San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
2 Oaklanders with distinct legacies: Newton, Robinson
Frank Robinson, the Hall of Fame baseball player, attended tiny McClymonds High, a public school in predominately black West Oakland, and Robbie was part of an unprecedented flowering of gifted black athletes to emerge from the School of Champions. Robinson and Hall of Fame basketball player Bill Russell were classmates at Mack and remained lifelong friends.
For seven years, Robinson led the big leagues in a painful statistic: HBP, meaning hit by pitch. He crowded the plate. He was not afraid of the 90 mph fastball.
During the same period, another black Oakland teenager who would go on to make headlines was attending high school in Oakland. Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton, was enrolled at Oakland Tech on the other side of town. Located on Broadway near Auto Row, Tech was racially integrated. In 1966, along with Bobby Seale, Newton founded the Black Panther Party, a militant movement that became the symbol of resistance to police brutality and systematic racism in the black communities of America.
Look Magazine described Oakland as “the terminal for the Negro exodus from the South since World War II.” Robinson’s family came from Beaumont, Texas, and Newton’s from West Monroe, La.. Because of housing discrimination, most blacks lived in West Oakland, a low-income neighborhood with a stable black middle class. West Oakland had thriving churches and its own entertainment area along Seventh Street.
But a decade of federal “urban renewal” policies changed all that. The Nimitz Freeway, the regional U.S. Postal Service office and Project Acorn (a town house and high-rise development for low-income and middle-income residents) took out acres and acres of low-income housing, forcing out middle-class blacks and leaving West Oakland to slide into years of neglect and malaise.
As teens, Russell and Robinson shot hoops at DeFremery Park on 18th and Adeline streets. By the 1960s, DeFremery had become the epicenter of the Black Panther Party’s organizing efforts. When Robinson and Russell were thrilling sports fans, Newton was preaching that political power came from the barrel of a gun. Since Robinson’s death on Feb. 8, I have been reflecting on
the Oakland upbringings of Newton and Robinson and asking myself: Was there a common thread binding these two famous lives together?
Frank Robinson versus Huey Newton is a reiteration of the great schism that goes back to Reconstruction and echoes to this very day. Does the redemption of blacks lie in overthrowing a racist system by any means necessary, or by lifting ourselves by our own bootstraps? Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois engaged in this debate in a previous century. And later, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X restated the same choices:
“I have a dream ... that one day ...” King said on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, while Malcolm X responded in Detroit in 1965, “It’s time to stop singing and start swinging. You can’t sing up on some freedom, but you can sure swing up on some freedom.”
It so happens that during the 1950s, I also attended McClymonds, where I played sports and served one year as student body president.
The 1950s were a time of great racial ferment throughout the country. The U.S. Supreme Court gave us Brown vs. Board of Education. That was followed by enormous resistance in the South and ugly rioting in Little Rock, Ark., and New Orleans.
McClymonds, oddly enough, was sheltered from these national political and cultural storms. In the 1950s, the high school had around 900 students, almost all of them black. Most of its teaching staff was white. The two coaches who nurtured the young athletes to professional careers were white (George Powles in baseball and Paul Harless in basketball). The principal was a taut, dapper Rotarian named Elwood V. “Doc” Hess. He was a great salesman for the idea that if you work hard enough, you can make it. We bought into that.
Jim Crow, slavery, segregation or civil rights did not make it into our curriculum. The only time in my three years that the race question emerged occurred in my senior year literature class. Our textbook anthology contained a short story by Joseph Conrad, “The N— of the ‘Narcissus.’ ” Somebody had carefully inked out the offending word wherever it appeared in the text. Puzzled, I asked our English teacher, Eugene Lien. He explained to the class that because the books would be taken home, he did not want parents to be upset if they were to see that word. I could not for the life of me make the connection between Joseph Conrad and a word that I heard every day on the streets of Oakland.
Having men like Frank Robinson as heroes gave us all inspiration. But sports did little to change the situation that left many blacks imprisoned, literally and figuratively, in poverty and deprivation.
In April 1970, I visited the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, where I interviewed Newton in his prison cell. “I’ll resist until my very death if necessary,” Newton told me. In fact, he died Aug. 22, 1989, on Ninth and Center streets in Oakland’s Lower Bottom neighborhood, and as a journalism professor at Berkeley, I assigned students to cover the trial of Tyrone Robinson, Newton’s confessed murderer.
Huey Newton also crowded the plate. But in a different way.
William J. Drummond teaches a class in the rhetoric of blackness at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle. com/letters.