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- Hello, welcome to After Dark Online: Shaping Landscapes. My name is Kathleen Maguire and I'm part of the team that puts together these weekly After Dark programs. While tonight's program was recorded remotely, we would like to acknowledge that the home of After Dark, the Exploratorium at Pier 15 in San Francisco, is located on unceded territory traditionally belonging to the Ramaytush Ohlone people. We pay our respects to elders both past and present and understand that we are guests on this land. Throughout our programs in February, we'll be honoring Black History Month by sharing underrepresented histories from Black communities, and celebrating ongoing and cutting edge work from Black scientists, historians, artists, and community leaders. Tonight, we're looking close to home and learning about the ways in which Black Bay Area leaders, both past and present have impacted and shaped local landscapes through changes to the physical environment, and by advocating for equity in Black communities. Later in the program, we will revisit a conversation from August of 2020, Unequal Air: Environmental Racism in West Oakland. In this conversation, we'll hear from Ms. Margaret Gordon and Phoenix Armenta of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, and Dr. Teresa Munoz of Climate Health Now, about the ways that air quality disproportionately affects the Black community in West Oakland. and the longtime work that the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project has been doing to address these inequities and prompt change. First up, we'll hear from Dr. Alaina Morgan about the impact of the Black Panther Party on the physical landscape of the East Bay, and the risks of losing memory of this history in a rapidly changing Oakland. Alaina Morgan is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Southern California. At USC, Professor Morgan teaches classes on African-American and African diaspora history, Islam and the Americas, race and ethnicity in America, mass incarceration, discipline and racialized punishment, Black intellectual history, and Black international movements. As part of a body of work of intellectual, political and religious history, Professor Morgan's research teases out the connections between religious identity and racial formation, intellectual discourse and grassroots activism, and local and global politics. And now here's Alaina.

