Tag: Kerner Report

Could massive internal displacement today rewire the Jonestown of yesterday? Wanda Sabir offers an up-close narrative of the MoAD-hosted reading and discussion with Dr. James L. Taylor, playwright Sikivu Hutchinson Ph.D., audience and cast of the play “White Nights, Black Paradise,” dissecting the Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple phenomenon.

In 1968, Joe Debro was reporting on an Oakland we would recognize today, where white arrests were down and Black arrests up, where in the first four months of 1968, police murdered about a dozen Black and Brown youth allegedly fleeing the scene of a crime, where “almost every ghetto Negro has a police record.” This is Part 18 of the report titled “A Study of the Manpower Implications of Small Business Financing: A Survey of 149 Minority and 202 Anglo-Owned Small Businesses in Oakland, California.”

All the ingredients of human bondage and denigration which characterize Anglo treatment of minority peoples in the United States are also present in Oakland, California. A study of Oakland’s socio-economic situation demonstrates, as the Kerner Report and many other similar queries have done throughout the country, that the poor are cut off dramatically from the middle and upper classes.