It’s the Stories We Tell Ourselves
On the Front Porch with Oakland Activist David Peters
An Interview by Dr. Gregory Downs
On the front porch of his house in West Oakland’s Hoover-Foster neighborhood, across the street from one of the elementary schools that define the neighborhood, David Peters knows everybody, whether he’s met them or not. Animated, boisterous, and always busy, he surprises strangers by calling out to them, and fails to surprise his neighbors—including cousins next door—who are used to his booming voice.
Peters’ voice extends far beyond his front porch. As the founder of two community organizations, he is helping sustain cultural assets in West Oakland, even as the neighborhood is under the dual threats of gentrification and neglect. Cut off from much of Oakland by elevated expressways, the Hoover-Foster neighborhood has suffered from decades of disinvestment and trauma. Peters’ West Oakland Community Action Network mobilizes local people to fight for their fair share.
But it is also a neighborhood defined by cultural assets, some visible in the beautiful murals of Black Oakland history, others visible only when Peters narrates them on the Black Liberation Walking Tour he regularly leads. On those tours, Peters guides groups to more than a dozen sites that together convey the importance of this neighborhood. Some are the homes of locally famous people, others of activists who fought predatory lenders, others churches and community groups, one the site of the Black Panthers’ first-ever community breakfast and some of their most significant historical moments. Knowledge of these moments can, Peters believes, instill in people a sense of pride in where they are, a pride that he counts as a literal asset, making the tour a form of reinvestment in a neighborhood suffering from decades of disinvestment. The tour has been named one of six standout Black history tours by Condé Nast and has been featured in local press and podcasts.
I met Peters on one of his tours and was immediately struck by the way he made this history not only visible but meaningful to both old and young. As a longtime History professor, I know how challenging this is, and how many people feel disconnected from the places they live. Since then, I’ve accompanied tours as a volunteer to watch and learn from Peters’ community-centered model, and this Spring I asked him to explain his neighborhood-centered approach to preserving Black life and Black memory, in a place where both are in jeopardy and his optimism that pride of place can be a restorative, even revolutionary act.
Greg Downs: Okay, we’re doing all right, it is Thursday and I’m here on the porch of David Peters, founder of many things, including the Black Liberation Walking Tour. So, just to start us off in a way that helps people understand where we are, and to understand the work you’re doing here, can you tell me about this neighborhood? What was it like as a kid here?
Dave Peters: This neighborhood has various names depending on who you are when it was, and where you’re from. We’re in a part of West Oakland that is not what people traditionally think of when they think of West Oakland. Generally, they think of what we call the Lower Bottoms or over on Seventh Street.
We’re here in what’s variously known as the Hoover-Foster neighborhood or the Hoover-Durant neighborhood. Both of those names are for the two schools that served this neighborhood for nearly 100 years, one of which is no longer here. And then it also has a legacy named Ghost Town, and there are various stories about how that name came about. That is a local name that folks in this neighborhood gave it and that some still hold fiercely to. There’s a point of pride in being from a time when it was really a tough neighborhood to be in, a tough neighborhood to survive, like so many of our inner-city neighborhoods during the crack bomb era. It could be dangerous, so folks took that name [Ghost Town] as a point of pride. I don’t like it. It symbolizes what I think of as the worst times in this neighborhood. So we’ll leave that there.
This neighborhood is so important to me. We’re sitting here on my front porch. My cousins are next door over there, and they actually used to live here. They grew up in here, in this house, when my uncle who lives next door was here with his family, and I was born next door in that house, my grandparents’ house, and they moved into that house in 1950. They migrated from the South [Louisiana and Texas] to come out and work, and I think it was 1942. Certainly I look at this neighborhood through the lens of a certain nostalgia because who doesn’t have a certain nostalgia for the places and the circumstances that we grew up in? And I think for me, particularly, because it was these two side-by-side properties, we found these were just really a cocoon of warmth and love. These properties are a lifeline for me to be able to move back here, five years ago with my wife, come back to where I was from.
