East Bay Yesterday

Looking back to the West Oakland of his childhood during the World War II era, Ed Howard remembers a place where kids felt safe roaming the streets, Black businesses thrived along 7th Street, and a flood of newcomers from the South created a prosperous, tight-knit community. His own memories present a jarring contrast to the contemporary media’s portrayal of this neighborhood as a dangerous slum. “Any time they see a group of Black people together, they say it’s bad,” Ed recalled. “But me and my friends weren’t bad. And Oakland isn’t bad.”

From his early days as community organizer based in DeFremery Park, Ed was motivated to challenge these negative messages, and as he climbed each level of his career ladder, he brought friends from his community with him. After becoming one of the first Black mechanical engineers at Kaiser Industries, he created a program to train and hire more Black workers, a model that was soon adopted by other local companies in the 1960s. Ed went on to produce “Black Dignity,” one of the first TV talk shows hosted by an African American. His resume doesn’t end there: Ed built a thriving nightclub in East Oakland, he created a consulting firm to help launch other Black businesses, he directed a documentary about Ron Dellums, and he even invented a comb specifically designed for Black hair. Now, at the age of 84, Ed is running the West Oakland Stories Positive Feeling Movement, a local history project aimed at countering persistently derogatory narratives about his home town.

In this episode, Ed Howard shares the life lessons that informed his philosophy of positivity. Considering the seemingly nonstop barrage of horrific news that we’re all now constantly bombarded with, I’ll admit I was a little skeptical at first, but Ed won me over with his pragmatic optimism. If you’re feeling depressed, cynical, and frustrated, listening to Ed share the wisdom he’s gained from overcoming countless challenges might just give you a glimmer of hope.

You can learn more about West Oakland Positive Feeling Movement and donate here: http://westoaklandstories.org/

Instead of waiting around for a solution to California’s housing crisis, about a decade ago Violet Thorns decided to move into one of the hundreds of vacant homes scattered throughout Oakland. During the Occupy era, she was part of a loose network of dozens of squats, but since then nearly all of those were evicted as local property values soared. After her community crumbled, Violet found herself living in a squalid, burned out building with no money and few resources. As a trans woman she was desperate to remain in the Bay Area, despite not being able to afford this region’s astronomical rents. Then one day, she noticed a vacant lot on a residential street that was so overgrown with fennel that she knew the owners hadn’t been there for years.

Today’s episode is about how Violet built a tiny home and a thriving garden on that abandoned land and gotten away with living there for nearly eight years without paying rent. Listen now to hear about the rise and fall of an anarchic squatting scene, how to deal with angry landlords, the Gold Rush-era laws squatters use to stave off evictions, guerilla gardening tips, and much more.

See photos related to this episode at: https://eastbayyesterday.com/episodes/how-to-not-pay-rent/

East Bay Yesterday can’t survive without your support. Please donate to keep this show alive: www.patreon.com/eastbayyesterday

Growing up in West Oakland during the 1940s, Evangeline Canonizado Buell remembers the neighborhood as “a melting pot of… adobo, linguisa, tamales, blues, and jazz.” From an early age, this child of Filipino immigrants learned how to connect with her Black, Portuguese, Mexican, Greek and Japanese neighbors through food and music, skills that she later built into careers as a guitar teacher, historian, and program coordinator for the Berkeley Co-Op. Her memoir, “Twenty-Five Chickens and a Pig for a Bride,” intertwines her personal journey of overcoming abuse and discrimination with the growth of California’s Filipino community, mixing tantalizing stories of backyard pig roasts with infuriating memories of racist harassment.

In this episode, Evangeline shares some of the wisdom, humor, and music that she’s accumulated throughout her nine decades living in the East Bay. Listen now to hear a conversation that covers everything from the agricultural origins of Bay Farm Island to the long legacy of the Spanish-American War. See photos related to this episode at: https://eastbayyesterday.com/episodes/they-wouldnt-sell-us-rice/

East Bay Yesterday can’t survive without your support. Please donate to keep this show alive: www.patreon.com/eastbayyesterday

Why has Oakland produced so many all-star athletes? This is the question that propels Paul Brekke-Miesner’s book “Home Field Advantage: The City That Changed the Face of Sports” through decades of local history, from the playgrounds to stadiums. His exploration helps explain not only the origins of this highly concentrated pool of athletic ability, but also why so many local stars have used their visibility to call attention to social struggles, long before Colin Kaepernick famously took a knee to protest police violence.

