Oakland, CA: Activists Take Over Abandoned Library and Opens For the Public

http://www.insidebayarea.com/oakland/ci_21301915

Quote from the article: "I think everyone in the community is psyched this will no longer be a dumping ground," said Jaime Silva, 43, one of the organizers.


"There's nothing in this area, really," she said. "There's really no place for kids to come."

Silva and other activists say the goal is for the building to be used for a community purpose, whether it's a library or a community center with a garden.

Guest Post #1: Interview with Urban Fiction Author, Reverend Harry Williams

By Amy Cheney, M.L.S.

I can’t keep Harry Williams’ books on the shelf at my library! His book covers are dynamic, attracting my reluctant readers. Even though there is implied violence, the stories also depict a person struggling to change his life. This kind of balanced representation enables me to easily purchase and defend Mr. Williams’ books on the shelves of my lockdown institution in California.

Harry Williams, reverend and author

For example, one teen patron named Jacobo, 15, says of Williams' books: “They’re cool, interesting. There’s action, shooting, gangsters, money, drugs, but positive stuff, too. I could relate to how dangerous the neighborhood was and how you could switch your life around. You don’t have to sell drugs, you can go to college.”

With my students so attuned to Williams’ titles such as Straight Outta East Oakland (2008) and Straight Outta East Oakland II: Trapped on the Track (2011), I wanted to find out more about the preacher who writes and publishes urban fiction:

Amy: Tell us about your background and how you know the streets so well.

Williams: I grew up in Asbury Park, NJ.  As a young person, I was blessed with many life advantages.  Both of my parents had master's degrees and they were able to send me to private school. I became the first black editor-in-chief of my high school's newspaper.  S.E. Hinton's book, The Outsiders, prompted me to write my first book (which never saw the light of day).

After I graduated from high school, I made some negative choices.  Like many young people, I laughed when my parents told me that my choice of friends could impact my destiny.  I moved back to New York City when I was 21 and lived there for close to ten years, involved in the hip hop scene and lived through the height of the crack epidemic of the 1980s.  I have never smoked crack in my life but I saw friends become addicted to the monster.  I saw what happens when automatic weapons arrive in the hood by the crateful. 

Amy: Your website mentions a life changing moment.  Can you give us the details?

Williams: When I was 23 years old, I became a Christian.  My entire focus in life changed virtually overnight.  Someone told me that God had a plan for me.  I wanted to know what that plan consisted of. 

Amy: What is the message you hope people will receive from your books?

Williams: My books are real.  If young people can't relate they will never hear the message.  The message is that the streets are a surefire dead end.  Faith, with education, is a ladder.  Lastly, once you've made it out of the hood, you have to go back to help others have a better life.  The Bible says, "To whom much has been given, much will be required."

Amy: What are your favorite books? Who are you writing mentors?

Williams: Richard Wright's Black Boy and Native Son, along with James Baldwin's works changed my life, especially Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Go Tell It On The Mountain.  I was greatly influenced by the father of gangsta fiction, Donald Goines.

Amy: When is your next book coming out? Can you give us a preview of the storyline?

Williams: Straight Outta East Oakland 3: Funk Season - The Return Of Street Life should be released Spring of 2012. "Firstborn" is a college kid, kind of square around the edges, but he has seen the inside of the game. Like many people from the block, he's intensely loyal to his friends.  When one of the members of his clique turns into an enemy and comes out of the pen ready to wage war against the Black Christmas Mob, Firstborn is tempted to go back to East Oakland to try to help his friends. 

Amy: Part 3 of your series sounds like it will be a great read enjoyed by many who relate to characters like Firstborn. Thank you for your time and dedication to telling rich stories about the city experience.

For more information about Harry Williams:
Website: www.revharrywilliams.com
Facebook: Soul Shaker Publishing
Author Interview: http://helpmepublish.wordpress.com

Amy Cheney is Librarian at Write to Read • Juvenile Hall Library & Literacy, San Leandro, CA.

Street Reals

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"What could possibly be more fantastic than reality?"  ~~Ashleigh Brilliant.
***

 A Tale of Human Lives

On New Year's Day, 2009, Oscar Grant III, an American Black male, age 22, of Oakland, California, was killed by an American Anglo male, Johannes Mehserle, age 28, a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer (at the time). That's an indisputable fact - in one sentence.

Here's another fact on the matter:

On July 8, 2010, Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for the shooting. In California, involuntary manslaughter carries a prison sentence of 2 years minimum - 4 years maximum.