Now certainly, as a young child and preteen you are not really as aware of perceptions of the neighborhood and poverty and crime and inequity. So, maybe I wasn’t as exposed to some of the things that were happening in the neighborhood that the adults were, but it just was a very warm place for me that had so much family connections in my blood family, but also in cultural family connections. So many of the folks on this block were my grandparents’ cohorts, kind of in their age range. They shared this cultural bond. So many of them were migrants from the rural south. In Oakland, the migrants, the Black migrants, were primarily from Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. And so they had, you know, sort of this common culture. Very frequently, you had folks who came from the same towns form associations and clubs. Here in Oakland, that was a common thing. Sometimes people think, all southern cultures are similar and they are very similar, but in certain respects, they’re much different. And I think Louisiana is particularly different. And I think those particular Louisianans, those Black Catholics, brought a particular culture here as well. So for me growing up here in this neighborhood, it was special because of those personal memories.
It was also very influential historically and culturally in the early 70s, late 60s, early 70s. Here was a time of just incredible political ferment. I think everybody is sort of familiar with many of those movements on the New Left, everything from free speech to anti draft, Black Power, Black nationalism, gay rights, women’s rights, third world liberation. All of those things were part of the ferment in the air that influenced me and my youngest memories growing up as a kind of precocious kid who read everything they could get his hands on. I was really exposed to a lot of these ideas, both in my reading as well as just being around the adults who would have conversations about the topics of the day.
Downs: There’s a lot of pride in the neighborhood, and walking around with you, you can see people who really feel that pride. Tell me where you think that pride comes from.
Peters: I think firstly, it just comes from Oakland. We’re across the bay from the city. That columnist [Herb Caen] called it Baghdad by the bay and said no real San Franciscan ever crosses the Bay Bridge willingly. Oakland has always been San Francisco’s redheaded stepchild kind of city. And Oakland has working-class roots. I don’t know how much it’s a working-class city anymore. Then in the seventies we had all the sports teams so San Francisco was our rivals. That was a great source of pride, that the bigger, richer, more picturesque tourist capital financial center, glossy city across the bay, we would be whipping them. And then a lot of that’s played out in our local press. The San Francisco Chronicle has been one a much more influential paper than the Oakland Tribune. And there’s certainly a sense here in Oakland that we’re not covered equitably. The crime stories would say, oh, crime in Oakland. But crime stories in San Francisco wouldn’t say crime in San Francisco. They’d say crime in the Bayview or crime in Chinatown. Oakland got painted with a broad brush.
I think that gives people from Oakland a sense of having a chip on their shoulder. And I think we tend to root for underdogs. We’ve certainly always been subversive and had subversive political thoughts, anti-authoritarianism. And I think that’s kind of the root of that pride for Oaklanders, the sense of pride that comes from living in coming up in a neighborhood where you’re getting the shorter end of the stick from government, from lending institutions, from retailers that don’t want to put their stores in. So all of this just kind of lends this sense of being an underdog. Then this neighborhood was particularly violent at one point. I think you find anybody that comes out of any underdog circumstance is going to have a lot of pride about where they’re from.
Downs: Let’s shift to the tour. Let’s give people a sense of the flavor of the tour. What are some of your favorite aspects of leading the tour?
Peters: For me, this tour is very therapeutic. Right? It gives me an opportunity to talk about some of the major inequities that I have experienced, that I have learned about. That ability to share this story with others, many of whom know some parts of it or have something to add that I don’t know, but to be able to tell it in my own way. So for me, it’s just personal, right? I’ve inserted myself into this tour, and it’s really a love story of my neighborhood.
One of my favorite stops is just a couple houses up the street here at the former residence of C. L. Dellums, the longtime vice president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union, one of the heads of the California Fair Employment Commission from its inception. He really fought to get that established. And then he did other work to break down discrimination in hiring in other places around the Bay Area, particularly retail stores in San Francisco and Oakland. I think he is an under-known figure in the West Coast civil rights movement and I posit that he is the central and founding figure in that movement. Yet, he’s not memorialized here in the city. He made his home here [on this block] after coming here from Texas, like so many others, and he came very early in 1920s. Sometimes we tell the story of the Black presence in Oakland starting in the 1940s and certainly there’s a huge growth then, but there’s always been a long presence of black folks here in Oakland. So that’s one of the stops I really like.
Downs: And how about we talk about where you start on the tour?