An Oakland native who grew up playing ball in the Eastmont neighborhood and began covering sports at Castlemont High more than half a century ago, Brekke-Miesner brings deep knowledge about such iconic athletes as Bill Russell, Ricky Henderson, Frank Robinson, Curt Flood and many others to our conversation in this episode. Along the way, we also discuss the impact of Prop. 13 on youth sports, some very unlikely superstars, and why The Town might be better off without the billionaire owners who keep breaking our hearts. To see photos related to this episode, visit: https://eastbayyesterday.com/episodes/from-playgrounds-to-the-pros/

East Bay Yesterday can’t survive without your support. Please donate to keep this show alive: www.patreon.com/eastbayyesterday

Although most “blaxploitation” flicks from the 1970s were action thrillers, “The Mack” feels more like a documentary. The film was shot on location in pool halls, barber shops and speakeasies throughout Oakland and features real people, not professional actors, as extras. But the driving force of the film’s authenticity came from the Ward Brothers, a family of pimps who dominated the Bay Area’s underground sex trade during this era. The movie’s protagonist, Goldie, was modeled on Frank Ward, the crew’s charismatic leader, and the rest of the brothers lent their clothes, cars, and expertise to the production, which was filmed on a shoestring budget.

Immortalized by dozens of rap hits that sampled the film’s streetwise dialogue and funky soundtrack, “The Mack” went on to become a cult classic that’s still relevant five decades after its release. However, Frank Ward never got to enjoy the film he inspired – along with Blanche Bernard, he was murdered in October 1972, sparking a persistent rumor that the Black Panthers were involved in his assassination. Now, on the 50th anniversary of this unsolved crime, Oakland native Chloe Sylvers has published “The Fabulous Ward Brothers,” the first book to explore the real origins of this family’s brief empire, investigate the double homicide that shattered them, and separate facts from sensationalized myths. Listen now to hear how she tracked down the story of “the original macks.”

To see more photos related to this episode, visit: https://eastbayyesterday.com/episodes/they-were-real-macks/

East Bay Yesterday can’t survive without your support. Please donate to keep this show alive: www.patreon.com/eastbayyesterday

In many ways, Berkeley is a city defined by dichotomies. The hills and the flatlands, academia and industry, counterculture and The Establishment. Despite the city’s progressive reputation, Berkeley has never been a monolithic place. The tensions between conflicting political and cultural forces are what have made it so dynamic and unique.

Although Berkeley’s reputation will forever be tied to the student uprisings of the 1960s, the century or so leading up to those conflicts is just as fascinating. Charles Wollenberg wrote the definitive book on Berkeley’s early years, “Berkeley: A City in History” (UC Press) and on today’s episode we cover major milestones between the Gold Rush and the Great Depression. Listen now to hear about Berkeley’s first businesses, a socialist mayor, some very ironic squatters, Bernard Maybeck, single family zoning laws, Phoebe Hearst, a boozy urban legend, and even an extremely symbolic sword fight. To see photos related to this episode, visit: https://eastbayyesterday.com/episodes/a-new-pacific-frontier/

East Bay Yesterday can’t survive without your support. Please donate to keep this show alive: www.patreon.com/eastbayyesterday

Some cities were founded by warriors, prophets, or idealistic visionaries. The man who established Oakland was an unscrupulous lawyer looking to get rich quick. This 1877 newspaper quote captures the sentiment shared by many residents about The Town’s first mayor: “If the early settlers had taken Horace W. Carpentier to a convenient tree and hung him, as they frequently threatened to do, the act would have been beneficial to immediate posterity.”

