Recent days digging into the Oakland History Center files were pleasantly overwhelming and historically depressing. The History Room at the main Oakland Public Library downtown has big filing cabinets full of hanging files crammed with old newspaper clippings and other odd documents gathered over the years – fliers, brochures, reports -- organized by subject, city sections, years. Every folder on West Oakland is full of plans for its revitalization, as early as the 1940s, and each plan implies the failure of the last, right up until the current mess. You begin to feel that none of it means anything and that history surely means nothing. Flip through the files on West Oakland and you get story after story, study after study, on its deterioration and its coming revitalization, through new zoning, new housing replacing old, new construction, new law enforcement approaches. Among the construction projects, the big ones, you find little that really had to do with West Oakland in particular. There’s the Cypress Freeway, the Bart Station and its above-ground tracks dwarfing the perfectly-scaled buildings of 7th Street, and finally, the worst one of them all, the massive, ugly, postal distribution center and its surrounding parking lots. Superficially, the files are full of optimism for each new plan, but I think much of it is false, boosterism at best but at worst the files are rife with opportunism for those unconnected to West Oakland, for the contractors doing the building, for the jobs that will go to outsiders, for the thousands of cars that will huff along the freeway and passengers who will stare out the train windows as they pass. The observer is supposed to assume these projects will somehow make West Oakland safer, cleaner, healthier but it is not always clear why that would be. The files are also full of quitting, of failure, of shifting strategies prematurely, of giving up on West Oakland and especially on its residents, of pushing them around. M comes from a place where people got pushed around. For me personally, it is particularly poignant to see items dated only a month or less before or after Khadafy’s murder, to see what the mood was, what the issues were at that time that were on people’s minds who didn’t want to think about violence and death.
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