Peters: Yeah, one of my favorite sites and certainly one of the more important Black Power sites in the world is the former site of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church. It was founded as an Episcopal Church specifically for Black folks, back in 1910. And that church and its leaders had always been involved in the NAACP and other civil rights efforts here in Oakland. When Father Earl Neil came, he provided a meeting place and refuge for the Black Panther Party in the late 60s. And on the tour there’s an audio recording from him about physically barring the doors to the Oakland Police Department who tried to come in one day on a false pretext.
At a time when the church community, respectable Black folks, and the so-called wild-eyed radicals of the Panthers were supposedly at odds with each other, Father Neil stood up for justice. He did not allow the police to come in that day, and who knows what may have happened if they would have come in and perhaps rounded up the Panther leadership that was in attendance? That site had the funeral of George and Jonathan Jackson, so tragically murdered, martyrs of the Black nationalist movement. Certainly George Jackson’s work in the prison reform movement made that history so present and palpable here in this neighborhood.
Then the first Panther breakfast program was founded there as a joint program of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church and the Black Panther Party. Just to be clear about that credit there, it was said that Ruth Beckford, the famous American dancer, perhaps it was her idea, and she and Father Neil did the legwork, the administrative work to get everything cleared up with the city and the county, but it was the first time the Panthers served a community breakfast. This is just an amazingly important historical place.
Downs: And then let me touch on a couple of my favorites if that’s okay. These are two activists separated by a century: Delilah Beasley and Annette Miller. What is it like to go by a house that held one of the great, unknown Black female journalists and historians of the early 20th century [in Beasley] and then to go by the house of a contemporary family that successfully fought against foreclosure by Deutsche Bank, a woman who helps inspire and educate housing activists today?
Peters: These two Black women, separated by a century, illustrate the importance of Black women leadership, of strong, rebellious, Black women leadership in this neighborhood and as it is across America. Today in this neighborhood, in so many of our local organizations, Black women continue to play leading roles. Delilah Beasley wrote Negro Trailblazers of California and self-published that over a century ago at a time of very violent racism in California and in Oakland; that is an amazing story. As she writes in her forward, she almost died in this task. I’m gonna say it was because she worked her fingers to the bone, but certainly it took a harrowing effort to cultivate patrons, generally white woman patrons, that funded her effort to travel all around the state of California to collect these stories in the 1910s. The stories of those 1800s Black pioneers, as well as the Africans that came with the Spanish earlier, were being lost.
She realized the importance of writing down this history, of preserving this knowledge for future generations. It is important for people to be able to see themselves reflected in literature and history, and it is particularly important for Black people. Black people, like other oppressed groups, have to see ourselves in the history, in the literature, in the culture, to reaffirm ourselves. She’s very clear about that. In addition she wrote for the Oakland Tribune, as the first Black syndicated columnist in the United States, not the first Black woman syndicated columnist, the first Black syndicated columnist in United States, and then she worked in other many other local civic groups around social justice.
Then we leap ahead 100 years and here is Annette Miller, who, like me is a multi-generational resident of the neighborhood who was able to take on Deutsche Bank and fight them off from foreclosing on her family’s house at a time when this neighborhood was transformed by the predatory lending crisis and so many friends and neighbors and families had their houses seized. Her inspiring ability to just say no in the face of this huge, faceless international bank is really powerful. Many of the students that we take on the tour, really connect with that because it’s a story not of someone 100 years ago, or someone rich or famous or powerful, but someone that is just like so many of us, someone who said no, organized with other people who were also saying no and fighting and demanding housing justice. She continues to be a leader in this neighborhood in so many other ways.
Downs: Just before we move off this, looking over on your wristbands, one of them says I Love being Black. Are you comfortable talking a little bit about that aspect of the pride, that so many of these amazing figures, they’re not just neighborhood figures, but they are Black Oakland people?
Peters: I think that’s one of the things I treasured most about growing up in the time and the place that I grew up in. There was this flowering of the Black Power and Black Pride movement. I think in the 50s, if you were called black, you could have been in a fight, because that was an insult…..Perhaps this was one of the first instances of a group taking a slur and embracing it and turning into a term of pride. And so, one of my earliest memories is hearing James Brown on the radio singing “Say it loud, I’m black, and I’m proud.” I have a vivid memory of that in my grandfather’s truck, and that must have been 1969, 50 plus years ago.
