East Bay Yesterday

When Jose Rivera started researching the Bay Area’s Chicano history, he was frustrated by how difficult it was to find information. To remedy this problem, Jose created Oakland Latinos Unidos as a platform for sharing stories that are often left out of mainstream narratives. We recently met up at a picnic table in San Antonio Park where Jose laid out some of the archives he’s amassed over the past...

In 1946, a few hundred department store employees, mostly women, walked off the job and started a picket line in downtown Oakland. Within a few weeks, more than 100,000 workers joined them, filling the streets with protesters who danced under holiday wreaths hanging from downtown lampposts. “This seemingly small action turned into the biggest challenge to corporate domination of American workers i...

Greetings to whoever finds this time capsule. If you want to know what’s inside, you’ll just have to listen.

Amidst this year’s bombardment of campaign ads and nonstop election news, it’s easy to forget that the ballot box is only one of many ways that people participate in politics and drive systemic change. Although often ignored by history books, which tend to focus on politicians, “bottom up” movements led by students, workers, and other “regular people” have been a major force in shaping the Bay Are...

On the morning of October 20, 1991, towering clouds of black smoke blocked out the sun as “diablo winds” whipped flames hot enough to melt gold throughout the hills above Oakland and Berkeley. By the end of that day, 25 people were dead and more than 3000 homes lay in ashes and charred rubble, little remaining but chimneys and the blackened skeletons of trees. Nearly 30 years later, as California...

A few years ago developers destroyed downtown Oakland’s largest rookery of black-crowned night herons. Workers removed dozens of nests before chopping down the curbside ficus trees where the birds had lived for years. The plan was to relocate them to a grove near Lake Merritt, but the night herons never agreed to this arrangement – and they weren’t tricked by the decoys meant to entice them away f...

The first part of this episode originally aired three years ago, when the Oakland Museum opened an exhibit of Dorothea Lange photos called Politics of Seeing. Now, the Oakland Museum is launching a huge digital archive of Lange’s work, so I’ve decided to re-run the original episode plus a new interview with Drew Johnson, OMCA’s Curator of Photography and Visual Culture, about why these photos are...

Massive protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death have brought unprecedented attention to the intertwined issues of police violence and structural racism, but the legacy of challenging police abuse in the East Bay goes back many decades. This episode explores several pivotal confrontations in the long struggle to hold police accountable for brutality against people of color. To read more about...

Oysters may seem like a simple creature at first glance – they can’t even move on their own – but their presence can determine the health of an entire ecosystem. Just like tree rings hold clues to Earth’s history, oyster shells can reveal much about past millennia. In the San Francisco Bay, studying the rise and fall of oysters illuminates Ohlone culture, the Gold Rush era, industrialization, publ...

From World War II until Desert Storm, the Oakland Army Base was the U.S. military’s largest seaport West of the Mississippi. This site had been a sandy marsh the previous century, and for millennia before that, but at its peak during the Vietnam War, it grew into “the largest military port complex in the world.” Situated at an industrial confluence of roads, rails, and shipping lanes, it served as...

I never planned to make an episode of this podcast about my own family history, but I’ve been spending more time thinking about my relatives, who are scattered across the country, ever since the coronavirus pandemic started. In particular, I’ve been worried about my grandmother (I call her Oma), who has been isolated in a Florida nursing home that banned visitors more than a month ago. From 1971 u...

Delilah Beasley didn’t have much education or money, but when she saw that African Americans were being ignored by history books, she knew she had to do something. Beasley ended up spending nearly a decade interviewing elders and digging through crumbling archives to compile “The Negro Trailblazers of California,” a book that rescued dozens of notable Black figures from historical oblivion. Howeve...

Since I’ve had to postpone my boat tours due to the Coronavirus crisis, I’ve decided to move the discussion about Bay history to the podcast. My guest is Chris Carlsson, who also leads boat tours on the Bay and just published “Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes & Radical Histories” (Pluto Press). Our conversation begins with the arrival of the Spanish in 1776 and then...

How did the Bay Area’s housing crisis get so bad – and what might be done to solve it? These are the main questions Oakland-based New York Times reporter Conor Dougherty tackles in “Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America.” In addition to tracing the origins of policies that led to some of the most expensive property values in the nation, this wide-ranging book also follows the trajectories...

In 1963, a Piedmont High science teacher decided to liven up biology class with a bird calling competition. This hatched an annual tradition that led to students shrieking and squawking in front of millions of TV viewers for nearly half a century. Today’s episode follows the trajectory of the Leonard J. Waxdeck Bird Calling Contest from the nest to the airwaves. How did this tiny enclave in the Oa...

In 1963, Northern California’s first African American State Assemblymember, Byron Rumford, championed a Fair Housing Act designed to prevent racial discrimination that severely limited where people of color could live. This bill, and the national laws it helped inspire, banned property owners from refusing to sell to potential buyers on the basis of race. As the Civil Rights movement gained moment...

It's almost impossible to image what Oakland would look like today if the Western terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad hadn't been established here in 1869. Where there had once been marshy wetlands, industry rushed in to build factories at this nexus of steel and sea. The railroad connected a broken country still recovering from the Civil War and solidified Oakland's position as a hub of glo...

Many Mexican-Americans growing up during the 1950s and ’60s had no awareness of Día de los Muertos. Due to the pressures of assimilation, relatively few Chicano families celebrated this ancient tradition, which combines elements of Christian and indigenous rituals. A new exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California, ¡El Movimiento Vivo! Chicano Roots of El Día de los Muertos, celebrates the resurre...

Why did BART come "within a gnat's eyelash" of being derailed by voters before the first track had ever been laid? How did Berkeley force BART to go underground? What's the deal with BART managers getting busted by FBI sting operations? All these questions and many more are answered in this week's episode, which was recorded live at the Oakland Public Library on October 9, 2019. Michael Healy, who...

Betty Reid Soskin is a living link to America’s long history of slavery. As a young woman, her best friend was her great-grandmother, who was enslaved for the first two decades of her life. When Betty attended the inauguration of Barack Obama she carried a photo of her great-grandma in her breast pocket – and she also carried memories of the many struggles that led to the election of America’s fir...

As hippies and radicals flooded into Berkeley during the sixties, the city faced mounting public health problems that ranged from bad acid trips to riot injuries. The Berkeley Free Clinic launched in 1969 to provide no-cost treatment to those who couldn’t afford (or didn’t feel comfortable dealing with) the mainstream healthcare system. 50 years later, this volunteer-driven collective running on a...

The previous episodes in this miniseries covered the early history of Canyon and this town’s fight for survival during the height of the hippie era. The conclusion of this trilogy explores this unusual little village’s trajectory since then. How did Canyon manage to transition out of the wild and experimental 1960s, while still holding onto many of the values that drew so many idealists out here?...

One of the Bay Area’s first business booms was the rapid growth of explosives manufacturing following the Gold Rush. The power of nitroglycerine and later dynamite enabled industrial-scale mining, continent-spanning railroads, and a total reshaping of California’s landscape. For many decades, the small Contra Costa town Hercules produced millions of tons of explosive chemicals that were used to mo...

How can history be used to challenge hate crimes? For the past 7 years, Barnali Ghosh and Anirvan Chatterjee have been exploring questions like this through their Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tours. This episode covers some of the tour’s highlights and discusses the unpredictable nature of turning public streets into a classroom. Listen now to hear about the first South Asian LGBTQ...

Ruth Beckford was known as “the Dance Lady” because she mentored several generations of young women through her popular classes and introduced the Bay Area to Afro-Haitian styles with her electrifying performances. She also co-founded the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program, which FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Ruth Beckf...