother came from their farm in Baton Rouge, La. to Oakland in the late '40s with big dreams. They first opened Christy's Grill, a small one room restaurant, and then expanded to a two-story building with a large stage, dance floor and three bars. They called the remodeled venue Rum Boogie and hosted scores of legendary black performers and black patrons who weren't allowed into white clubs.

"Cars and limousines would be lined up all the way down the block," Christy remembers, "and people would come from all over to dance. Everyone loved it."

Christy and Diallo's great aunts were just a few of the thousands who came to Oakland in a wave of black migration during World War II. In what was known as The Great Migration, thousands of black Southerners came west in search of jobs in nearby shipyards and factories that helped maintain the war effort.

They also came trying to escape the racism of the Jim Crow South.

"It was the daily grind of [racism] that got to us," Christy says. "Like white salesmen refusing to buy your produce. It ate away at your spirit."

As families settled into their new community, they brought blues music with them. Along with the Continental Club were other popular venues like Esther's Orbit Room and Slim Jenkins' Place that lined Seventh street, a long stretch of road that became the heart of West Oakland.

West Oakland was also home to the West Coast branch of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), led by Marcus Garvey. The UNIA center was housed on Eighth and Chester Streets, just a few blocks away from where Black New World currently sits, and was symbolic of the cultural and political activity of the era. By the 1930s, the area was the thriving home of nearly a quarter of a million residents.

Everybody's Angry

Once the war effort ended and the U.S. was seen as a new superpower, conservatism swept the country. Deindustrialization led to factory closures, and jobs disappeared. Factories moved to the Southern Hemisphere, where the cost of production was cheaper and labor standards were lower. New Deal legislation was overturned, and Urban Renewal began to take shape. Black urban residents throughout the U.S. lost their homes or had their apartments demolished as city blocks were leveled to clear the way for government housing projects. According to author Mindy Thompson Fullilove's book Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It, since the inception of urban renewal programs in the 1940s, over 1,600 black communities around the country have been removed.

In West Oakland, the story was no different. Acres along the once-thriving Seventh street were removed to make room for a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train station. The Cypress Freeway was built to connect with the Bay Bridge and bring commuters into San Francisco, effectively cutting West Oakland in two and isolating it from the city's downtown.

Slim Jenkins eventually moved his establishment out of West Oakland to nearby Jack London square at the urging of influential white patrons.

"Biggest mistake he ever could have made," says Christy. "It wasn't the same after that, and eventually he just shut down."

Residents fought back against the destruction of their community. It was out of the struggle against urban renewal and police brutality that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966.

"They made a lot of noise," remembers Christy. "It seemed like Newton really had some sense, and when he acted, people followed."

From the late-60s through the late-80s, urban decay, drugs and neglect plagued West Oakland. But there were even bigger shake-ups yet to come.

Getting Organized

On October 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake hit Northern California. The 7.0 temblor hit at 5:04 p.m., the height of rush hour traffic, and the results were devastating: 67 people died and nearly 4,000 were injured, in addition to costing millions of dollars in property damage. The most devastating effects were felt in West Oakland where the double-decker Cypress Freeway collapsed, killing 42 people and injuring dozens more as commuters drove through rush hour traffic.

But out of West Oakland's rubble arose new possibilities. The freeway may have been a necessary thoroughfare for commuters, but it was an eyesore and virtual death trap for the community surrounding it.

"Although we were devastated after the earthquake, the freeway definitely wasn't missed," says Oakland City Councilwoman and 30-year West Oakland resident Nancy Nadel. "The bottom of it was dark and dirty, filled with junk dealers and car parts places. The entire freeway basically served as a wall separating two halves of West Oakland, not to mention the toxic pollutants all those cars and trucks spewed into our neighborhood," Nadel remembers.

Nadel, along with her late husband Chapelle Hayes, current Port Commissioner Margaret Gordon and dozens of other community members embarked on an ambitious environmental justice campaign to get the freeway rebuilt along industrial land, away from residences and schools.

The campaign also educated the community about the hazards of living among environmental toxins. "We had local rap acts come and perform concerts to teach our youth about what toxins in our air can do," Nadel remembers. "It was a good way to get the vocabulary of environmental justice into young people's consciousness at a time when very few people were talking about it."

The freeway was eventually rebuilt farther away from the residential part of the neighborhood. The area where the old Cypress once stood eventually became Mandela Parkway, a stretch of freshly paved roadway that connects to the nearby Emeryville shopping district. While the parkway undoubtedly gave a much needed face-lift to the area, some worry that it opened the doors to modern gentrification by showing money-hungry developers what the area could be with an influx of cash.

"Mandela Parkway definitely caught the eyes of developers whose eyes lit up when they saw a big piece of real estate, but it alone isn't responsible for the gentrification that's already happened in West Oakland," Nadel says. "Blame that on vague zoning language by city officials," she says.

The Wayans Brothers have expressed interest in building a studio in the area. They have been in talks with city officials, who are optimistic about the plans. "We hope that the plans can bring good blue collar union jobs to the area, like set designers," Nadel says. Still, West Oakland faces challenges before a new renaissance can take place.

The '80s Babies Dilemma

To many current residents of West Oakland, the stories of the '30s and '40s are interesting to hear, but don't resonate. Unemployment is high and violent crime is a reality of everyday life. Although the murder rate has been in decline in recent years, 2007 still saw over 100 people murdered. Most of the victims were young and black.

"I've lived in this community for 17 years," says a woman who preferred not to give her name, "and the violence is terrible." When asked what she likes about her community, she says "I don't. These '80s babies are tearing it up and wreaking havoc on the rest of us."

Amid all the finger pointing, the '80s babies seem to be conspicuously absent from the people leading the discussion.

"Everybody's angry," Christy says. "These kids are angry, the government's angry, our world is an angry place. I'm angry." He says he's never heard of the Black New World, or the Black Dot Collective.

Christy recounts how he tried to open the Continental up to hip-hop shows in the early '90s, but the crowds grew too raucous, so he put a stop to the events.

"I can't deal with that hip-hop," Christy says. "It seems like these kids don't know how to act." While generational differences may cause some friction, there are encouraging signs growing elsewhere in the neighborhood.

The Black New World is exclusive in its own right. The crowd is mainly comprised of professional artists, musicians and community organizers. Diallo, however, sees potential to reach a younger audience.

"Right now, we're working with people who are in their mid-30s or older. A lot of people are jaded in their ways, not able to see a new future," he says.

He continues, "Lately, I've been vibing with folks who are 10 and 13 years younger than me" he says. Then he laughs, "I'm so ahead of my time, only younger people can see my vision."

Sele Nadel Hayes, an '80s baby and lifelong West Oakland resident, sees the need for intergenerational and interfaith alliances. "We have the largest Methodist and Baptist churches in Oakland right here. People who've left the community because of violence come back every Sunday," she says. "Every week there's a line of Buicks and fancy Sunday hats," she laughs.

Diallo, who recently started performing with his band after a lengthy hiatus, has grown frustrated in recent months. He's tired of being portrayed as just an activist, when he feels the art he creates is his greatest work. He's grown weary of the attention and says that the his garden, and the spiritual aspect of his work, are most important.

When asked when he began his garden, he pauses. His small sons, seated nearby, are busy with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Finally, the oldest, a six year old, says, "One hundred billion zillion years ago," Diallo smiles.

"This all began long before I got here," he says. "If it comes to it, I'll just let all crumble to the ground, then start all over."

Jamilah King is Wiretap's contributing editor.