Due to the insidious history of white cops killing black male citizens in America, Fact 1 + Fact 2 = a very angry, disillusioned, and pissed off Oakland community. While we don't really need to know more about Oakland to understand why the city's people would respond to this conviction on July 8th, by looting and rioting in the streets of its downtown area, here are some facts about Oakland, California, (according to Wikipedia) to bring the city more into context:

• It is the 8th largest city in California, with a population of about 405,000 souls
• It is a county seat
• It is just 8 miles from San Francisco
• Its population is a diverse group of Latinos (25%), some of them certainly descendants of the original Spanish colonizers of the land, Blacks (29%), many surely descended from transplants of the Great Northern Migration, Anglo American (37%), many who are very likely descendants of logger workers of the 19th century, and by the end of last century, various immigrant groups (30% - of which 1/2 are Asian) from all over the world.
• Oakland is the one of the most diverse cities in the U.S.
• About 20% of the population is poor; about 18% of the city population is unemployed - but check this out: only 0.7% of Oakland's population is homeless.

Here's a few facts about Grant and Mehserle:

• Grant: raised in the Bay area
• Grant: dropped out of high school in 10th grade, but went back and completed his GED
• Grant: had previous convictions for drug dealing
• Grant: had a documented pattern of resisting arrest (see Wikipedia article)
• Grant: is a single father of a 4 year old little girl

• Mehserle: raised in the Bay area
• Mehserle: graduated high school, but dropped out of college to attend the police academy
• Mehserle: graduated the police academy at the top of his class (5th)
• Mehserle: is a single father of a little boy, who was born the day after the Grant shooting
• Mehserle: has had to move twice since the shooting due to death threats to his family

Oakland has long been considered a significant cultural center, and can be considered a progressive town, with luminaries such as: The Black Panther Party, Tupac Shakur, Sheila E., the Hawkins gospel family, Paul Mooney, Shamar Moore, Ishmael Reed, Tom Hanks, Pharaoh Sanders, Amy Tan, Gertrude Stein, and Green Day, to name a few. Oakland is also the city where its school board voted in 1996 to recognize Ebonics as an official language, which sparked all kinds of controversy in the education sector with journal and web articles and books being published to flesh out the never-ending debate surrounding insider/outsider language in schools. 

Street Reals

I'm not going to get into the shock-and-awe values of Oakland's crime rate. My observations and experiences bring me to safely conclude that all cities have crime issues - American or otherwise. We know that crime tends to occur when people living in close proximity to one another are lacking jobs, therefore lacking money, therefore lacking social capital, and therefore consequently, not feeling like they have access to equal justice. Oakland's poverty and unemployment rates already tells us that there's crime issues, and when you couple those statistics with a high minority population that lives in the the racist republic of the United States of America, such statistics hint that there's likely issues around equal justice.

The light-handed conviction (handed down by a jury of 7 whites, 4 Latino/as, 1 Asian - 8 women, 4 men) of the BART police officer, whose explanation for the killing is that he mistook his gun for a taser ..., was the cayenne pepper added to a boiling gumbo of no money, no jobs, no access, no justice (everyone's struggling in "these hard economic times"). So street protests, street looting, street vandalism, and street arrests occurred on the night of July 8th, 2010, in Oakland, California, but you wouldn't have known it if you weren't living in the San Francisco Bay area, where of course, it was their lead news story that day and night. Nope. For the rest of us Americans, we were mesmerized, hypnotized, zombie-fied, and disney-fied by mainstream media with the one-hour special about NBA basketball player, LeBron James, and his move from Cleveland, Ohio, to Miami, Florida. 

While the streets were shouting, yelling, pulsating, rumbling, quaking on the fault of the imbalanced justice of the light-handed conviction for the killing of yet another African American male youth, we were being entertained by another African American male youth (Bron-Bron is only 25 years old), who more than likely was oblivious to even the existence of Oscar Grant....I wonder if LeBron knows that he was dooped too.......(Note: I'm spelling "duped" this way for a reason.)

I don't begrudge Mr. James his celebrity nor his livelihood. I begrudge our socio-cultural programming and how we all are actors and players in the fictionalized version of American reality. I begrudge that we don't pay attention to nor prioritize real life. I begrudge that part of our addiction to entertainment is that we actually enjoy our information being planted, harvested, cooked, and spoon-fed to us, nicely being dooped. We want our reality, which includes our daily joys and triumphs, yes, but also our daily struggles and fears, to be broadcast back to us in colorful HD and 3D with CGI, ... background music, please. 