- Thank you so much, Kathleen, for that introduction. And thanks so much to everybody that's watching this video right now and for supporting San Francisco's Exploratorium and their ongoing After Dark series. This lecture today is entitled Hidden in Plain Sight: Photographing the History of the Black Panther Party. The idea for this kind of came about several years ago when I moved to Oakland after about a year of living in Palo Alto during my postdoc at Stanford. And I was so excited to move basically from what were the suburbs to Oakland for several reasons, but one is that I'm a scholar of Black radical Islam and Black power, and I'm interested in the ways that Black power and Black radicalism are woven into our history as a nation. And there's no better place to study that than East Bay. And so of course, I was excited to trace the footsteps of the Panthers but I was kind of disappointed when I figured out that this was a little bit more difficult than I expected. So I said I'll just trace it myself. I found a map of Black Panther Party sites online and one day accompanied by my boyfriend. He was my photographer. So he gets the photo credit for most of these pictures. My best friend, I photographed the ways that the Black Panther Party and the history of Black radicalism are etched onto the landscape of Oakland and Berkeley. And I began to think about the ways that they had changed and how this history had been both memorialized and erased over time. I wanna start here. On 14th Street and Peralta in the lower bottoms neighborhood of Oakland. In 2017, Batsch Lo, a Senegalese French artist under Refa Sanay who's also known as Refa One and Oakland-based artist got together to paint this mural in the lower bottoms neighborhood of Oakland. I wanna give this your mural as an entry way into thinking about the way that this history has been memorialized. I'll come back to this a little bit more later at the end of the presentation, but one of the things that you could see quite clearly in this is the Black Panther Party slogan to serve the people which is prominently displayed here with a large image of co-founder Huey Newton, who was killed by a drug dealer actually around the corner from where this mural stands. I began to work on this idea in 2018. But since then, I think that the presence of this particular phrase on this mural is even more salient here. Given the global Black Lives Matter protests that have swept the country and the world since the murder of George Floyd in May, 2020. People are filling the streets with protest posters, demanding that the police be held accountable to protect and serve as they say that they do. And this disconnect between these explicitly stated goals state and the way that they're executed was present in the 1960s, and in the 1970s as well. So, what exactly is hiding in plain sight? I'm going to talk about the history of the Black Panther Party more generally. But I wanna also focus in the latter part of this presentation on three murals in Berkeley and Oakland which memorialize the history of Black Panther Party. This one, the one that was painted by Refa One and Batsch Lo is the only one that's painted by Black people with the intention of sending a message to their own community. And we'll come back to that exact point. So, as I mentioned, so what exactly is hiding in plain sight? What are the types of things that we pass by every single day and barely give a second look to? And how have those things been part of larger struggles for racial equality? So I'm going to start here. This is technically where it all began for the Black Panther Party. 5700, 5714, Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard, or rather, how what was known in the 1960s, Grove Street. This area occupies what is referred to as the flatlands of Oakland. And it used to be a site of extremely robust Black and minority community. Today, as I put in this slide, the Oakland Senior Center and the Children's Hospital of Oakland Research Institute. But in 1966, it was Merritt college. And in this space right under this iconic bell tower is where Bobby Seale and Huey Newton drafted the Black Panther Party's 10 point program in the wood-paneled library underneath that bell tower. So now, taking it back into the past, this is a photograph of Merritt College in the 1970s during widespread student protests against moving it from the flatlands, where as I mentioned, most of Merritt's core and disadvantaged minority population lived, to the wider and richer hills. Merritt college had always been a very important hotbed of political activity. As I had mentioned, the Black Panther Party was founded here in 1966 and it, and the mobilization of Black, Brown and indigenous students of color was responsible for the implementation of Black studies and ethnic studies curriculum in California colleges and universities. So if you've ever taken a Black studies class or an ethnic studies class of any type in a California university, or really anywhere in this country, you have the Black Panther Party and their colleagues to thank for that. And so what was here that together, Black LatinX and indigenous students made claims to dignity and to self-government. So Merritt College is our first example of the connection between land, development and racial effect. The decision by the city to move the college from the flatlands to the hills was not well received by the community. And it was speculated really that despite Merritt College and the city of Oakland's arguments that the reason that they were moving the college was because the land that it sat on was seismically unstable, that this was actually an attempt to neutralize minority student activism. I can't verify whether or not without further research that this is true, but another fact is that Black students simply couldn't afford at the time or the money anymore to go to Merritt College. The hills were not served by public transportation. It was no longer within walking distance. And so we saw an attrition of the number of Black, Brown and indigenous students that were able to attend Merritt College. So if the city's goal was to neutralize student activism, they certainly succeeded in this respect. But they did fail in other respects. So the second site that I want to take us to is It's All Good Bakery, which is 5622, 5624 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Oakland, formerly Grove street. So this is right around the corner from the old Merritt College. And today, anytime I talk about It's All Good Bakery, I encourage anybody that I'm talking to to go there and to get the best pecan pie. Everybody needs to go and check it out, put on a mask and squirt Black history, right? And so in 1967, this became the first office of the Black Panther Party. And so this is the office, the office here. You should take a note, that all of this activism is happening in an area of Oakland that lies on the border of Berkeley in Oakland. And that's because as I mentioned, this is a historically Black area. And so this here is a picture of It's All Good Bakery back during that time. You'll also notice if you look to the lower right corner of this picture, that there's a bullet hole in the glass. And this is from an incident that took place on September 10th, 1968 when two Oakland police officers shot into the Black Panther Party headquarters. There was no particular reason identified for the shooting but in a turn of events that actually rarely happens today, right? We see it pretty rarely, despite ongoing protests, the officers were actually arrested and discharged from the course. And so I think that this particular incident goes to the extent to which Oakland police were incredibly threatened by what the Black Panther Party was doing and the extent of their influence. And so now I wanna come back to the present because as a whole, what you'll see is that, although a lot of the buildings that I'm going to talk about that how our role in the Black Panther Party history are still physically standing within them and around them, there is very little evidence, very little documentary signage that they were associated with the Black Panther Party or with Black radicalism in any way. That's what I was expecting. That's what I was expecting when I came to Oakland a few years ago. I was expecting to see signs lauding this history. And it's one of the reasons that I wanted to take a tour of these sites so much, but It's All Good Bakery is one of the exceptions to the fact that this documentary history simply does not exist. And so if you go inside again, I encourage you to do for the pie and for the history, there is a wall of historic Black newspapers of the Black Panther Party and signage that celebrates the connection between the past history of the bakery as a Black Panther Party field office. So be COVID safe, right? But once this nightmare is over, please go and go inside and take a moment to look at this history, right? And so the third, the second site. The second site where there's actually signage is on the corner of 55th street and Market Street in Oakland. In June, 1967 after several children from Santa Fe Elementary School were hit and killed by cars, Black Panther Party activists, along with activists from the Antipoverty Center petitions to the Oakland City Council to install a stoplight here. That request was made in June of 1967, but the city council basically said that they would not install it before the end of 1968. For the Black Panther Party, this meant ongoing death of Black children who already were experiencing lack of safety and violence, right? And so many response, of course, they kept petitioning. Well one of the things that they did was to take direct action as well, to physically protect children. And so Black Panther Party men dressed in their braise and all their jackets and holding their guns escorted children physically to school at Santa Fe Elementary every single day until that light was installed. And that happened in August, 1967. Only two months after the request was made, as opposed to the more than a year that the city council said that it will take. That school, the physical building where Santa Fe Elementary School exists, still stands today but the actual school is no longer open. That's a different school called Glenview. And so with that, I wanna conclude our discussion of prominently marked sites which was actually only two sites, right? But this provides an important segue into the buildings and the spaces in which the Black Panther Party served its mandate to serve the community. And what has happened to those since the 1960s and 70s. So one of the things that the Black Panther Party focused on immensely was the protection of the Black family, children being paramount to that. As I mentioned, Black Panther Party were physically escorting these children to school every day to protect them against violence. And so this here on the screen, it's just a photograph of Black Panther Party children at the Black Panther Party Community School. Which I will discuss in just a moment. But one of the most famous programs that focused on the health of children and all the community, and one of their inaugural community programs was their free breakfast. And so this Oakland, the Oakland free breakfast program was housed at what is now today St. Andrew's Baptist church. This is on West street, on 27th Street in Oakland. And in 1969, when the Black Panther Party founded their free breakfast program, this church was known as St. Augustine Episcopal Church. And this isn't uncommon at all in the history of Black radicalism and Black power. Many programs, many programs that sought to uplift the community were done in consort with religious movement. We saw this in the case of Martin Luther King Jr. And the case of Malcolm X. There is a deep connection between sites of religious worship and the Black radical and Black power tradition. So with the breakfast program, the Black Panther Party saw a very important need and an impoverished community. And the free breakfast program quickly became one are the staples of the Black Panther Party survival program. Essentially the question was how were we going to help the Black community flourish? There was a breakfast program in every Black Panther Party chapter. And to establish a chapter, you had to prove that you had the facilities and the manpower to pull this off. And this was so incredibly successful that it was specifically targeted by the federal government. