Oakland emerged as a port city in the late 19th century. Because San Francisco sits on a peninsula, ships sailed right past it and into the bay, where they dropped off cargo in Oakland, whose location made it well equipped to transfer goods from the ships to trains. It grew into one of America’s most diverse cities over the course of the 20th century. African Americans from the South came to work at the port. They joined immigrants from Asia and Latin America in making Oakland their new home.
Between 1900 and 1930, Oakland quadrupled in size. Growth slowed in the following decades, but when the American Football League began play in 1960, it deemed Oakland fit for a team. And so the Raiders were born. In 1968, the Athletics moved to Oakland from Kansas City, and in 1971 the local basketball team moved across the bay, changing its name from the San Francisco Warriors to the vague but more inclusive Golden State.
All the while, Oakland and Alameda County became home to the fringes of leftist political movements that were gaining traction throughout the United States. In 1964, nearby Berkeley hosted the Free Speech Movement, a series of student-led protests that led to reforms allowing political activity on campus. The Movement turned Berkeley into Berkeley. Huey P. Newton started the Black Panther Party in Oakland in 1966, and while the civil rights movement gained momentum in the South, the Panthers’ militant strain of black activism gained traction out west.
Much of this — the concurrent rise of Oakland sports and Oakland radicalism — is coincidence. But on occasion the two worlds overlapped. In 1965, the Raiders were scheduled to play an exhibition game against the Jets in Mobile, Alabama. Four Raiders, however, refused to play. The problem: Mobile’s Ladd Stadium segregated black and white spectators. Rather than continue amid a player-led protest, the teams moved the game.
The A’s launched a dynasty in the early 1970s, winning three consecutive championships from 1972 to 1974 — just as the Black Panther Party was rising to power in city politics. One piece of the Panthers’ strategy was the launch of a sports section in their propaganda-filled newspaper, The Black Panther. Readers picked up the paper for news about Ken Stabler and Reggie Jackson, but when they kept reading, they found op-eds advocating overthrow of the capitalist system.
Still, talk of the intertwining of Oakland’s teams with its political movements is, more than anything, talk of nostalgia. The ’60s and ’70s were great because the Raiders and A’s were winning and Oakland, in the national conversation, mattered.