The Tail Of Two Cities.

When I was a child some 70 years ago, my Aunt Dot and Uncle Herb Lived in the Oakland hills. For those of you who, thanks to the Internet, may be reading this blog from a faraway land, Oakland lies across the bay from San Francisco. In any case, in those days Oakland was an idyllic paradise much the same as San Francisco, but with a far better climate (milder temperatures and no fog). My Aunt and Uncle's home was located high in the Oakland Hills with a view of the south bay to die for. The sight from their large kitchen picture window was particularly spectacular at night when the twinkling lights from the city below extended as far as the eye could see. The middle class homes on Maxwell Avenue were immaculately maintained with tree lined sidewalks and beautiful green lawns. This town was middle class America at its best. At that time, in the 1940s, Oakland's downtown was a thriving center of commerce that would be the envy of any large city today with beautiful theaters, magnificent retail stores and a thriving automobile row that extended for 10 to 12 blocks along North Broadway. Today, much of Oakland is a waste land and stands out, only in a negative way, as the murder capital of California. Before long it may rival Chicago as the murder capital of USA. More than half of Oakland's young black males are either in prison or on parole. Nearly every store front along Broadway is boarded up and auto row is a thing of the distant past. The few business offices that have survived the cities destruction are confined to a couple of high-rises protected by armed guards and surrounded by homeless people who live in, what for all practical purposes, is a third world country. The beautiful residential area where my aunt and Uncle lived in when I was a child is now surrounded by crime ridden slums. High street is now Low Street. What went wrong? How did this atrocity happen? I expect there is more than one reason for destruction of this once beautiful city by the bay, but one event stands out in my mind as more important than all others. In the early part of the last century there was an unwritten rule in Oakland, Blacks were not allowed to own property on the east side of East 14th Street. Yes, this was segregation at its worst but, guess what, it worked for many years! Sometime in the early 1940's this voluntary mandate, enforced by white property owners in the Oakland hills, began to crack as the first blacks crossed East 14th street and began to invade the Oakland hills. Within 20 years the Caucasians, who had made their homes in this beautiful part of the city for generations, had abandoned ship and headed through the Caldecott tunnel to the suburbs along the 680 corridor east Of the Oakland hills. The rest of the story is history. The fact that blacks finally broke the color barrier and gained access to White Oakland was not, however, what brought Oakland to its collective knees. No, not by a long shot, that honor rests squarely on the shoulders of Lyndon Baines Johnson and his infamous Great Society which promised equal justice and equal opportunity for all Americans. Unfortunately, the welfare state constructed by Johnson and his liberal supporters had the opposite effect because their socialist policies supporting welfare mothers destroyed, in a matter of a few short years, the fabric of the black family. When all was said and done, the Blacks in America survived slavery, or at least out lasted it, but they could not overcome Johnson's attempts to right the wrongs inflicted on their far distant ancestors by confederate slave owners who had died hundreds of years before. The fact that over 300,000 northern soldiers lost their lives in the great civil war fighting to free the slaves is of no consequence to modern day Blacks or, for that matter, their new liberal masters. The single parent families fostered by well meaning, but demented, liberals like Johnson, were no match for the pimps, drug dealers and other low-lives who soon came to control every facet of street life in Oakland as they did in every other American city that was run by Black liberal politicians. Things have gotten so bad in Detroit that they dismantling the city brick by brick and returning the land to nature. Alas, even the best efforts of Black grandmothers and their Black church leaders were no match for the chaos that occurred when Johnson's economic policies drove the Black bread winners from their families and turned their children loose on the crime ridden streets of Black America.. What can be done to turn this sinking ship around? In truth, I think nothing! The wonderful shinning city by the bay that was Oakland is gone forever and the new lawless poverty stricken Oakland is here to stay! I am glad my Aunt and Uncle, who were diehard liberals, did not live to see the Oakland of today.