Building a People’s History of West Oakland: A Review of the Women of The Black Panther Party Mural and Mini Museum and Black Liberation Walking Tour

Abstract

In spring and summer of 2021, Jilchristina Vest turned her two-story Victorian at the intersection of 9th Street and Huey P. Newton Way in Oakland, California, into the Women of the Black Panther Party Mural and Mini Museum. A twenty-year resident of West Oakland, Vest wanted to pay homage to the women who had inspired her to move to the neighborhood in the first place. Meanwhile, fourth generation West Oaklander David Peters was envisioning a Black Liberation Walking tour—an audio tour exploring the histories of the West Oakland neighborhood known as Hoover-Foster, where he grew up. During the unveiling of these two projects, I lived in West Oakland—around the corner from the Mini Museum. I attended both celebratory events; they were the kind of events that often attract new residents and thus remind me of the ways Oakland has changed since I was a child. But something about these events was different—more affirming. Amongst these crowds of residents new and old was a sense of acknowledgement of the site-specific histories of the streets where Black community leaders and everyday folks like Delilah Beasley, C. L. Dellums, Bobby Seale, and Huey Newton, as well as my aunt Dhameera Ahmad and my great aunt Loretta Thomas, once walked. Through narrative storytelling and educational programming, the Black Liberation Walking Tour and the Women of the Black Panther Mural make these site-specific histories of Oakland legible to a broader public. The Black Liberation Walking Tour is an exploration of the twentiethand twenty-first-century Black histories of the West Oakland neighborhood of Hoover–Foster. David Peters, a community advocate and accountant, envisioned and created the tour. Liam O’Donoghue—host of the local history podcast, East Bay Yesterday—conducted and edited the tour’s interviews. The walking tour consists of a website (www.blwt.org) with nine audio stops, featuring a map of the neighborhood, as well as addresses for each of the stops. Each stop is a six-to-ten-minute walk away from the previous one. When clicking on each stop on the website,