Downs: Did your grandfather like James Brown?
Peters: My grandfather was a blues guy, he was from Texas. His taste ran more to blues. But certainly he was a very prideful black man. And you could see it in his bearing in his care. Like so many grandparents out there, he could do everything, right? Not a man that went all the way through high school. He trained as a welder, came out and worked as a machinist but could do everything. Work on cars and work on houses. Could grow everything in the backyard, and we went fishing, just all of these just things that I thought were amazing and you know, not a man of very many words.
In that era, then the Panthers were active in the streets and you’d see people like our paperboy, one day he had on the uniform. He had on a braid leather jacket. He’s a Panther and I was very prideful, and people were talking about Black is beautiful, and Black Power, about afros and dashikis.
During that whole time period, I was just really in this really affirming Black cultural environment, where Black was positive and everybody was talking about this topic in a positive way. It’s not that way anymore. Now, some of the most naked racism and prejudice and Jim Crow-ism doesn’t exist because we don’t live in such segregated neighborhoods anymore. But then, in my remembrance, it’s really an all-Black environment and neighborhood. When I grew up, we had people of different classes, income levels, educational levels, kind of all together. I don’t want to oversell that. But I think there was this cultural cocoon that I grew up in.
Any oppressed group anywhere in the world is gonna have that pride. Particularly just being from Oakland, and being Black from Oakland, you have this double pressure. So I wear this bracelet saying, I Love Being Black, because you know, there’s a cost to it, right? On many levels, financial and psychological, emotional. We don’t understand all the health impacts. That pride of that culture of survival, knowing the sacrifices that people make, and sometimes we hear folks go, oh, you know, we shouldn’t talk about slavery because it makes you feel like a victim or it makes you depressed. No, it’s a source of pride and strength and power to know the things that my people survived.
Downs: I want to talk about one more spot on the tour. There’s a spot that isn’t one of these landmarks, like the other places, but it’s a corner where you ask people to look up at the highway that cuts across the neighborhood. I don’t want to say it defines the neighborhood because the neighborhood defines the neighborhood. But it’s certainly had a big impact on the neighborhood. And you ask people to listen, and to think about the exhaust and to think about the impact of that big scar put across the neighborhood. Did you always know you would do that on the tour? Or is that something that came to you as you started leading?
Peters: I knew that was going to be part of the tour. I’m traumatized by that. I think West Oakland, collectively, is traumatized by those freeways and the conditions, the governmental planning that led to that. It defined the current boundaries of West Oakland. This was considered to be North Oakland a generation or two ago, before those freeways were put up.
This is something that’s played out all across America. The geographies of this neighborhood, the built environment, the psychological environment, the economic environment, are all greatly influenced, perhaps even determined, by those freeways. It’s all part of a whole. We can go back to the redlining maps, the risk map from the Home Owners Loan Corporation that said that this neighborhood was risky at a time when there were very few Black people here. The mere presence of my family as the fourth Black family on the block, that was enough for the assessors to say to the government, who was going to provide guarantees for the loans, that this was a risky neighborhood. That crime led to higher or no lending, that wealth that’s transferred. The folks here in this neighborhood always had to pay taxes, but were not able to receive that government guarantee for their real estate lending.
So if you look now at everything from the pollution, maps, poverty maps, lack of green space, all of these markers are inequity. Follow these red lines and the racial makeup. The neighborhood is still defined by something that was mapped out in the 1930s almost 100 years ago. And then, when the federal government planned the interstate highways, those red lines were used in many ways, and I think there’s a specific government memo that told municipalities, Hey, use these freeways to build barriers between Black people or other minorities and the other parts of town. You can use the highway to tear down neighborhoods, to displace people. You can use this as an entree to the urban renewal acts in these areas where the areas that were put under urban renewal were those areas that were redlined. No investment, no access to capital, people can’t borrow against their property. So of course, you see the housing and commercial business start to decline.