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover saw the free breakfast program as dangerous, dangerous socialism. And they knew it was critical to the Black Panther Party success. And if you've ever had free breakfast in school today, you can think again, the Black Panther Party. It's one of the reasons that free breakfast is federally funded. And one of those reasons was to actually neutralize the power of the Black Panther Party. So, as I mentioned, children were a main focus of the Black Panther Party's community protection and revitalization efforts. And so this here is a photograph of Black children at the Black Panther Party Community School which was located at 6118 14th Street, currently International Boulevard in Oakland. And so the school was established in 1973 and it was directed by Ericka Huggins who actually is now a professor at Merritt college and Donna Howell. And the mission of the school was to allow children to be able to see themselves in history. And to move away from Eurocentric models of education. And so one of the things that you see in the background is that instead of the president or some sort of white world leader, we have a picture of Huey Newton. Sitting in a position that really approximates royalty or aristocracy. Today, 6118 International Boulevard is home to Men of Valor Academy. Which is known for its programs to educate, to train and to place ex-convicts in jobs around Oakland. And so this is kind of very much in the mission of the Black Panther Party and Academy actually is sponsored by a gospel church. It's kind of just constantly on the verge of closing. It's always having some sort of financial crisis or it's had periodic times where it's almost, just kinda gone under. So very precarious situation. And so some of the other community survival programs actually, the Black Panther Party implemented included free health clinics, sickle cell anemia testing. Sickle cell anemia is something that is disproportionately more common in the Black community and free grocery distribution. And so, I'll speak a little bit more about some of the specific sites around Oakland, but in the last 10 minutes or so of this presentation I like to switch to the present and to talk about efforts to memorialize and to remember the Black Panther Party today. Here we are back at 14th street in Peralta in lower bottoms Oakland. At this mural painted in 2017. And so one of the reasons that Refa One, one of the artists has given for the need to paint this mural now, rather in 2017, just three or four years ago. Is that members of the Black Panther Party, both the leaders and the rank and file members, just average everyday people that never will make it into the history books are dying. And that with them, this history, unless it is recorded and remembered, will die with them. And so there is an urgency to preserve this history and to recognize it. And it's hastened by the pace of development in Oakland and in Berkeley and in the Bay area. Points that I will discuss just in a moment. So I wanna talk about two other Black Panther Party murals. Two other murals commemorating the Black Panther Party in Brooklyn and Oakland. I might be wrong about this. And if I am, I really encourage people to email me and to reach out about whether or not there are more murals. Particularly more murals that are made by and for Black people. And so the first I'm the oldest of these murals it's called the People's History of Telegraph Avenue which is on Haste Street and Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. It was first painted in 1976 and it was restored and expanded in 1999. This is also one of the few sites for which there is an existing plaque here, right? But the Black Panther Party is actually not the focus of this particular plaque. As you can see here where I've kind of zoomed into it the Black Panther Party is just tiny little part of this mural, right? And so even though this is a mural celebrating bright people's resistance. It isn't exclusively about the Black Panther Party. It's also not made by Black artists. The second one is a mural that was painted in 2012 by an Oakland artist named Dave Young Kim. And this is at 1655 8th Street near Campbell and the Village Bottoms. Now, I know that I said, I wanna talk about this one. Now I know I said that there were two murals, or not. It's somewhat of a trick. But it's not, and I'll explain why in a minute. But I wanted to kind of show you guys this mural as well. This mural, which was at the former site of the Ella Baker Center which was at 40th street in Oakland before it moved is no longer there anymore. It's been painted over. And there is, and this is really emblematic of the way that rapid redevelopment, the development and redevelopment of Oakland, the rapid gentrification of Oakland is transforming and changing the priorities of the neighborhood in the history and erasing the history that is etched into the built environment. Okay, so looking at the numbers. We're breaking down the murals by numbers. So one mural is a historical site with a plaque. One of these murals is in Berkeley. Two are in Oakland. Two of them, two out of three are dedicated exclusively to the Black Panther Party. One no longer exists anymore. And the one point that I think is most salient for this conversation is that only one is designed and executed by Black people. And that's the point that I will turn to right now. So the 2017 mural, it's the sole funeral in either Oakland or Berkeley to be designed and painted by Black people. There's a pretty amazing statement to make given how deeply the history of the Black Panther Party resonates in Oakland and Berkeley. How active they were and how opens in Berkeley was a center of the spread of those organizations. And so why exactly is this important? So why is this important? As I mentioned before, The first reason is that there is a rapid pace of development and gentrification in Oakland and Berkeley. Because of the coronavirus pandemic for the first time, in a really long time, rents are actually going down. But home prices are not going down. And you see, because of the tech industries, that there's an influx of very young, pretty young rich people and a shortage of housing. And the price of housing, still, even now, is completely out of control. When I moved to the Bay area from New York, I was shocked at how expensive things were. But these prices, the astronomical prices are more than just a minor annoyance. With gentrification, which I define as the investment in communities that were was once disinvested in were historically Black and poor neighborhoods suddenly become really hip and upcoming neighborhoods with housing and amenities targeted to mostly white young buyers. When gentrification takes hold, Black and minority people often become displaced for a number of reasons. And with them, history does. Either erased or fought. Anyway and so, as I mentioned, the area this is happening in, the all this Black Panther Party activity is happening in is the Oakland flatlands. That area around Oakland about the border of Oakland and Berkeley. That's now Temescal, Bushrod, Uptown Oakland, et cetera. This area is an example of that. And I'd like to show you just a couple of contemporary photographs. So this mural as I mentioned, this was the Ella Baker Center Center for Human Rights focusing on poor and disenfranchised communities. In 2015 I believe, they moved from their old location at 40th street to a new location on Broadway. And this of course coincides with a very sharp increase in Temescal's rents and a shift and its racial demographics. And so like I said, this mural, it doesn't exist anymore. And so the center, which was focused on poverty and racial justice and preservation of revolutionary history, as it picked up and moved, that history picked up and moved with it in a sense. It's gone because the present community has made a statement that it no longer perceives a need for it. And the second thing that I wanna point, the second contemporary example that I wanna point out is 1690 10th street in Oakland. This absolutely adorable house, right? This was if former Black Panther Party Community Center. And a couple of years ago, it was renovated as a private home. When I drove by and I took this picture, construction crews were working kind of gutting the inside and transforming it. And this, one of those called, one of the places that is kind of on the tour places that you can visit in Oakland and Berkeley. That deal with the Black Panther Party. But I was curious, so I checked on Zillow and the 2011, this house was sold for $290,000. So pretty reasonable amount of money. And today, Zillow estimates that the property is worth about 900 to a million dollars. This house is in lower bottoms. It's right around the corner from the 2017 Black Panther Party mural. And so we see this urgency that Refa One was talking about to preserve the history of the neighborhood as it changes. The second reason that this is important is because then and now, there have been tensions between what communities and community leaders want and what governments want. Oftentimes, community leaders have an idea to commemorate a particular type of history. And that history is at odds with the official government record. One of these examples, is the death of a project to create a Memorial at DeFremery park. DeFremery park park, AKA Lil' Bobby Hutton Park. This is a picture of it in Oakland today, it's at 1651 Adeline street. So this was DeFremery Park in 1968. In 1968, chairman Huey Newton was convicted of manslaughter for the murder of two police officers. That conviction was later overturned. In part due to protests that occupied this park. This is DeFremery Park in the early 1970s. The survival programs that I mentioned before were combined once a year into what was called the Black community Survival Conference. And this took place at DeFremery Park. Black Panther Party members called it Lil' Bobby Hutton Park. Lil' Bobby Hutton was the first recruit to the party. And he who was killed in a shootout with the police in 1967 at the age of 17. So coming back to the present. In 1998, DeFremery Park was actually renamed Lil' Bobby Hutton Park by the Oakland City Council. And in 2016, a grove of trees. And the park was named Bobby Hutton Grove. But as I think you can hopefully see in this photograph, this sign in front of the park still says DeFremery Park. And if you hadn't seen your archival photographs you would have never known anything related to the Black Panther Party had ever happened here. And so I took this photograph in 2018. In 2017, there was a discussion of creating a Black Panther Party legacy project at lil' Bobby Hutton park to commemorate the Panthers and to highlight the role that this opening open gathering space provided to the movement to Oakland and to the nation. The National Park Service was supposed to give $98,000 toward the project, but after conservative news outlets expressed their horror about the project and the fraternal order of police wrote a protest letter to Donald Trump, the National Park Service yanked for budget for the project. And so the project was supposed to be called Black Panther Party Research Interpretation on Memory project. But as we can see, that memory was never attached onto the public. And so the third reason that this is important is the aging population of those who were alive during the 1960s and 1970s. And this brings us to our final point. Which is what happens when repositories of community memory, people die, war, physical artifacts and landmarks and buildings are destroyed or covered up? So here we are, again, back at 14th street in Peralta. Not to be morbid but if there's anything that the Corona virus pandemic has taught us, is that nobody is forever. And as a historian, as events approach their 50th and 60th anniversaries and the people involved in them reached their 70s, 80s and 90s. You begin to get this very real anxiety about the preservation of this history and the real possibility that they can be lost forever if you don't act immediately. And so this goes back to Refa One's concern about the community's ability to both preserve its history and tell the story. Concerns that this mural was painted to address. And so I wanna end with this slide. Now you might be thinking that's a blank slide. There is something wrong with my computer? And the answer is no, there's not. I end with this blank slide because in 1989, Huey Newton was killed as he attempted to purchase crack cocaine from the drug deal. This happens at the court, at the height of the American crack epidemic. In 1997, David Hilliard, the Black Panther Party's chief of staff began to give tours of some of the sites that I showed in this presentation. I wrote a New York Times article about this in which Hilliard went to 1564 Center Street in Oakland. And that was a site of Huey Newton's murder. And the article noted about on the ground. There was this fading silhouette of Huey Newton on the sidewalk. In 2018, I went to 1564 Center Street to see what was there. And the answer is, as this slide shows, nothing. It's a parking lot. There's nothing on the sidewalk anymore. And so in conclusion, this is symbolic of the way that memory changes and fades over time as the neighborhood changes. How layers are built on top of other layers, things are painted over. But hopefully, as this presentation, I hope showed, you can peel back some of those layers to see what's underneath. Thank you

