Oakland

Oakland is a city made and unmade by migration. During World War II, Kaiser Shipyards drew tens of thousands of Black workers north from the Jim Crow South—the Second Great Migration reshaping the Bay Area's demographics in a decade. The newcomers found work, built communities, and by the early 1980s African Americans made up 47% of Oakland's population. Then the industrial jobs disappeared.

The Black Panther Party emerged from this rupture. Founded in October 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, the Panthers understood that the industrial promise of the Great Migration had failed. Over 16 years, they built 65 survival programs—free breakfast for children, health clinics, sickle cell testing—before federal suppression and internal conflict brought the party down. But the Panthers' insight about Oakland's economy proved prescient: the Port of Oakland was becoming a node in global commerce, even as local residents were locked out.

The second displacement came with tech. The dot-com boom of the 1990s and the smartphone era of the 2010s made Bay Area real estate into a speculation vehicle. Middle-class Black families cashed out and moved to the suburbs; working-class Black and Latino residents were priced out entirely. By 2010, Oakland's Black population had dropped below its white population for the first time since 1970—a demographic reversal that continues as tech wealth floods across the bay from San Francisco.

Today, Oakland occupies an uncomfortable position: close enough to San Francisco to absorb its spillover, distinct enough to remember what it lost. The Port of Oakland handles global trade; the neighborhoods that once housed shipyard workers now house tech commuters.

By 2026, Oakland tests whether a city that twice absorbed American migration—from the South, from Silicon Valley—can develop an economy that serves residents rather than displacing them.