Blues City: A Walk in Oakland (Crown Journeys)
Ishmael Reed
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 1400045401
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Oakland is a blues city, brawling and husky . . .
Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its twinkling sister city across the Bay, Oakland is itself an American wonder. The city is surrounded by and filled with natural beauty—mountains and hills and lakes and a bay—and architecture that mirrors its history as a Spanish mission, Gold Rush outpost, and home of the West’s most devious robber barons. It’s also a city of artists and blue-collar workers, the birthplace of the Black Panthers, neighbor to Berkeley, and home to a vibrant and volatile stew of immigrants and refugees.
In Blues City, Ishmael Reed, one of our most brilliant essayists, takes us on a tour of Oakland, exploring its fascinating history, its beautiful hills and waterfronts, and its odd cultural juxtapositions. He takes us into a year in the life of this amazing city, to black cowboy parades and Indian powwows, to Black Panther reunions and Gay Pride concerts, to a Japanese jazz club where a Lakota musician plays Coltrane’s “Naima.” Reed provides a fascinating tour of an un-tamed, unruly western outpost set against the backdrop of political intrigues, ethnic rivalries, and a gentrification-obsessed mayor, opening our eyes not only to a singular city, but to a newly emerging America.
like Richard Mellon Scaife, and kissed his ring. At Salon.com it’s Attack Queer Andrew Sullivan. At CNN it’s Tucker Carlson, whose comments about Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Michael Jackson are aimed at an audience that gets cheap thrills by hearing black bashers depict black men as buffoons. But later I thought, how many times do young black people see a black male writer mentioned on the networks? Black men only show up in the sports, entertainment, and crime sections of the media. Poet Al
Oakland Museum’s ethnic guild, organized to improve the museum, felt that too few blacks were involved in the museum’s programming. Rothman had never heard of black cowboys until 1975, but after the guild did their research they discovered that four out of ten cowboys in the Old West were black. At the time, Rothman was also involved with a group called the Oakland Traders, people—black, white, and Hispanic—who came together to promote Oakland. The Traders began a sister-city program and the
Pardees didn’t maintain an elaborate lifestyle and they didn’t entertain a lot of famous people. They were environmentalists. Theodore Roosevelt was George’s role model. In one room of the house there is a photo of John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and George Pardee together. Enoch caused some gossip when, at the age of fifty, he married a twenty-six-year-old high school teacher in Lodi named Emily. They had a daughter named Eleanor who died of typhoid fever. George, his son, was upset about the
an unconscious era. It is totally apolitical and a historical. African-American students should fight to learn this history. It is about students fighting for control over curriculum. The Panthers were about that. Seventy students were killed at Jackson State and seventy-eight at Georgia State. The civil rights movement was reduced to Martin Luther King. He died back in 1968. Back then the Panthers were the number one political organization. We were more powerful than King. Students identified
Seventh Street. Richard Nagler, the photographer, kept shaking his head and saying, “This is great; this is great.” I was so surprised that I stuttered while attempting to address the crowd and inform them that the photo was to be in my book Blues City. Someone asked me to sit in the center of the photo and I demurred. I told them that I knew my place. I felt honored enough to have Little Jimmy Scott, Bobby Womack, Taj Mahal, and Eddie Harris sing some lyrics I’d written, but nobody in this crowd