- Up next. Unequal Air: Environmental Racism in West Oakland. And this segment, my colleague, Kate O'Donnell who's part of the museum's environment group will moderate a conversation between Ms. Margaret Gordon and Phoenix Armenta of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project and Dr. Teresa Munoz of Climate Health Now. I'll pass this along to Kate to get the conversation started and share more about each of the conversations participants.

- Hi, thank you for joining us this evening. My name is Kate O'Donnell. My pronouns are she, her, hers. And I'm a senior project specialist with the environment team with the Exploratorium. Before I introduce our panelists, I want to recognize that we are all on indigenous land. And while we're coming to you from our various homes this evening, the Exploratorium sits on Ramaytush Ohlone land. And we thank the Ramaytush Ohlone people for their past and present stewardship of that land. Our work in the Exploratorium environment groups centers on understanding our local landscape through the perspectives of scientists, artists, community members, policy makers, and other stakeholders. When the museum is open, we are centered in the Bay Observatory gallery and we're really excited to be collaborating with public programs for this virtual program tonight. In this program, we're going to be exploring our connection with land in place, through the lens of environmental justice and environmental racism. One of the top determining factors for our health and lifespans is where we live. Proximities to air pollutants, landfills, toxic waste zones, water contamination are all major driving factors in our health and in each case, these environmental hazards disproportionately affect Black communities, indigenous communities and communities of color. Our guests tonight are here to help us understand this and what we can do about it. So it is with great pleasure that I introduce Ms. Margaret Gordon and Phoenix Phoenix Armenta of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project. And Dr. Teresa Munoz of Kaiser Permanente and Climate Health Now. Ms. Margaret Gordon is the co-founder and co-director of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project and a legend in the environmental justice movement. For decades, she has tirelessly devoted herself to improving the quality of life for the residents of West Oakland. Her numerous collaborative efforts have resulted in very tangible improvements that have led to seek for jobs, schools, and home. She held roles on numerous local and state advisory boards, including being the first West Oakland resident to become a port of Oakland commissioner. Her work has garnered numerous awards including from the US Environmental Protection Agency and president Barack Obama. And I could go on about her work for far longer than we have time. For Ms. Margaret, it's such an honor to have you here with us.

