the all-American city; welcome to Oakland, the ‘city of pain.’ Most of the well-to-do whites and a small number of well-to-do Negroes live in the Oakland hills . . . They look down onto a patchwork of grey . . . where the flatlands are . . . spilling over with people. The flatlands stink with decay . . . The flatlands people have had no one to speak for them.”17
Mayor Reading gave honest answers in his interview. Critics coming to voice concerns at City Council meetings would be afforded “respect, dignity and courtesy,” a decided change from mayors past. Reading understood the urgency of the situation in the spring of 1966 and squarely addressed the issue on so many people’s minds: “Is Oakland going to blow?” The Mayor acknowledged: “Unless more is done, quickly, we can have real trouble here in Oakland, anytime.”18 He admitted to the paper’s editorial board that, as a member of the establishment, he expected them to view him with suspicion.
Of course, the real power lay in the City Council majority, which remained intransigent. Nonetheless, Reading began to make inroads, working closely with African-American urban planner John Williams, the talented head of Oakland’s Urban Renewal Agency. Reading also tried to broker a compromise when Oakland’s Poverty Council and its community relations chair Judge Lionel Wilson first proposed an advisory police review board. Appointed to the bench six years earlier by Governor Pat Brown, Wilson was still the only African-American judge in the county. He had started out as a political protégé of East Bay Assemblyman William Byron Rumford, the first black elected to the state legislature. Judge Wilson’s proposal for community police review went down to defeat at the hands of the adamantly opposed City Council majority. Not until 1980 would such a review board be established — during Wilson’s tenure as Oakland’s first black mayor.
While Oakland remained free of any major incidents in the summer of 1966, riots broke out in San Francisco as well as Chicago, Brooklyn, Cleveland and Louisville. As in Watts in 1965, what prompted four days of looting and burning of warehouses in San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point and the Fillmore District that September was a single inflammatory incident. This time it was the death of an unarmed sixteen-year-old named Matthew Johnson, whom a policeman had shot as a suspected car thief. When officers arrived to stop the looting that followed, they faced sniper fire. Rumors spread that militant blacks in Oakland were stockpiling homemade Molotov cocktails and stashes of arms to launch similar violence. Federal officials worried that it might not prove feasible to save Oakland from exploding next.
West Oakland community leader Curtis Baker was among the original doubters who came to trust Mayor Reading to represent the community in convincing the EDA and Department of Commerce in Washington that devoting federal resources to a multi-million dollar jobs program in Oakland was worth the risk. Baker distributed mimeographed flyers urging others to keep the faith. The Flatlands paper soon folded for lack of funds, but the federal jobs program went forward. In the summer of 1967 when riots erupted in cities across country, remarkably, none happened in Oakland. At about the same time, Mayor Reading lured a major league baseball team, the Kansas City A’s, to Oakland beginning with the 1968 season, and decided he would run for election.
The widespread riots during the “long, hot summer” of 1967 prompted President Johnson to order a blue ribbon panel to study its root causes. Chaired by Illinois governor Otto Kerner, the commission and the report it produced were both commonly referred to by his last name. The Kerner Report, which became a best-selling book, zeroed in on the lack of diversity in police forces across the country as a major societal problem. The panel placed most of the blame for urban unrest on “[w]hite racism . . . for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.”19 The panel also criticized the press for reporting the news through “white men’s eyes.” It warned that the nation was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal” and proposed controversial major investments in the nation’s inner cities like the pilot jobs program in Oakland.20
Lyndon Johnson made the war on poverty a top priority, but the home front was only one crisis he faced in the fall of 1967. The other was escalating opposition to a war in Vietnam that was looking less and less winnable. What grew most worrisome for Washington was the convergence of the two anti-establishment movements — mostly white war protesters and mixed-race civil rights demonstrators. FBI Director Hoover became especially alarmed in April 1967 when Reverend King called for the United States to declare a unilateral cease fire in Vietnam and bring the troops back home to promote justice and “the service of peace.”21
By this time, Hoover considered the gifted orator the most dangerous man in America. Now King was openly using his moral authority to pressure the federal government to end the war and redirect those same resources to address longstanding civil rights grievances at home. More radical activists, including SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael, echoed — and amplified — the sentiments of King’s speeches. Carmichael derided the war as “white people sending black people to make war on yellow people in order to defend the land they stole from red people.”22 In their first public statement in May 1967, the Panthers similarly condemned the war as an act of racist colonialism mirroring centuries of genocidal practices at home.23
Starting in the fall of 1964 when protesters on the Berkeley campus launched the Free Speech Movement (“FSM”), students joined with outside activists to turn the public against the war in Southeast Asia by staging numerous sit-ins, marches and teach-ins. They also plotted aggressive action to disrupt the arrival of troop trains at the Oakland Army Terminal. All the while, the FBI was not only tracking FSM leaders closely, it had embedded agents in the Movement. Journalist Seth Rosenfeld’s best-selling 2012 book, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power, focused particularly on the FBI’s activities at the University of California vis-à-vis the FSM in the 1960s. Rosenfeld says: “One of the most surprising findings in my research was the extent to which the FBI had infiltrated every level of the campus community, from student organizations to faculty to administrators to the Board of Regents.”
The lead lawyers later involved in Huey Newton’s defense were among the radical members of the Old and New Left the FBI had already been tracking. In the early sixties the FBI focused on East Bay’s Friends of SNCC, headed by Jessica Mitford’s daughter. It was one of the primary fundraisers for SNCC in the country. The FBI also maintained a file on the San Francisco Lawyers Guild, which sent lawyer volunteers to help staff Freedom Summer in Mississippi and Alabama in 1964 to register black voters and defend arrested civil rights workers. So when the Free Speech Movement began in the fall of 1964, the FBI was already keeping dossiers on the activists who would lead it.
The Free Speech Movement started out nearly all white — in Berkeley, you could then count African-American student activists on the fingers of two hands. Students on college campuses across the country soon began staging hundreds of their own protests, as did activists in the nation’s largest cities. Filling a role that radical bloggers would assume several decades later, new underground newspapers like The Berkeley Barb and San Francisco’s The Movement ran stories that countered, and often ridiculed, establishment media coverage of erupting anti-war activity.
The third week of October 1967 marked a major, two-pronged initiative. In coordination with a planned march on the Pentagon, a coalition of Bay Area activists launched “Stop the Draft Week” — several days of massive demonstrations designed to shut down the Oakland Induction Center, one of the largest such facilities on the Pacific Coast. The police geared up too, with all officers assigned to 12-hour shifts for 24-hour coverage in anticipation of a major assault on the induction center. On the first day, some three thousand protesters blocked the center’s entrance, leading to more than a hundred arrests. The following day twice as many demonstrators blocked the doorway and the surrounding streets. An estimated 250 Oakland police, sheriff’s deputies and highway patrolmen broke through and dispersed the crowd, spraying mace and swinging batons in a bloody confrontation that injured many protestors.
The stand-off with white students amazed West Oakland blacks who had thought head-bashing was not something police did to whites. It also surprised them to see privileged college students standing up to the police to risk injury for a cause they believed in. Belva Davis covered