Volume 13, Number 4 · September 11, 1969
Letter from Oakland: The Panthers
By Ronald Steel
I went to Oakland, dead end of the westward course of empire, and home of the Black Panthers, to take a look at a conference of the revolutionary Left. Oakland, where the American dream ends at the Pacific, and the nightmare begins, is a familiar kind of industrial city: high-rise office buildings and apartments downtown, plasticene shopping centers on the fringe, and slowly decaying wooden houses in between. West Oakland, facing the Bay and the gleaming hills of San Francisco beyond, is the ghetto where the Black Panthers were born. It is a Californiastyle ghetto, with one-family houses and neglected yards, where poverty wears a more casual face and despair is masked by sunshine.
Feature, 8249 words
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