- Thank you very much.

- I'm also thrilled to have with us, Dr. Teresa Munoz. Dr. Munoz works in Kaiser Permanente's Women's Health Department in Richmond, California where she serves working class women of all ethnic backgrounds. Her goal is to empower her patients to take their health and the health of their families into their own hands and give them the tools to succeed. She was raised in a small town outside of Mexico city before immigrating to the US as a child and throughout her life, she's seen the effect of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and other preventable health conditions ravage her community. She became a doctor to help alleviate suffering. Understanding that healthcare must go beyond the walls of her office, she also participates in supports programs in the Richmond community, including the Ujima Family Recovery Services, Mindful Life Project, and YES Nature to Neighborhoods. She's also a member of Climate Health Now, a group of doctors and health professionals in California, taking on the climate crisis to protect their patients and the people in places we love. Welcome Dr. Munoz.

- Thank you very much.

- And finally, we're very excited to have on our panel, environmental justice educator and activist, Phoenix Armenta. Phoenix is the community air liaison at the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project. And they've worked on environmental racial and social justice campaigns around the world including anti-nuclear organizing in Japan and India, homeless advocating in San Francisco and multiple civic engagement and political campaigns throughout the bay area. Through the work on political campaigns, they've helped to get multiple progressive people of color into political office. They're co-founder of the New Leaders Council Oakland and Professional Leadership Development Organization to get free project, a civic engagement project that puts everyday people into the political process and woke witch and earth-based spirituality, lifestyle brand. They also work as a teacher within Mycelium Youth Network. Welcome Phoenix. So, as I mentioned in the beginning, the zip code we live in is one of the top determining factors for our lifespan. And when we talk about the zip code areas that have shorter life expectancies, we're usually talking about communities where Black, indigenous and people of color live. So I'd like to start out with you Dr. Munoz, can you help us understand why where we live is such a determining factor in our health and how disproportionate the effects of environmental degradation are on communities of color?

