SOUL CITY

Oakland back in the day.

It’s not just San Francisco whose culture has been altered by Big Tech. As the author Ishmael Reed writes in his foreword to this eloquent collection of photos of Oakland in the 1970s, the Bay Area city—where Reed has lived since 1979—has lost much of its Black population: “In 1980, Black residents made up 47 percent of the city’s population. Because of rising housing costs driven by gentrification, in 2024 the percentage of the Black population was reduced to 21.09 percent.” Like neighboring Berkeley, he adds, “Oakland is becoming a white city. But just as we gaze at photos of other historic Black zones that have been razed, Ken Light’s photos will remind future generations that there was a time when Blacks lived among deteriorating Victorians, and no matter how miserable the environment, they had pride and they had friends, made love, had jobs, ran businesses, and made much from little, which has been the strategy of Blacks since the slave ships landed.” The more than 120 black-and-white images by this longtime documentary photographer and filmmaker show everyday scenes in West Oakland—“once considered,” as he writes, “the ‘Harlem of the West’ (along with San Francisco’s Fillmore District).” We see men in fedoras and blazers, their shoes scuffed, posing for portraits. An elderly woman, one of her shoes untied, stands before a heater, her right hand resting gracefully on her chest. There are photos of smiling ironworkers, a man in a bolo operating a shop’s sowing machine, a lone customer at a beauty salon, young couples holding hands, and children on the street hugging each other. The settings are often grim—smashed windows, peeling paint, a tired American flag next to the stenciled words “save childrn need boys scout”—but the photos depict dignified people in humble circumstances.

An invaluable window into urban Black America.