OAKLAND — On the night of Sept. 3, sisters Zoe and Julia Marks were waiting in line to buy coffee and ice cream at the Whole Foods Market a few blocks away from home. This was supposed to be a quick post-dinner stop. Few customers were left, most of the registers were unmanned, and only one entrance to the store remained open. The day — and the store — was coming to a close.
A dispute a few aisles away punctured the quiet hum of the supermarket: A customer was arguing with a couple of Whole Foods employees about a problem with his welfare benefits card, more commonly known as an EBT card. The employees wanted the man to go to the customer service counter and let others through. The shopper kept arguing and wouldn’t budge. One of the store’s armed security guards moved in and tried to escort him away, the sisters said.
That’s when the confrontation turned violent. The security guard twice swung the man into the concrete wall, pinched his nose, and put him in a headlock, the sisters said. “It’s like the security guard was re-enacting a Mortal Kombat scene,” Zoe said.
In only a few seconds, the shopper — a 27-year-old black male who hasn’t been identified — was left sprawled on the pavement outside the store, unconscious and bleeding from the head and face. The security guard quickly closed the doors to the store, casting the man out into the darkness. The sisters watched in bewilderment, almost absentmindedly paying for their items.
“In the moment, I couldn't really fathom what had just happened,” Julia said. “I feel bad that I finished the purchase.”
When the sisters got outside, they were surprised to find the man still on the ground. He was motionless but still breathing. Someone called 911. Zoe took pictures while everyone waited for an ambulance.
Courtesy Zoe Marks
In her photos, the man’s plaid boxers are exposed, his jeans pulled down around his knees. In another image, his arms are folded under his head as a pool of blood forms underneath him. Another shows him on a gurney, surrounded by three emergency responders with his neck in a brace. There are no pictures of his face. “I’m adamant about protecting his identity,” said Zoe, a lecturer at Scotland's University of Edinburgh, who was in town for a conference.
When it opened in September 2007, this Whole Foods was celebrated as the first new grocery store in Oakland in 20 years. But in a city of about 414,000 where little affordable housing is being built, and poorer residents find themselves unable to find a home, the store has gone from a symbol of progress to one of exclusion.
More than a month later, little is known about the men involved in the commotion that prompted all of the renewed focus on the store. The city’s police and fire departments haven’t identified either of the men in their sparsely detailed and heavily redacted reports from the scene. Whole Foods wouldn’t comment on whether cameras in the store had recorded footage of the alleged attack. No charges have been filed, and Oakland Police said the investigation is still ongoing.
After the sisters gave their statements to the police, they plopped down at one of the tables outside of the Whole Foods with a couple of other witnesses. They all tried, but failed, to make sense of what they had seen.
“It was definitely a shocking thing to see,” said Adam Sussman, who arrived at the store just as the man was tossed onto the sidewalk. “There was a lot of anger at what the security guard had done.”
Once the sisters were by themselves, on the short, brisk walk home in the dark, they debated whether to share their pictures on social media. “The shock and sorrow had passed and we were angry,” Julia said. “It wasn’t until we got home that we tried to be more … we thought about the next step.”
Zoe spent the next hour crafting a 178-word Facebook post and attached her photos from the scene. “I'm sorry for more graphic images of violence against black citizens,” she wrote. “Does anyone know with whom and how we can share this story most justly and effectively?"
Although she had only around 500 followers, Zoe tweeted the images at the Whole Foods account and by the next morning, they had been shared nearly 4,000 times on Facebook and viewed about 70,000 times on Twitter, thanks to a boost from anti–police brutality activists and community leaders. “We take this very serious,” Whole Foods tweeted back to her. “We are investigating this immediately.” But a week later, frustrated with perceived inaction on the store's part, protesters stormed the aisles of Whole Foods, forcing it to close early.
The timing, and symbolism, of the incident and the subsequent images weren’t lost on those who live in this rapidly changing city. In the very emblem of gentrification — a retailer that has come to symbolize white bohemian affluence, the kind that enjoys the “grit” of an urban neighborhood but not the people already living there — a poor black man was assaulted, ejected, and left to bleed on the ground, personifying the fear of many black residents: Oakland wants them out.
Courtesy Zoe Marks
An old shipping and railroad town, Oakland has long beckoned to newcomers seeking steady work and a modest alternative to the cosmopolitan and bustling San Francisco. “It’s strange to think of Oakland, with its 19 miles of coastal waterfront, as a rust-belt town, but that’s exactly what it is,” the New York Times wrote in 2012.
World War II dramatically increased the demands on Oakland’s factories, shipyards, and canneries, providing thousands of jobs for workers from across the country — especially black migrants from the South. Thus commenced the city’s pronounced demographic shift: Black residents went from 2.8% of the population in 1940 to 12.4% in 1950, 22.8% in 1960, 34.5% in 1970, and 46.9% in 1980. Then came another shift: White residents sought refuge in the surrounding suburbs and hills of the East Bay range.
The end of the war brought the city’s boom to a close, and, by the 1950s, “giant companies such as GM and GE moved their plants out to bigger suburban tracts. While Oakland's surrounding Alameda County gained over 10,000 manufacturing jobs between 1958 and 1966, Oakland itself lost nearly 10,000 jobs — and 23,000 residents between 1950 and 1970,” read a story in the City Journal in 1999.
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Accordingly, the local economy cratered and Oakland gradually became more poor, less safe, more black, and less white. Those early days of despair, dwindling job opportunities, and oppressive police presence birthed the Black Panthers, who subsequently launched a powerful political machine in the 1970s that turned Oakland into a black-controlled Democratic town.
“It was the Black Panthers who brought blacks to power in Oakland,” said Ishmael Reed, a prominent black poet, writer, and playwright who’s lived here since 1979. “When I moved here, Oakland was one of the few places where blacks had actually realized their own power.”