- Yeah. I think, you know, that it really has to kind of a complex answer, but I also think that it's important to ask why did people end up living where they're living? And the answer really is racial and economic discrimination. And there's been a long history of that in our country and throughout the world unfortunately. So people of color have been pushed out to areas that are less desirable, and there have been unfair lending policies that have kept people, primarily Blacks and people of color from buying their own homes. At the same time, we've had a lot of investment in primarily white suburban neighborhoods. And so this created a gap between neighborhoods of people of color and white neighborhoods. And poverty has really concentrated in our neighborhoods of color. And what this did is it had this ripple effect where we had businesses leaving and then also schools declining. And so our zip code really represents more than just the house we live in, right? It represents our opportunities, our exposures, are access to services or lack thereof, and what we're getting, what really we need to start talking about is what we call social determinants of health. And our current medical model fails to take them into account, but we know that social determinants of health make the bulk of our wellbeing. So a healthy community needs access to things such as clean air, clean water, safe and affordable housing green spaces. And we know that poor neighborhoods, unfortunately don't have access to many, if not all, all of these factors. And so take air pollution, for example. So the neighborhoods that are in close proximity to the sources of air pollution, like refineries and freeways and industrial complexes typically tend to be poor neighborhoods, right? And so the people who live in these neighborhoods have been chronically exposed maybe since childhood to unhealthy air. And so there have been studies and we know that chronic exposure to unhealthy air is associated with heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary dysfunction, hospitalizations, and all of these really lead to a shorter life expectancy. So we also know the poor neighborhoods are food deserts. Meaning that they don't have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. And again, we have a large body of evidence that links poor nutrition to heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer. We also know that your food choices can affect your psychological wellbeing, affecting illnesses such as anxiety and depression. So you can very easily see that someone living in a poor neighborhood in Richmond has less access to this healthy type of lifestyle than someone living in the Berkeley Hills for example. What may not be so evident though is that poverty exposes people to stress. So the stress of being worried about whether or not you're gonna be able to pay your rent or the stress of being fearful of sending your child to an unsafe school or even just the inability to get a full night's sleep because of noise pollution. All of this changes the hormonal structure within your body leading to increased levels of stress hormones, primarily cortisol. And again, large body of data showing that increased stress has adverse health effects on people. And so what happens is people who are under chronic stress are kinda stuck in this like fight or flight mode, right? And when you are in this chronic reactive mode, your ability to respond to physical, psychological and emotional disturbances is altered. And so Dr. Anthony Eisen of the California Endowment has said that people of, low income people are physiologically different than high income people. Not because they were born that way but because our policies or lack thereof have made them that way. And so the other point that I wanted to make is that poor, the people living in poor neighborhoods not only lack access to healthy alternatives, the unhealthy ones are often, they're often addictive. And we have corporations that spend millions of dollars on advertisement and on research to understand human psychology and they push their products into our homes. And so I think that, we're asking people to engage in a battle that is unfair. They don't have the tools to win and they're starting off as a disadvantage.

- Well, thank you, Dr. Munoz for walking us through that. And I really encourage people are watching to look at some of the links in the comments and chat for additional resources about environmental justice. There are so many different aspects about it that we don't have time, unfortunately tonight to cover, but it's really important that to learn about these different facets. Tonight, we're gonna be focusing mainly on air quality. And like you were saying, Dr. Munoz, this issue is so prevalent in a number of different places in the bay area. In Richmond, with Chevron's Refineries. In West Oakland, where we're gonna be focusing sort of the rest of our conversation today on with its proximity to multiple freeways, as well as the port of Oakland. And this proximity of communities of color to major pollutants, isn't accidental, right? The number one determining factor for whether you live near toxic waste is your race. And this stems from very deliberate racist policy. So Ms. Margaret, I was wondering if you'd mind sharing sort of a brief history of redlining and how that affected West Oakland.

- First of all, as West Oakland has been developed from the Spanish claimant of the land and people coming from back East to West and the gold rush and all those different things. West Oakland has always been a place of people being engaged. So first of all, even with the red lining as a place to look at, as a place that was developed after World War II and the Korean War where there was not a lot of money around for infrastructure or for infrastructure plans and also the surge of developing freeways, And the surge to develop public transit. Became a place for West Oakland and also being land, having land close to water, a body of water and a bridge made it a target for industry to move goods. A different time of industrial use that had not been developed, had not been developed, but wealth being developed. In order to make the residents be on the approach, of not being full citizens with the same infrastructures and other parts of the community had. Other parts of Oakland had. And at the same time, fighting these industrial businesses coming in that did harm to their health. What if someone has always had a core group of folks that was involved in advocacy? I want people to really understand. There was always been a core group of somebody doing advocacy. From my knowledge base even through the church of the social clubs that they had, that they were always a form of advocacy in West Oakland. And West Oakland indicators has picked up that banner and continuously educating orientation, educating school, research and data to give that tool and a resource to people about advocating for themselves to have no harm done to them as the same as other parts of the city of Oakland.

- Thank you. Yeah, I am very much looking forward to talking more about your work and the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project. Quickly before we get there, Phoenix, I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of the need for that work. What are some of the ways that the racist past that got us to where we are today? The racist present affects the West Oakland community today?

- Yeah, I like to kinda tell a little story from the data that we have here. So if you can see this right here, this is a map of Oakland and this is a red lining map of Oakland. So these are originally the communities in red where the communities where you could not by your house historically. And if you go and match it over with a couple of other maps. So the department of toxic substance has a mapping tool called Envirostore. And if you look at a map of Oakland with Envirostore, you can see all the toxic sites lining up right along where those red sites were. And then you have one more tool called CalEnviroScreen that you can look up. And this shows the environmental burden of those communities. So you see again, the orange and the red or the high pollution areas. This orange right here is West Oakland. And you can see just a mile away is the city of Piedmont. And that's a city that is mostly white, mostly affluential. They have actually made themselves their own city. They used to be a part of Oakland but they made theirselves their own city so that their taxes wouldn't go to helping Oaklanders. And the city you can see is completely in green which means it is one of the least environmentally burdened communities in all of California City. About a mile away from the most environmentally burdened communities. So if you look at the data, you can see, it's very clear that this has been a years long systemic approach to environmental degradation in Black and Brown communities. And we have not gotten here unintentionally.

