Brahinsky - A Peoples Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area

You might begin in West Oakland, a place that reflects a remarkable spectrum of the Bay Areas culture and politics, its historical contradictions and challenges, and perhaps its hope for the future. Traverse these streets and youll see Victorian cottages hand-built by workers in the late nineteenth century. Youll pass by community gardens where locals are claiming their right to urban spaces while remaking the meaning of urbanism. Youll maneuver streets where midcentury urban redevelopment tore through, devastating the neighborhood, and where people responded by building movements calling for self-determination and community control that echoed around the world.

In wandering here, you will inevitably intersect with the BART train tracks, as they swoop from under the San Francisco Bay, shuttling thousands daily into San Francisco and out to the east county suburbs. In the distance, you can probably see some of the cranes at the Port of Oakland, the Bay Areas stalwart economic gateway to the world. You may notice tent camps under the freeway overpasses or in the in-between places where uneven development has produced gaps in the urban fabric. Not far from where houseless folks find shelter, youll also see slickly painted homes with high-end cars and new fences. These are the now-ubiquitous poles of the Bay Areas economic extremes, visible block to block.

You cant see it today, but if youd looked down 7th Street toward the San Francisco Bay a century ago, you would have been facing the last stop on the first transcontinental railroad. That train looms large in narratives of the conquest of the West and the fortunes that it brought to the rapacious capitalists known as the Big Four (Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins, and Crocker, the core investors and figureheads of the Central Pacific Railroad). Ultimately, however, the majority of the people that these trains carried to the Bay AreaChinese, Black, and working-class whitesrepresent a very different narrative about this place.

Here in West Oakland, for example, youll be treading the same ground walked by the African American employees of the Pullman Company, who in the 1920s organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It was the first Black-run union chartered by the AFL-CIO and a bedrock in the development of neighborhoods like this one. Its presence on these streets helped create the historical possibility for social justice movements years later, like the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, and the contemporary Movement for Black Lives. This historical legacy still lives in these streets; it is part of why these blocks hold places where antiforeclosure activism has had some success, with residents banding together to save each others homes from predatory bank actions, building community organizations for broader resilience along the way.