Blacks Are Pushed Out Of Black Oakland
While African Americans in Oakland have been steadily displaced by gentrification, others who remain are treated like criminals in their own hometown.
Oakland was a critical destination for African American families migrating from the south in the 1940s, a home to a “Harlem of the West” jazz and blues scene in the 1950s and the birthplace of the the Black Panther party in the 1960s.
The government, however, systematically devastated the city’s black communities throughout the 20th century. Officials constructed freeways, train tracks and federal buildings that literally destroyed homes and tore neighborhoods apart. Federal “redlining” practices embedded racial inequality and segregation into the city’s development, with banks allowing wealthy white communities to flourish while denying home ownership to black families. A corrupt police agency brutalized and jailed innocent black citizens.
SOURCE ⇒ THEGUARDIAN