- Yeah, thank you for that. And just to sort of recap, that redlining and being, it was really about, you know, where like you said, Black and Brown people, people of color were able to buy a house to live, et cetera. And you just said, very, very intentionally deliberate in the way that this has evolved. So, Ms. Margaret, you were speaking about how West Oakland has had this amazing history of people coming together to be empowered and be active and do activism. And the story behind the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project is just a really powerful and compelling one. And I'd love if you could share sort of some of the origin stories. When did you first notice that kids in West Oakland had health problems and what did you do about it?

- At one time, I had a job with a local health center. I was doing violence prevention program and we had correlated violence within the city of, within the neighborhood based on the drug epidemic that we had, the drug issues that was going on and people being addicted. That was giving the children a lot of problems. So we were able, we as the West Oakland Health Council bounce winter program was able to get funding to do afterschool program where we took first and second graders and matching them up with a youth or youth of high school. But the primary school was called Prescott. So we would match the child up with a teenager and do homework with them after school and talk about how stay out of trouble. And if I just had conversations about the violence due to the community, violence due to a family who was bound to themselves. So I would go visit the school, Prescott school. I would go to the nurse's office and ask about a kid. Some kids, we made an ask them the class that she probably had got a call or something like that. So when I would go into the nurse's office, she would have baskets of shoe box full of inhalers. That was the thing that sparked, really sparked my attention. Then right after that, we got several more grants, we got other grants that started looking at the issues of health and public health. It was opened. And I joined those committees. And eventually we got a small grant for the Pacific Institute, which is a research group who I got a small grant to talk to show residents how to use research and thinking. And that was back in 1994, '96. And then from then on, as we've learned how to measure stuff, a couple of other indicators. We got more of a asking questions. Why is this in West Oakland? Why is this on my block? Why is this, where's the smell coming from? And as we started developing relationships, what researchers data like this, some engineers were able to add some grad students and PhD students for UC Berkeley from the regional, from urban and regional program that was also interested in environmental and social justice and environmental justice. So they were able to give us lots of insights and how to, the insight that we had never had about these issues. That turns up conversation from being very academic to very colloquial. Putting in the pocket education. So people can understand the language of the engineers, of the scientists, of the researchers. And that became a tool, a new tool for us to have as called popular education. And as with popular education, we were able to develop a method of advocacy and various campaigns. To be able to have the conversation with community that they were at. And I was one of those residents, and I just, I just stayed with it. And other residents would've stayed with it but also gave us the ability to talk about impacts on the same par on the same level with the polluter and the agency we never had before. So having the research and data puts you in a different place of really explaining what's happening in your community and how appropriate is that to you? So looking at, so we started looking at how many trucks came through the neighborhood? Why did we add this male? I wouldn't have still all Black. Why was children, so many children have asthma? People having cancer, COPD. I would start asking those questions. Why was so much trash placed in West Oakland? Why did we have so many break ins, all these other things? So we were able to advocate from the research on . We will do the state, to the feds, to the county and city hall.

- That's amazing.

- So that's our story about how West Oakland Environmental Indicators came as organization.

- Thank you. And you did your own research too, right? In sort of pioneering the Citizen Science Data Collection and having that.

- As organization, Not as an individual, as an organization.

- Sure. Maybe you could just tell us a little bit about that and why it was so important for people to collect their own data.

- Well, first that, one of the first things when we started talking about air quality. We had to understand about air monitors. We did not, I really didn't know from the beginning that that the air district or the California Air Resources Board. A US environmental, US CPA. Had inspect, monitor equipment in the community. So we learn from other researchers that there was a difference in the air quality for being two, three stories up compared to what people were on the ground, coming out your door, getting out your car, walking down the street. It was a different level of air quality. And so we started asking the questions and as you start extra questions, I was suggesting these sub, devices were starting to being developed. A backpack. Air monitors being developed. And that, with that, we were able to acquire those backpack with air monitor, which was air monitor would take the details 2.5 or a 10. And that was what entail when they was doing prototype project in Berkeley. And they wanted to do actually wanted to do. Actually wanted to do was develop a app of putting your telephone that you'll hold your phone up in the air. And you could tell what was in the air. What was the air quality at that particular time? So we were able to take at least 25 residents through a training around how we use those air monitors and from that, and also being able to download it on grass draft gave us and having a Pfizer research technical person interpret what was going on from those that gave us, what's the beginning to understand? Can we, not only can we talk community. Since it's a science for us, of community-based research and data collection.

- Yeah and I love this.

- So that's how. And then we also had to organize a cable to brand all the agencies to one table and not having, not having to go to see this one, here this airport, oh, here's the car. We developed a method of putting everybody at one table and even the poor. So especially as the, there was a transmission from cars from the state saying that the port had to do a reduction of emissions and they had to have community engagement. Of community involvement. So that also gave us a place to enter to bring our own information.

- And you achieved some really tangible results from that. Could you maybe share like some of what those were? I mean West Oakland is a different place because of the West Oakland area.

- We were able to achieve a truck route where trucks can come in and off the freeway. And about the neighborhood. We were also were able to get a truck parking facility out of a neighborhood. We were able to support the new island rule that trucks can run the engine and they had to have updated engine that would have been required to run the engine. We also was able to get upgraded trucks, policies to car that allowed to be a truck driver. You had to have a tier three or tier four truck. Or truck with a filter on it. We also got the, was able to get the port of Oakland to electrify behind their dock. So when the ships came in, they were not island their engines anymore. So those were from the business we have had.

