AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL. Lise Pearlman
Wall Street lawyer Amory Bradford, author of Oakland’s Not for Burning, was a former Ford Foundation consultant whom the Johnson administration tapped, in late 1965, to help launch a multi-million-dollar pilot jobs-program in Oakland. He and his colleagues from the Economic Development Agency (EDA) had as their mission to prevent another ruinous riot like the one that had just devastated Watts. When Bradford arrived from Washington, D.C., with other EDA emissaries, he could see that “a dangerous deadlock had developed between the Oakland ghetto, which was demanding a better way of life, and the business and government establishment, which was determined to maintain order in Oakland and to improve its economy, but was unable to provide the resources to meet ghetto needs. Without outside help, this deadlock seemed certain to produce an explosion. . . . The community had become fragmented into hostile, distrustful [warring] groups.”11
Bradford met early in 1966 with Oakland’s “leaders in business, in the city and in the port . . . men with the power to solve Oakland’s problems if the federal government provided key resources.” He noted, “This group was Republican, mostly conservative . . . Chamber of Commerce–oriented [and] . . . instinctively distrustful of Federal spending programs . . . .” These local powerful men were extraordinarily sensitive to outside criticism. National media from the Wall Street Journal to TIME and Newsweek had already zeroed in on Oakland as “a failed city plagued by racialized poverty and unemployment.”12
There was much to resent in these disparaging accounts. In 1962, Oakland had expanded the capacity of its 35-year-old port. In the process, it became the first city on the Pacific Coast where container ships could dock. The port was soon handling the second highest tonnage of cargo shipments worldwide. By 1966, two mammoth construction projects were taking shape along Seventh Street in West Oakland: a new transbay tube to San Francisco for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) rail system and a huge new main post office. Yet, many homes and businesses were razed in the process, leaving gaping construction zones adjacent to dilapidated Victorians that reflected a long-gone, more prosperous era.
Among the recent building projects was also a new multi-story police headquarters at Seventh and Broadway. Black youths arrested on the streets of West Oakland became all too familiar with its basement jail cells. Civil rights lawyer John Burris was a local teenager at the time: “Back in the 1960s . . . what you really had was this sense of white officers . . . occupying the African American community in law enforcement. . . . You did not trust the police at all.”
Morrie Turner — a protégé of “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles Schultz — would become world-renowned in the 1970s for creating the first integrated comic strip, “Wee Pals.” Turner was the son of a Pullman porter. He made his living in the 1960s as a rare African-American clerk in the Oakland Police Department. At night, Turner followed his passion, penning civil rights cartoons for African-American newspapers and magazines and sketching signs for the local NAACP. By day, Turner typed up police reports from white officers who described African-American arrestees as “male, nigger.” Morrie would correct them, repeating “male Negro” as a form of protest. There was no question in Turner’s mind — the police he worked with were bigoted. Once he took a phone message meant for a white co-worker — “The niggers are taking over Oakland.”
When Turner’s co-workers looked out the window and saw NAACP picketers, they would call to him to come see the Commie protestors. Turner wisely did not mention that the signs they carried were his design. Too often police reports described male suspects who had to be physically restrained or shot. He could not imagine so many arrestees had invited such harsh treatment. He concluded that the officers simply backed each other up as cover stories to justify so many bruises and injuries to the black men they hauled in or, occasionally, to explain away their deaths.
By 1966, Oakland’s population was over one-fourth black and thirty percent minority. White flight had turned much of North Oakland into transitional neighborhoods with black residents moving in and whites moving out. African-Americans still occupied West Oakland; East Oakland remained dominated by people of Portuguese descent as it had been for several decades. One exception was the Fruitvale District two miles southeast of Lake Merritt, which was becoming mostly Mexican-American. A large area near the 40-year-old Oakland airport was in the process of turning into another black ghetto. Starting in the early ’60s, whites began moving to more homogenous communities further south in the county and blacks from West Oakland moved in.
Like Seventh Street in West Oakland, East 14th Street became the main thoroughfare through East Oakland. By 1966, East 14th Street had become a “garish strip of shops, bars, poolrooms, and dance halls” attracting young Latino and black clientele. To Ivy-Leaguer Amory Bradford, these youths seemed “poised on the edge of trouble.”13 Bradford saw some hope for salvation with job creation; most police on the beat simply saw them as budding juvenile delinquents.
The divide between police and minority communities was exacerbated by police patrolling in cars rather than walking beats on foot as they had once done. When Bradford and other white federal officials first met with black neighborhood leaders in West Oakland in early 1966, Bradford noticed how “the introduction of the ‘prowl car’ widened the gulf between police and people.” The mixed race group of adults had gathered on a sidewalk while awaiting a key to the hall where they had come to discuss the proposed new jobs program. Bradford saw his black companions grow tense as a patrol car circled the block a number of times studying them, never stopping to ask what was the problem or to offer assistance.14
For Mexican-Americans the situation in East Oakland’s flatlands was similar. Future Alameda County Judge Leo Dorado recalls, as a teen, policemen stopping him on his bicycle headed across the bridge to a public beach in the town of Alameda: “I was clearly stopped because I was a brown face from Oakland in Alameda . . . It was . . . the way it was . . . I was very aware that Alameda was completely white.” Dorado explained: “From the time I was young . . . the Oakland police . . . had a very strong presence in all of my neighborhoods. Everyone had stories. . . . It wasn’t all negative, but the lines were clearly drawn that the Oakland police were in charge of what was going on in the neighborhoods. And as long as you didn’t get on their bad side, their wrong side, then you’re okay. If you did, then you are in trouble . . . you are going to be physically handled before they took you to where they were going to take you.”
In the spring of 1966 minorities in both East and West Oakland had a somewhat sympathetic new mayor who promised to listen to their concerns. John Reading was a self-made millionaire who had moved to Oakland as a young teen. Reading worked his way through the University of California (“Cal”) before spending six years in the Army Air Corps, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. After World War II, Reading expanded his father’s grocery business, which became famous for its frozen “Red’s Tamales” packaged in company plants in Mexico and East Oakland. In just a couple of years Mayor Reading would become the Panthers’ chief nemesis, but when sworn in in April 1966, his first instinct was to convince West Oaklanders that someone at City Hall would finally work with them to support major improvements in their community.
Reading’s Republican fellow council members elected him in February of 1966 when the incumbent John Houlihan abruptly resigned after being caught embezzling from a law firm client. Houlihan later spent two years in prison. Reading figured the other council members valued his problem-solving skills and business success. He did not consider himself a career politician, but was willing to devote himself full-time to the “thankless job” of mayor, which offered only token part-time pay and little power.15 His predecessor Houlihan had been a lawyer for the Oakland Tribune. Houlihan’s gruff manner probably resembled that of his father, a San Francisco policeman. Black leaders considered Houlihan “an arrogant, impatient man” who enjoyed imposing the will of “the power structure” on the powerless.16
Reading promised dubious West Oakland leaders a new “open door” era at City Hall and vowed to “listen to anyone who wants to come in and talk to me.” To launch his new policy of free-flowing communications between City Hall and West Oakland, Reading agreed to an interview with a new African-American newspaper, The Flatlands, started by two enterprising young women. Its motto was “Tell it