A ‘model for education’
A legend in its time, facility turned children frompoor communities into eager scholars
OAKLAND — What does the inside of a slave ship look like? An inquisitive fourth-grader posed the question in his class at Oakland Community School. The teacher instructed the children to lie on their backs on the carpet hip to hip and place their heads between the knees of the person behind them. He had the students hold the pose for less than a minute then asked how it made them feel.
How did women have their babies? the children asked. Why did they enslave just Africans? Then, without missing a beat, what time is lunch?
Ericka Huggins, a former director of the Oakland Community School, says that story is an example of the innovative teaching that turned children from poor and marginalized communities who so often fall through the cracks in public school into eager scholars. Opened in 1973, the Black Panther school was an oasis in an impoverished East Oakland neighborhood until 1982 when the party collapsed and it closed.
“We called it a model for education that was replicable anywhere,” said Huggins, a former Panther Party leader who is a professor in the Peralta Com- munity College District.
The Intercommunal Youth Institute was renamed Oakland Community School when the party purchased a church property at 61st and International Boulevard to house the campus. The new space could accommodate 150 students, and OCS began accepting kids ages 2 ½ to 11 whose guardians weren’t Panthers, as well as the offspring of party members. Most of the students and their teachers were black though there were also a few whites, Latinos and Asians.
Betty Jo Reuben was a single mother who lived in the neighborhood, working and going to school to become a medical assistant. She was not a member of the Black Panther Party but enrolled her son Tim, 5, and daughter Kesha, 2, in OCS because she wanted them to
learn about black history. “My children grew up feeling proud of being black instead of feeling like it was a curse like a lot of children,” Reuben said.
OCS was administered by the Educational Opportunities Corporation, a nonprofit set up by the party. Tuition was mostly free. The school held radiothons and other fundraisers to help cover operating costs, headlined by entertainers such as Sheila E. It also received government funding. Children were fed three meals a day.
The alternative school grew out of No. 5 in the Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program, which called for educating black and poor people about their “true history” in the United States. Yet the mission was broader than indoctrinating the next generation into the Black Panther ideology, historians say.
“The real focus was to teach children to be critical thinkers and problem solvers, to think of ways to make their community better,” said Kimberly Mayfield Lynch, chair of the education department at Holy Names University in Oakland.
The OCS philosophy was that the classroom extended beyond the school grounds. Teresa Williams remembers going on a field trip to the Oakland airport. The children were ushered onto a plane. They were told to take a seat, fasten their seat belt and visualize a place they wanted to visit. Then, promise themselves that they would go.
“I said I would go to Antarctica and to Ghana to see the Door of No Return and I did,” said Williams, 50, now a geology professor at Merritt College. “They taught us to see yourself in the future doing what you want to do and just know that the future hasn’t caught up with you yet.”
M. Gayle (Asali) Dickson, who had been an artist for the Black Panther Party newspaper, taught preschool. She took her class to Coit Tower in San Francisco to see Diego Rivera’s murals about working-class struggles.
“They might have been only 2, but they saw the pictures and kind of got the idea,” Dickson said.
The world also came to the school. Civil rights icon Rosa Parks, poet Maya Angelou, writer James Baldwin and labor leader Cesar Chavez all paid visits.
OCS also got involved in students’ lives outside the classroom. One student was chronically late because he was helping his mother shoot heroin, according to Elaine Brown, executive director of Educational Opportunities Corporation.
“We told her we got your 8-year-old son and we’re putting him in our dorm,” said Brown a former head of the Panther Party. “We’ll see you later when you get out of rehab. And if you call the police, we’ll tell them what you were doing to your son.”
The guiding principle was that children would be taught “how” and not “what” to think. They were assigned to classes, usually with 10 students or less, based upon their ability, rather than age. There was poetry writing, math, science, Spanish, history and current events. Martial arts, meditation and yoga. A child who was cutting up might be sent outside to stand in a tree pose until he had calmed down.
A student advisory board meted out discipline to fellow students who misbehaved.
The OCS students performed on average better than their Oakland Unified peers on standardized tests. In 1976, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors gave the school a glowing commendation.
“Here is this group that was presenting this really strident view of the world carrying guns and going into public places and I was really happy to see them take a different tack,” said Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, who was a county supervisor at the time.
Then in 1977, 10 years after armed Black Panthers marched on the state Capitol to protest the repeal of the Mulford Act, lawmakers had a ceremony recognizing OCS for its “highly effective service in educating children in the community of Oakland.”
Saturu Ned (formerly James Mott), a party member who taught at OCS, was in the group with Panther co-founder Huey Newton and OCS students who addressed lawmakers.
“It was amazing,” Ned said. “I have never seen anything like it where you had Republicans and Democrats on their feet, applauding.”
But by the late ’70s, the party was disintegrating. State investigators and the FBI alleged financial misconduct in the party’s use of government grants awarded for OCS programs. Erratic behavior by party leadership led to an exodus of the school staff.
“Toward the end, paranoia and addiction and all these things that were the problem with people outside the school impacted everything,” Huggins said. “In that last year, it was obvious even though I hung in there until the last minute, that I needed to go.”
Yet the school’s legacy endures in the many students whose lives were touched. Some would not manage to navigate the minefields in their neighborhoods — prostitution, drugs, prison and violent death. But others would become doctors, teachers, writers, entertainers, and open community-based nonprofits.
Gregory Lewis, 46, says the mentoring he got at Oakland Community School taught him the importance of being involved in the lives of his three children, two of them young adults and one teen. His teachers encouraged him to ask questions. The little boy who asked what the inside of a slave ship looked like is now an attorney. “I think more times than not, a young kid born in East Oakland in 1970 to a 17-year-old single mother doesn’t experience all of that,” Lewis said.