Oakland became known as the home to black American icons as diverse and accomplished as Black Panther co-founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, NBA Hall of Famer Bill Russell, former Oakland Tribune owner Robert Maynard, and hip-hop pioneer Too $hort. Indeed, Oakland loomed large as one of the handful of bustling black capitals of America, joining a list of cities that included Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Detroit.
Black Panther Party members Bobby Seale (left) and David Hilliard sit at a table in front of the Party headquarters during a press conference, Oakland, California, August 1969.
David Fenton / Getty Images
But like many of those cities, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Oakland suffered through a precipitous — and steep — decline. Jobs remained scarce, nearly a fifth of residents lived below the poverty line, and the city’s crime rate began to climb to record highs — Oakland’s murder rate was once twice that of San Francisco's and New York's.
Oakland’s descent was also marked by its embattled police force, which responded with, well, force — and what many, such as the Black Panthers, claimed was corruption and brutality — in its efforts to maintain order as the city collapsed around them. Those allegations extended to the city’s housing authority police, which led to a federal probe that ended with convictions for four officers in 1991. Today, the Oakland Police Department remains under federal oversight stemming from a series of misconduct investigations.
The city’s drug problem, exacerbated by notorious drug lord Felix Mitchell, even claimed Newton, who was shot to death in his old neighborhood in 1989. “His body was found lying in a pool of blood on a street in an Oakland neighborhood where residents say they fear they are losing the fight against drug dealing and poverty,” read his obituary by the Associated Press.
“I was raised here and grew up in the Bay in the ‘80s,” said Patricia Flores, a community organizer for a local nonprofit. “My whole life Oakland was the city that you don’t want to go to. That always lingered for so long, that its bad reputation preceded it.”
But for all of its urban ills, Oakland still had affordable rent, a temperate climate, a busy port, sweeping vistas of the East Bay, and close proximity to San Francisco and a world-renowned public research institution in nearby Berkeley.
“Everybody back in the day talked about 'The Plan,'” said Bil Banks, a professor emeritus in African-American studies at the University of California-Berkeley, “which was to make it safe for whites to move in.”
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Oakland’s population was nearly half black in 1990, according to the census. Today, blacks make up only 27% of the city’s population. In just the past decade, Oakland has lost 24% of its black population while the city has seen gains in Latino (13%), white (7.8%), and Asian (7.8%) residents.
That demographic shift was triggered primarily by rising housing costs in Oakland and neighboring San Francisco, where skyrocketing housing prices forced residents there to look for housing across the Bay, squeezing out longtime residents. The emergence of local tech companies like Pandora and Ask.com, which generally employ a younger, whiter, wealthier workforce, also played a role in the city’s change. New developments — luxury high-rises, taxidermy-festooned cocktail bars, chic vegan restaurants — were geared to the more well-heeled new arrivals, with affordable housing an afterthought at best.
“There’s a question of how do we make a future in Oakland that is for everybody,” said Rebecca Kaplan, an Oakland city councilmember who finished second in the 2014 mayoral race and recently convened a special hearing on the city’s housing issues. “Especially those who’ve been here a long time, those who have less money, those being displaced — primarily black people."
The recent announcement that Uber, the rapidly growing San Francisco–based ride-hailing service, would expand its headquarters across the Bay in 2017 was greeted with nearly as much trepidation as triumph. People in Oakland fretted about whether the impending influx of white-collar workers would forever alter the city’s working-class and counterculture roots, and escalate rent prices and income inequality in a city that already ranks fifth and seventh, respectively, nationally in those categories. Many took their concerns to social media, starting the #OaklandIsMyHome hashtag.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf (L) and Oakland Police Chief Sean Whent ® speak to the media about vandalism and property damage that ensued during a May Day protest on May 2, 2015.
Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images
“We are in an affordability crisis,” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said during the news conference to announce the move, responding to a question about the city’s rising cost of living. “That was the case before this announcement.”
But in a city that has long celebrated its diversity — as the pluckier, more affordable cousin of San Francisco just across the bridge — the loss of black residents has nonetheless raised concerns that Oakland is on the precipice of losing, as Schaaf has euphemistically taken to calling it, its “soul” and “magic.”
“They’re doing it somewhat like San Francisco and moving us out,” said Lee Hines, a 59-year-old former San Francisco city worker who lived in Oakland for 10 years before moving his family to nearby Antioch in 2004.
Hines, who is black, regularly returns to Oakland to meet with old friends, eat soul food, and stroll around picturesque Lake Merritt, which is only a couple of blocks from Whole Foods. On a recent fall afternoon, he was walking to a nearby restaurant, decked out in a black 2015 NBA champions Golden State Warriors T-shirt and cap.
For years, Hines said, he worked for the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department but lived in Oakland because it was too pricey to live near his job. He sees the same thing happening in his old home.
“I’d be here if I could — I love it here,” Hines said. “But they keep going up on rent, making it so you can’t afford it. It seems like they want us gone. I can see it coming.”
Making Oakland “safe” was a priority for former California Gov. Jerry Brown, who’d been out of politics for six years following a failed run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992. Oakland was where Brown made his political comeback. Once derisively referred to as “Gov. Moonbeam” because of his wildly progressive, 1970s-era politics, Brown re-emerged as a pro-business, political independent who pledged to reduce crime 20% a year. Brown ran for mayor in 1998, beating 10 other candidates with 59% of the vote.
First, Brown persuaded voters to adopt a "strong-mayor" form of government that gave him the power to veto legislation and hire and fire department heads. He then used his new clout to push his 10K Plan, which would lure 10,000 new residents to downtown Oakland with a range of upscale commercial and residential developments.
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