Reply #101: Your history of Oakland is not accurate. [View All]

[kwassa]

perhaps you should get to know your hometown a little better.

from a review of

American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland

Robert O. Self

Winner of the 2005 James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians.
Winner of the 2005 Best Book in Urban Affairs, Urban Affairs Association.
Winner of 2004 Ralph J. Bunche Award, American Political Science Association
Winner of 2004 Best Book in North American Urban History, Urban History Association


http://pocketsofspace.blogspot.com/2008/07/review-of-american-babylon.html

World War II brought a large number of blacks into the city, whom were segregated in West and North Oakland (51). The black community was prevented from owning property both through racial housing covenants keeping them out of most neighborhoods in the East Bay, especially ones in the new suburban cities, and banks refusing to loan money for mortgages (15, 104). Movements for fair housing and fair employment enacted some change, but also led to the conservative backlash of Proposition 13 (95).
Although the primary forces that pushed for Proposition 13 were in Southern California, the suburban East Bay cities gave their support to it as well. It was an, if not the, instance of California homeowners leveraging their individual rights as a class “to disadvantage other segments of society” (289). Proposition 13 hurt the poor the most—those who benefited the least from the reduction in property taxes and were most dependent on the services property taxes provided for. In Oakland the African American population who could not purchase property in the suburban cities that passed Proposition 13 was most impacted by the cuts in services the proposition enacted (326).

another review:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/American-Babylon/Robert-O-Self/e/9780691124865

Robert Self shows that racial inequities in both New Deal and Great Society liberalism precipitated local struggles over land, jobs, taxes, and race within postwar metropolitan development. Black power and the tax revolt evolved together, in tension.

American Babylon demonstrates that the history of civil rights and black liberation politics in California did not follow a southern model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights that began during the World War II years and continued through the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial segregation. Self traces the roots of the 1978 tax revolt to the 1940s, when home owners, real estate brokers, and the federal government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle centered on property ownership.