Governments then come in under urban renewal to just level areas and redistribute that land to other folks. It’s a way to recapitalize land for other, future owners. That is such an important part of the neighborhood, the story of all of West Oakland, a lot of East Oakland and some of North Oakland as well. You can’t tell the story of West Oakland, nor urban America without telling me that story. Students came out here and asked people for recommendations for reparations, and one of the things we talked about was that this is this generational trauma, and there are thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, who are still here who are suffering, who have directly or generationally suffered from this trauma and that need to be invested in, you know, repaired, so to speak. Reparations, whatever you want to think or talk about that, it is indisputable and traceable and quantifiable to talk about what happened with redlining and that transfer of wealth and opportunity from Oakland to the suburbs and this relationship that we currently have between Oakland and its suburbs in terms of the concentration of poverty in Oakland and the concentration of wealth in its suburbs.
Downs: And I just think of when you point to the exhaust poisoning people for generations, and it’s right there. It’s so stark. Switching topics, do you have any moments as you’ve given the tour, where the reaction of the audience or things that happen really stand out to you or help capture you know, what you’re what you’re aiming for?
Peters: Yeah, absolutely. I had a group of high school students a couple of weeks ago that came on the tour. After that first stop about the Panthers, they were on fire with the power to actually be in this place where something happened that they had learned about in class.
I had a group of middle schoolers and we stopped at Ms. Miller’s house and talked about how she saved that house. These are kids living with housing insecurity and housing displacement, so they get this and they were inspired by that. That’s awesome. Right? They were able to talk about getting organized. You can make things happen. So those things were really rewarding.
I took out a group from a crisis support and mental health and suicide prevention nonprofit here. And then I got a call back from the executive director who told me she was inspired to start a community speaker series around mental health about the way things happening in the community are an aid to better mental health. She said, I got that from the tour. I’m blown away.
Downs: I’ve seen you lead school groups. Do you have optimism about the youth these days, that we’re about to see a more activist generation?
Peters: Absolutely. I have great optimism about the youth today. I made this comment to a younger person not too long ago that you can’t imagine the range of the political spectrum and activism back in the early 70s. And they looked at me like what?
Downs: They didn’t accept that premise? You know, 20 years ago, I would have guessed even a very woke progressive white kid might have been like, that’s right the range of political opinion was wider back then, they couldn’t imagine that context, even if they and their friends were activists. It was easy to feel 20 or 30 years ago, that they would be in a small pool. And it does feel like the pool is bigger now.
Peters: Right? There’s social media stuff. They’re able to use that to organize and communicate. It is amazing to me to see Oakland Tech [High School], their leadership in the summer of Black lives, leading protests and marches. There are so many youth groups or groups that are fostering youth leadership around Oakland now. It is amazing. I don’t want to oversell it because I grew up in an era where there was a lot of activism and political education. Then, theory may have been more widespread. But I think now, in terms of racial justice, I think there are strong parallels between now and late 60s, early 70s.
Downs: I want to ask about the more abstract applications of this work. You talk about the importance of cultural assets. What does that mean to you? And how does that help you capture what you’re trying to convey and preserve on this tour?
Peters: Cultural assets equal belonging for me. It’s being in an environment, a neighborhood and community, that you feel not only welcome in, not only that you feel belonging in, but that you feel a sense of ownership and pride. You’re talking about navigating the spaces comfortably. Now I’ve lived in other neighborhoods in Oakland, where you know, I’ve had to deal with things, like the neighbors called the police on me for robbing my own house.
Downs: It’s horrible. The idea of someone calling the cops on you, it’s beyond comical.
Peters: It was horrible. I live with the rage of it. I knew things were pretty bad with the police department but seeing the barrel of a gun in my face….If he kills me, he won’t be sanctioned. It still kills me that it is not gonna be sanctioned. This was in Oakland, not like being out in Castro Valley or San Leandro or some other place that is probably more notorious.
So to be in this neighborhood, and to know this history, and then to have this personal connection to know that my family specifically my people, have been contributing here in this neighborhood, to this city for decades and generations, it really creates this sense of belonging like this is our, this is my place.
Downs: One thing that strikes me is you really talk about that feeling as an asset, as an investment that really does work for people, affects people. The moments of beauty, the moments of activism, the Panther mural, that they aren’t just pretty or nice. They really are assets that people can draw upon.