Where the Story @

And we get mad when art imitates life and tells life like life is - band-aid rip and all - as in Street Lit. We get upset and feel uncomfortable when truths are laid out in splayed, spread eagle fashion; we don't want to look at truth, hear about truth, read about truth, or even acknowledge the truth that everyday people live hard in America. We can sing and bounce our heads to Jay-Z's song, It's a Hard Knock Life, but to really digest the reality of what he's talking about? To really look face in another's face (not a mirror, not a window) with what is really going on in inner-city neighborhoods, homes, and streets in the U.S.A. today? Oh, and to realize that it's not just black people or Latino people but ALL people in the hood? Psshhhhh. The horror of it all is enough to ignite a revolt: which is what happened when Grant was killed (Oakland rioted to protest the killing in 2009), and on July 8th when Mehserle was convicted.

Take note that the Oakland riots on July 8th weren't a "black riot" or a "Latino riot" .... oh no no no. If you do a web search on the story, you'll see pictures and slideshows of everybody protesting, looting, and getting arrested. E'er-bod-day - men, women, young, old, city council people, and block captains... Which is why, I believe, the mainstream media got paid to broadcast a one-word statement ("Miami") over the course of 60 minutes. I believe that the media did this on purpose - perhaps under orders (don't get me started on that ...) - because the next morning, July 9th, no one still talked about Oakland (I'm talking mainstream media here). MSNBC, CNN, the Huffington Post, etc., were still leading with "King James." MSNBC didn't mention Oakland until around 10:15 a.m. EDT, where the news anchor soberly reported the story, only to quickly segue into an upbeat tone about - you guessed it - "King James." But I digress ....

My point is this: Oakland, California, on July 8, 2010, didn't conduct a racial riot - at least not from what I read, viewed, and listened to ... it was a human revolt - a human riot. Go look at Oakland's demographics again. View the slideshow I linked to: it wasn't a "black riot" because "black people" got mad because a "white cop" killed a "black man." Nope. Look again.

And these are the kinds of truths that annoy me - that get me going. Silencing the truth about the humanity in all of us. All of us are pissed off, "we all mad," at what Mehserle did, at the expense of Grant ... and at the same time, we  feel a sense of the human that both young men are and were. So while Grant was young, a single father, and a drug dealer, that brother was also very human, very real, and loved. And while Mehserle is young, a single father, and a killer, that brother is also very human, very real, and loved. And perhaps on a deeper level, this is what Oakland was rioting about - the disrespected-ness of the value of human life. We have to respect the whole human story - not just the parts that whatwhat? make us feel good ............

I cried for Oscar Grant and his family. I cried for Mehserle and his family. Here's another fact about both of these young men's situations: both of them - were in the same place at the same time. Mehserle didn't come from cloud nine or planet Eris to interact fatally with Oscar Grant on that fateful 2009 New Year's Day. Mehserle is from the same city as Grant. Mehserle's life is as over as Oscar Grant's life is ..., whether Mehserle serves 2 - 4 years in prison ... or more ... or not. His life as he knew it and assumed it - is done - cooked - flambayed. I don't care how white or male or American he is. He's from Oakland, Cali. He will pay for his crime in ways only karma can chronicle: the Oakland community will see to it, prison will see to it, his thoughts will see to it...

For me, the bottom line is, the Grant/Mehserle killing (I posit that they both died that day) is a tragedy for the Grant family, for the Mehserle family, for the Oakland community, for all of us in humanity. It's a tragic crime that is very real, and sadly all too commonly real in America's streets, whether it be citizen-on-citizen crime and/or cop-on-citizen crime. 

If you read novels by Terri Woods, or K'wan, or Shannon Holmes or Sister Souljah (to name a few), you'd get some real realisms of what's going on in our American streets. Case in point, last year when the movie "Precious" came out, I had to correct a friend who was very clear about the fact that the text the movie is based on, Push by Sapphire, is a biography. I told my friend, "No, it's fiction. It's a novel." She was like: "No it's not - it's real."

A teen book clubber at a Philly library once said to me about Street Lit:

"It's all real - fiction, non-fiction, don't matter - it's all real."

She was 18 years old at the time she said this.

I can't wait until we all care, I mean really, empathically care,  about what's real about these streets. I look forward to when collectively, a consciousness is built that fully acknowledges the power of the streets and respects that power. Then, perhaps, we can really live differently about it.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn't share that this last photo is a pic of a neighborhood block in Camden, New Jersey, USA. I can't tell which street, but to guess, I think it's South Camden - near where I grew up.

Thanks for listening.