- It's amazing and just humbling and inspiring what your work has accomplished. And Phoenix, I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about AB617 and some of the current work that y'all are doing. I mean, this idea of citizen science as a tool for political agency is I think really, really compelling. And also, I mean it sucks that it has to sort of come from the community in a certain sense, right? And that, as you said, Ms. Margaret, the observations of anyone who lives in West Oakland, going out, running your finger on your car, your house, your window sill, you know, you see the stuff that you're breathing in. And then it needs to that that communication was trusted in this sort of data had to be collected to really affirm that is its own issue for us. But I'd love to hear how this movement is growing and what you're working on now.

- Yeah, well, we believe that people need to be a part of the political process in order for it to be done effectively. So when you talk about AB617, what it is is Assembly Bill 617 and it allows for communities to create their own community action plan around air quality to help improve air quality in their communities. So West Oakland Environmental Indicators was the first, so we have our community action plan right here Owning Our Air to get this done. And the reason why we were able to do that is because of the great work that Ms. Margaret and Brian Beverage have been doing over the years. We already had the data in place to drive the decisions about where we needed to target and find places to improve air quality. So there are 84 strategies in this owning our own air. And the way that it's going forward now is that there is a steering committee and there are various subcommittees that are meeting on a regular basis and going through the 84 strategies and figuring out which ones they wanna focus in on, which ones they wanna follow, and which ones they wanna pay attention to. So, that that's happening right now, as Margaret has led, we have, on each of the steering committees, we have co-leads or our community members. And we have trained to be a part of the process and the equal power to the folks who are working in these agencies. And so it's really a community-driven process. And as part of AB617, we also go to other communities and talk to them about how they can set up their own air quality monitoring plan.

- Thank you for, Phoenix. This is really wonderful that this work is expanding to multiple communities and we only have a few minutes left but I wanna recognize that, you know the reason that we're not all sitting in one room together is because we're in the middle of a global pandemic that is intimately connected to race and air quality. And Dr. Munoz, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about some of the correlations between COVID-19 and air quality and race and where we live.

- Yeah. So, you know, early on in the pandemic, we began to recognize that the Black population was disproportionately being affected by COVID-19. They had an increase in number of deaths and increased number of hospitalizations. And the thought was people who have underlying chronic conditions tend to do worse. And we've talked about many of the reasons why people of color have a higher burden of disease, right? But more recently, we've have had data come out that suggest that chronic exposure to particulate matter from air pollution also increases your risk of death from COVID-19. And in fact, just a small increase can have a significant impact on whether or not you're gonna survive the infection. Yeah. And so I was just going to say, you know, some of the thought is, you know, just chronic inflammation and again, just the chronic disease that the burden from this chronic exposure to air pollution that people of color have had.

- So, Ms. Margaret and Phoenix, you've talked about how important it is for the community to be involved to be at the table, being a driver, be a leader at the table. And especially as we talk about these really difficult issues. All three of you are involved in environmental justice organizations, which is wonderful. And I'm wondering what can people do for our audience who are watching this right now? What can people do to get involved and to help out?

- Well, if you wanna be a part of AB617, you can actually participate in our steering committee our subcommittee meetings. So in order to do that, you can just email our campaign coordinator, Jamir Howard jhoward.woeip@gmail.com. Connect with him. And yeah, you can join in our meetings. They're on Zoom as well. So you can just jump on a Zoom call and give your comments. And then one strategy that I wanna highlight that's coming forward is the City of Oakland is putting forth It's an urban forestry mastery plan. And this is going to be an, this is an accounting of all the trees in Oakland and all the places where there are not trees. So one of the problems with environmental justice justice burdens is that the communities that are in the hills that are rich and affluent and have a heavy tree cover versus the communities on the flat lands that are mostly Black and Brown people have very little tree cover. We wanna change that. We can't change it without the community involved. So we're gonna need folks to be identifying places, planting trees, looking for places where they can, where we can grow more in greenery in our communities.

- One of the things that we would be much appreciated if people would just follow our Facebook, donate money. Ask for orientation and education about the work that we do. Those are some of the things that really facilitate the process of people being engaged. The more you know, the more you learn, the more you know. And right now, because of the virus, people are not that engaged to the level that besides just being on the street. But after you do all the good work of being on the street with the demonstrations still, at the end of the day, somebody has to go back and find the room and develop policy, making collaboration, coalition, facilitating a process, To keep the ball out of the ball and out of the prize at the end of the day. And based on this past places condition and is not, and we shouldn't, I just leave it up to the youth is everybody's responsibility to try to get as much information and clarification about what's in their surroundings. And I'll just say environmental degradation and climate change really is a health crisis and it will affect every single one of us. We are being ineffective now. And so I would like to urge everyone to stay informed like Ms. Margaret said, knowledge is power. The more you know, the more powerful you are. And please go out and vote. We need leaders who can truly represent us and who have our best interest at heart. And we don't have that right now.

- Thank you so much. The three of you for joining us today. We really, really appreciated this conversation and really urge folks to take a look at the links and some of the actionable things that our panelists just mentioned. In the middle of these two global pandemics, it is so important that we are examining structural racism within our own institutions, within our own communities and in doing what we can to respond. So thank you, everyone for watching as well. Hope that this is gonna be one of many conversations that we're having at the museum about environmental racism. And we really appreciate you joining us this evening. Thank you.