Moriah Ulinskas: I have been thinking about how we lose narratives of collective action, the detailed records of grassroots movements that arise in specific political and social moments. For example, I have been researching the response of West Oakland residents to the Model Cities Program and other antipoverty programs that arrived in Oakland in the 1960s.
This history and these programs are largely represented, now, through institutional or government archives, if they are represented at all. I’ve been searching for a different kind of evidence, connecting materials in individual archives to related content in institutional collections, in an attempt to tell a counter-history of the Oakland Redevelopment Agency. This was the agency that led the most radical physical transformation of the city, especially in the 1960s and 1970s when thousands of homes were demolished. We often hear about how, nationally, local communities were devastated by such redevelopment projects. But the response was incredible grassroots organizing, and those stories have been buried in received narratives about decline and dissolution.
I’ve realized there is a lost history — lost because it doesn’t have a place in institutional archives — in which the residents of West Oakland at one point set up their own government parallel to the City of Oakland, and managed to generate enough autonomy and strength to control federal antipoverty funding. This group resulted from a lot of hyperlocal organizing, a spurt of activity that we could trace back as far as 1940, peaking in the late 1960s, then sort of folding in on itself by the early ’70s. It’s very hard to get to that history, because the movement evolved in fits and starts, and was extremely decentralized. It’s not documented in official archives. And yet that history is so empowering and important. As a researcher, it’s taken me a huge amount of time to pull together the disparate news clippings here and microfiched articles there — publicly held, privately held, these little bits split across different collections and kinds of sources. What do I do with this material now that I’ve assembled it, so that it doesn’t break apart again?
That’s the goal of your project with Moms 4 Housing, the Archive of Urban Futures — is that right? To make records like these available, so that people addressing housing issues or challenging their local government today have precedents they can reflect on; a means of knowing how they belong to their city and its history.