In Oakland and the region in general, a vibrant nightlife provided not an escape but a return to the worlds of meaning-making that industrial work tended to negate, a kind of joy and ecstasy that made sense of the realities of exploitation. And if that was not possible, they at least found – in what would soon become known as Baby Harlem – some peace of mind.28 Much of what Cap had discovered in the church, Clara Whiteside likely realized in these spaces. She was constantly in search of a good time. Though she left Mobile when she was four, she would return yearly to attend Mardi Gras when she reached adulthood.29 In more recent parlance, she might have been considered something of a socialite. She was beautiful, outgoing, and perhaps somewhat of a rebel to Cap’s strict sense of control. After graduating from high school, she ventured out into the social worlds of Black Oakland. It was a world which also produced a class of leadership in both the business and politics that would also have consequences for the larger Black Bay Area society. It was here where Clara met one such leader, the San Francisco club owner Frederick Hill, and began an affair. Whether or not Cap knew about this dalliance, the fact would have deeply troubled, or likely angered, him. And that it produced a child born out of wedlock – who she named Cedric – certainly may have rubbed against his Seventh Day Adventist sensibilities. But none of this prevented Cap from showering the child with the love that would ultimately shape him. His other daughters, Wilma and Lillian, were also mothers, or soon to be, within a few years of moving out on their own. Whatever the circumstances surrounding their bringing of life into the world, its end result was a close-knit network of aunts, uncles, and cousins to which Cedric would become attached. Like all families, they were “full of imperfections and contradictions,” but what their love of Cedric reveals was that it was an ethic also grounded in what Kelley describes as a kind of “holding on to each other because they had to and because their culture demanded it.”30
Cedric James Hill was born on November 5, 1940.31 Within a year, Clara married Dwight Robinson, from whom Cedric took his surname. But their marriage was short-lived. Along with Clara, Cedric was cared for by his grandparents whom he called Daddy and Mama Do. They had just been contracted by the city to provide janitorial services to public buildings. They were continuing a Whiteside tradition of self-sustaining entrepreneurialism. There was also Cedric’s father, Frederick Hill, who played a role in his son’s life. There were some moments where he lived with him. His aunts Wilma and Lillian were a presence as well. Their children were like siblings to Cedric. They found much in common as young boys navigating life in West Oakland. Cedric’s biological grandmother, Cap’s first wife, Corine Cunningham, had even moved to Oakland. Though his family life was anything but the western sociological norm, Cedric had people.
And that is where “Ricky” – as Cedric was called – likely learned for the first time what it meant to live a Black existence, what it meant to confront the world that produced that existence with a Black ethic of confrontation. Cap instilled in Cedric a sense of patience and the necessity of rejecting impulsive thinking. When Cedric faced frustration, he was there to provide care and support.32 But it was Aunt Wilma who was most interested in things Black. Working as a teacher’s aide, she rejected the logic of white supremacy. She had no desires or plans to assimilate. She gave Cedric some of his earliest lessons in Black history and provided a sense of Black identity.33 These were the settings that first showed Cedric that there was a depth to ways that Black people experienced these times. He would later recall that these early moments inculcated within him a certain pride in being Black.34
It occurred against a backdrop of Oakland’s own transformation. In the year of Cedric’s birth, Oakland experienced an injection of the faith of the Black Radical tradition that had for so long been planted in the rural cultures of the Deep South. In the first half-decade of his life, it was rerooted in the East Bay in the very West Oakland neighborhood that his grandparents had been calling home since the late 1920s. Like other migrations, this was not simply a demographic transformation, a movement of just people, but as Robinson wrote of the Great Migration in Black Movements in America, it was a continuation of this search for a free space – a search begun by the maroons, by the emigrants, and other ancestors who knew freedom was rooted in flight.35 It was a resituating of the spiritual core of African America in the West, a movement that presaged what Alain Locke called the New Negro, the creation of “a new vision of opportunity … a spirit to seize.”36
And it was no mere trickle. From 1940 to 1945, the Black population in Oakland had almost tripled; by 1950, it had increased by a factor greater than five. Altogether, upward of fifty thousand Black folk came to the East Bay during the war, continuing their flight even after Potsdam.37 This decade produced a monumental change in the character and tenor of the Black community, and thus the city. The material consequences were deeply meaningful for the Black migrants as the opportunity to participate in employment markets driven by the requirements of war was the ironic backdrop for all of this movement. When A. Philip Randolph threatened to march on Washington to force the hand of the United States to open the war industries to Black workers, Oakland became one place that directly benefited.38 The older strongholds of rail-line work expanded, albeit temporarily, as did opportunities for Black workers to labor in the shipyards. But for Black people there was also an intense desire to start new lives. Unlike earlier migrations to the region, this movement was generated amid the hope and opportunities that arrived alongside an unprecedented industrial expansion. And maybe Oakland could be a new beginning. But they would soon realize that Oakland was still America.
Postwar reconversion meant another kind of (re)turn – to a racially ordered labor market that reserved the proverbial blessings of the prosperity of the 1950s for those who could claim property in whiteness. This made perfect sense, given that much of that prosperity was also extracted from the larger colonial theater, another racial order. Despite this, Black Oakland fought an extremely valiant fight for fairer employment – a fight that included activists from across the ideological range. Migration to Oakland from the South continued despite the decline in job opportunities for Black workers. Faced with a rising population that needed work, Black civil rights leaders addressed this question head on by seeking to end discrimination in the hiring process.
The year that Cedric was born, Clara was able to land a gig at the California Department of Unemployment. She stayed there for forty-four years.39 For most, however, such opportunities were fleeting. Though we do not know for sure how Clara experienced workforce discrimination and whether or not she was approached by activists in her capacity in the department, there was much agitation among Black organizers with respect to city jobs. One of their targets was transportation. Oakland’s Key System, which directly affected Black life, drew organizers and activists who sought to overturn the discriminatory methods it deployed when it came to staffing its operations. The labor militancy of earlier periods continued, with activists like Dellums, Albrier, and Pittman working to provide space for new migrants in the workplace as well as in the housing markets.40 That militancy crossed racial lines in critical ways as well, despite the fact that unions did not have the best record when it came to Black membership and participation. When white workers executed a general strike in 1946, Black workers refused to cross the picket lines. It might have appeared to some that class solidarity and racial solidarity could in fact go hand in hand if the stakes were clarified – that it did not necessarily mean making a choice toward one end or another. But Oakland was not destined to become an interracial worker’s utopia, as the next decade and a half demonstrated.41
Perhaps stewing from the fallout of Oakland’s general strike of 1946, the city fathers – Republicans, all – made it their goal to extend a kind of growth liberalism toward a vision of what they called “an industrial garden.”42 In order to execute their vision, business-minded liberals, known as the downtown faction, had to unseat their main rivals for political power, ironically Oakland’s chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.43 In place of violent race hate as a modus operandi, the downtown faction imagined a political economy that realized racial capitalism through softer means: workplace and housing discrimination as requirements for capital growth. It was a vision of capitalism that connected development to