Featuring an interview with local historian and author Dennis Evanosky, this episode travels back to Oakland’s origins to explore what made our founding father such a widely detested villain. See photos related to this episode here: https://eastbayyesterday.com/episodes/he-stole-the-town/

East Bay Yesterday can’t survive without your support. Please donate to keep this show alive: www.patreon.com/eastbayyesterday

In 1968, an exhibition titled “New Perspectives in Black Art” opened in the Kaiser Center Gallery of the Oakland Museum. The show was curated by Evangeline “E.J.” Montgomery, a woman who was at the nucleus of the West Coast’s vibrant Black Arts movement during that radical era. According to Montgomery, the “New Perspectives” collection was “the first time that a Black Arts association has organized and set up their own art exhibit in a museum of this size.”

Now, more than five decades later, Oakland-raised radio producer Babette Thomas is revisiting the life and legacy of E.J. Montgomery in a new season of SFMOMA’s Raw Material podcast called “Visions of Black Futurity.” Across seven episodes, Thomas will explore the local roots of the Black Arts movement to understand how this often overlooked past could inform the kind of future they want to see, a future of Black creative expression released from the limitations of traditional art institutions. Explaining why they chose to focus this series on E.J. Montgomery, Thomas explained, “Black Art was her language, and she used it to advocate for the role and work of Black artists and ensure that Black art was accessible to the communities to whom it mattered to the most.”

Listen to the podcast now to hear episode one of Raw Material’s “Visions of Black Futurity” and an interview with Babette Thomas covering what they discovered about the history of California Black Arts while making this series.

See photos related to this episode here: https://eastbayyesterday.com/episodes/black-art-was-her-language/

More about Raw Material: https://www.sfmoma.org/raw-material-a-podcast-from-sfmoma/

East Bay Yesterday can’t survive without your support. Please donate to keep this show alive: www.patreon.com/eastbayyesterday

The Bay Area’s status as a rock & roll mecca may have peaked during the psychedelic sixties, but the party didn’t stop after the hippies took the flowers out of their hair. Following the height of the Haight-Ashbury scene, a wild diversity of styles and iconic performers continued to emerge from this region’s clubs, cafes, and even churches. These locations are compiled in “Rock and Roll Explorer Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area,” a new book that traces the rise of groups ranging from The Pointer Sisters to Primus by literally following in these superstars’ footsteps.

This episode features an interview with authors Mike Katz and Crispin Kott about the geographic history of Bay Area rock & roll and also explores the profound ways this terrain has shifted over the past few decades. If you want to hear about how they tracked down all the East Bay landmarks mentioned in Green Day lyrics, why Metallica ditched L.A. for the Bay, and much more, listen to the full episode.

To see photos related to this episode, visit: https://eastbayyesterday.com/episodes/more-than-just-the-1960s/

East Bay Yesterday can’t survive without your support. Please donate to keep this show alive: www.patreon.com/eastbayyesterday

In the early 20th century, the largest employer of Black men in the United States was the Pullman Car Company, which operated luxurious trains that carried millions of passengers around the booming nation in an era before airplanes and interstate highways. Ever since the company’s founding during the Civil War, Pullman exclusively hired Black men as porters to keep the train cars clean and serve the white passengers. Although the job was prestigious, by the 1920s porters were fed up with the low pay, long hours, and abusive conditions. Their struggle to unionize became one of the most significant civil rights conflicts of the pre-WWII era and laid the groundwork for the movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. in later years.

This episode explores how Oakland’s C.L. Dellums helped the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters triumph over one of the nation’s most powerful corporations, and also his massive impact on challenging widespread racial discrimination throughout California. Dellums helped open jobs in wartime industries up for Black workers, setting the stage for the “second great migration” on the West Coast; he organized early protests against police brutality; and he helped end widespread racial segregation among powerful labor unions. His goal was nothing short of “total freedom and equality.”

Today’s guest is Susan D. Anderson, the History Curator and Program Manager at the California African American Museum, and the author of a forthcoming book on California’s Black history. This episode also features a segment from the Black Liberation Walking Tour which includes the voices of C.L. Dellums and his daughter Marva. See photos and more information about this episode here: https://eastbayyesterday.com/episodes/the-porters-were-fed-up/

East Bay Yesterday can’t survive without your support. Please donate to keep this show alive: www.patreon.com/eastbayyesterday