Oakland

West Oakland entered the twentieth century as the premier Black community west of the Mississippi River. Pullman Porters anchored a Black middle class at 16th Street Station, and the 7th Street corridor from the 1920s through the 1940s supported more than fifteen jazz and blues clubs that earned the neighborhood the name the Harlem of the West. C.L. Dellums and A. Philip Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters out of their Pacific Coast headquarters on 7th Street in 1925. Slim Jenkins opened his Supper Club the day Prohibition ended in 1933.

State and federal infrastructure projects dismantled that neighborhood in three overlapping waves. The Cypress Street Viaduct opened in June 1957 as California’s first double-deck freeway, routing the new expressway through the residential grid and displacing 600 families. Five years later, the Oakland Redevelopment Agency cleared approximately 50 blocks in the Acorn Urban Renewal Project, demolishing roughly 600 dwellings and scattering approximately 9,000 residents. The U.S. Postal Service razed 12 blocks for a distribution center around 1960. BART elevated tracks silenced the remaining live-music venues on 7th Street. I-980 took another 503 houses, 4 churches, and 22 businesses between 1968 and 1985. By the time the freeways finished, West Oakland was encircled: I-880 on the west and south, I-980 on the east, I-580 on the north.

The Loma Prieta earthquake collapsed 1.25 miles of the Cypress Viaduct on October 17, 1989, killing 42 people. The community organized immediately. The Citizens Emergency Relief Team, led by West Oakland residents, proposed rerouting the replacement freeway around the neighborhood rather than through it. Caltrans accepted that route in January 1992. The Title VI settlement that followed required the conversion of the former Cypress corridor into a landscaped boulevard. Mandela Parkway opened in 2005, and the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, co-founded by Margaret Gordon and Brian Beveridge in 2004, used the organizing model to cut the neighborhood’s cancer risk from air pollution by 54 percent by 2025.

The essay under this city documents the three waves of destruction, the three organized responses, and the present-day fight over I-980 removal now under study by Caltrans.