Oakland Grown

On Thursday, April 22, the Oakland Public Library hosted a virtual program with filmmaker, curator and visual artist Celia Peters in which she spoke about the origins, development, and current popularity of Afrofuturism. Click here to watch! 

Using images from art, fashion, literature, and clips from music and films, she illustrated that Afrofuturism is a multidisciplinary, wide-ranging creative movement that centers Black history and culture. Ms. Peters cited the cosmologies of Nigeria, Mali, and Egypt as major influences, “cultures that show up in the DNA of Afrofuturism.”

Afrofuturism places Black protagonists and experiences at the center of a song, painting, story, or film. With the phenomenal international success of the film “

On February 3, to commemorate this important moment in our history, the Oakland History Center hosted a panel discussion featuring Women of Color Resource Center co-founder Linda Burnham, newly elected Oakland District 3 councilwoman and Moms4Housing co-founder Carroll Fife, author and Black Panther Party newspaper editor Judy Juanita, and Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza. The event was a special one with these women discussing the hard, collaborative work that makes a movement, defining allyship, outlining challenges women activists face, and sharing insights about where we go from here.

The recording of the event can be found here. For library books and other resources about Black women claiming political power, see our latest bibliography here. 

The year 2020 will go down in American history as the year Black women rose

Seventy years ago, on January 7, 1951, Oaklanders gathered shoulder to shoulder on 14th Street in numbers that made traffic impassable to be the first ones to visit a new, modern library. The previous Main Library, the handsome Carnegie building located on 14th and Grove (now Martin Luther King, Jr. Way), was nearly 50 years old and too small to accommodate the population which had exploded during the Second World War. After years of citizens campaigning for a larger library, a bond measure was passed in 1945 to finance the new library.

The new central library was to be located on a key block of the planned Civic Center, a municipal district that clustered government agencies and cultural organizations around the western end of Lake Merritt. To make way for the project, several houses and an old music conservatory had to be torn down. Designed by the firm of  Miller and Warnecke, the library construction didn’t begin until 1948. The cornerstone was laid by the Native Sons of the Golden West in May 1949. The firm of Stolte, Inc. won the construction

Have you been wondering how to find new books in Oakland Public Library's catalog? We've created a brief tutorial that shows you how.