Peters: The moments of pain and suffering get fed back to me in the media, the negative things that happen. I’ve had to be like, Hey, I feel great about this stuff. They are investments. They are really things that one can draw upon to find sustenance. And I’ve heard people from the tour, particularly Black folks from the tour talk about, Wow, I’m proud to learn what I’ve learned, I’m proud of the way that you deliver it. They say, I’m from this neighborhood, and still I learned so much. And then you hear from people, who have things to add, you know, my family was from this part of Oakland or that part of Oakland, and here’s what I know about the churches, or here’s what I know about housing history.
Downs: What happens if a neighborhood loses those cultural assets? People talk about economic investment and health investment, but what if those murals go, those sites go, the knowledge goes?
Peters: Well, it becomes a different place. It becomes a different place. Because I think it’s the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and where we are that define us. And when those stories change, not only are those people’s contributions erased, but the absence of knowledge is irreparable. So the people who come later don’t realize what had happened here before. Walter Hood, the MacArthur grant winner, has a phrase: placemaking is re-colonizing. Every place has a history if you look for it, and so when we lose these histories, those become new places. And then the people who are here, if they don’t know these stories, are from a different culture. No matter what they look like, they are different culturally.
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Downs: So what are the strategies you see working in historically Black urban neighborhoods for trying to preserve that? When you look around, they’re under threat almost everywhere, right? What’s working in your view? What should people do?
Peters: I think what’s working is the archivists. We’ve got the African American Museum and Library here in Oakland, which came out of a couple of couples starting to collect Black historical artifacts in the 1940s over their storefront. And [the legendary and recently retired Oakland History librarian] Dorothy Lazard. We are participants in the future history, so we have to be cognizant about preserving it. One of the things that is critical is the churches and we still see many displaced families commuting back into Oakland to come to these historical churches, which were once the only opportunities for organizing for black folks. But there’s a major, major decline is so many of our churches.
The city of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Department, whose budget is under great threat on the next budget that’s coming out, has belonging in Oakland as their theme, and they are intentionally funding groups with a particular intentional focus on Black and other communities of color to do cultural festivals, to create cultural assets, to assert a voice, and to create belonging in Oakland.
We have to work with the people that have been here a long time but also invite in the people that are newer because so many times now people just don’t know about things. This energy of new folks coming in, that’s essential for healthy neighborhoods. New and old residents working together, that is really the key, and I think Oakland is saying that these things are important for Black communities here. One of the things I love about Oakland is there’s so many people who are just out here doing things, untutored, just doing it, doing it and figuring it out later. I love that energy, that activism.
Downs: History has taught them they can’t wait on somebody else. Well, we’re at the last question. One thing I’ve heard you say and one thing I tell my students is, history is everywhere, history is everybody. Every place has a history and some of them might be more interesting to us than others and every person comes from a history. But not every place has a tour like this and like the web of organizations that you and Ms. [Alternier Baker] Cook and other people set up.
If somebody is in a place where some of these stressors are happening, how do they get started? What’s your advice? They can’t wait for Dave Peters to move in and do it for them. So how do they get going?
Peters: Talk to your neighbors. Just talk, be passionate. Just talk about it to everybody. And then talk to your family. If you’re interested in this particular cultural history, talk to elders in your family, talk to youth in your family and develop a family story. Just talking to somebody and asking them their story is affirming. It gets people going.
Me, when I had this idea for this tour, it was kind of something inside that said I need to do this and I had no idea how to do it. So I just started talking to people about it, telling them, hey, I got this idea, I want to do this thing, just built up a fire about it and the things I needed, the funding that I needed, the people that I needed, fell into place.
You know, I get really passionate about things. And one of the things I cultivated is like this. We’re sitting here on the front porch. I sit here and I try to speak to everybody, every neighbor, every passerby, just give them a wave, how it’s going. You know, we’re so much more isolated than we used to be, walking around with our AirPods. So for me, it is about being intentional, just talking to people in your community that are passing by. You know the Myers Briggs test says that I’m an introvert. [Laughter] But I have this sense of this obligation of, you know, loving this neighborhood and just wanting to build community here.
Dr. Gregory Downs is the department chair and professor of the History Department at UC Davis. He studies the political and cultural history of the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
