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Project Diary: this is a story

James O'Brien

I'm writing a book and keeping a diary of the process, with entries about my research, interviews, discoveries and massive self-doubt. The book is a story of people surviving what at the outset appeared to be impossible to survive. It is a story of invention and discovery, of human beings at the height of their isolation and marginalization finding personal strengths they didn’t know they had and of one among them finding her greatness. To me, the story begins in the decade of the 1990s, but really much earlier than that, with a second great migration of souls out of the American south, this time farther west than the old Rust Belt, to California, to northern California, where there were jobs in the war industry, in shipping and ship building and transportation, jobs for African American men and women, better paying than what they could find in Louisiana or Texas or Arkansas. Still, if they thought they might find out west greater freedom from American oppression and segregation, they were wrong. But they needed the work, the money, so they uprooted, and came west. Many who came here settled nearby much of the available work, in West Oakland, at a time just prior to its dismantling in the name of redevelopment, when we lost a big rich chunk of the soul of our city. The first public housing project in Oakland, Campbell Village, was built in West Oakland in the late 1940s. Another West Oakland development, called the Acorn, was not intended to be public housing, but middle income housing that might attract more whites to an area of the city that had been lived in by multiple minorities. But, as the author of the recent book on Oakland redevelopment, Hella Town, says, whites had options, far more than African Americans had, and few opted to live in the Acorn, despite newspaper reports that would briefly tout the racial harmony there. Eventually, as wartime jobs that had sustained the minority residents faded away, as changes in technology and transportation reduced job opportunities for African Americans at the port and on the railways, the Acorn opened its doors to subsidized renters and morphed into what today feels like a typical housing project. West Oakland is where the incident at the crux of the story occurred and where lives the person at the center of the story.



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