YESTERDAY’S NEIGHBORS TOGETHER OAKLAND UNITY RALLY called on folks with different opinions to bury animosity and work together to end the inhumane conditions in the town’s tent camps, more than 300 of them by a recent Chronicle count.
Cfabo’s president Steve Heimoff led off with a talk that stressed how he and Seneca Scott, the rally’s emcee, met online, coming from different perspectives, yet became close friends collaborating on homeless camps, the issue they aligned on.
Councilmember Carroll Fife, who has had harsh words in the past for both Mr. Scott and Mr. Heimoff, joined on stage to boost the unity theme.
As Ms. Fife left the podium, I saw Steve trotting along to catch up with her. He later told me their chat had been cordial and constructive, and that they had set a meeting to discuss things further.
Chief Armstrong also hit the city unity theme, warning that other approaches to solving problems — trash talk toward the otherwise-minded — leads to nothing productive … like the night before when OPD collected more than 100 spent cartridges at a gang shootout on Foothill Blvd.
It’s possible to progress in positive ways, witnessed a poet, a hip hop artist, and a camp cleanup activist named Vincent, who has devoted himself since getting out of prison to removing trash from encampments. “And I don’t get paid a dime,” he added without rancor. Service to the homeless is Vincent’s calling, and he was obviously damn proud of it.
The day’s most eloquent talk came from mayoral candidate Loren Taylor who started with his grandparents’ arrival in Oakland in the 1940s, a time, he said, “when Oakland kept its promises.”
Taylor said Black residents of Oakland in those days consciously and deliberately mounted the track from government housing and poverty, on their steady climb to homeownership and prosperity — not just his family, but thousands of Black families. (East Oakland activist John Jones III told precisely the same story in his illuminating history of Oakland published last year by Oaklandside — highly recommended.)
Loren Taylor’s point was this: when Black families and a government they could trust worked in good faith together, upward mobility left poverty behind. He is now running for mayor to make that happen again.
Jack Saunders
