‘Black Spaces’ at the Oakland Museum Meditates on Displacement and Reclamation

You don’t have to dig deep to find a story of Black displacement in the Bay Area.

Walking through the Lower Haight, I’m reminded of my grandparents being denied an apartment in the 1950s when the landlord flatly stated, “We don’t rent to Blacks.” Meeting a friend recently outside Oracle Park for a Giants game, I couldn’t help but think about how even Willie Mays — a Hall of Fame outfielder and one of the greatest baseball players of all time — was nearly blocked from buying a home in San Francisco’s exclusive Sherwood Forest neighborhood in the late 1950s. (Neighbors objected, forcing the mayor to intervene so Mays could close the deal — at $5,000 above the price quoted to white buyers.)

Today, Mays has a statue anchoring a plaza named in his honor. Yet the contradiction lingers: celebrated in bronze while the system that excluded him remains largely intact.

My family’s story and Willie Mays’ struggle aren’t isolated incidents. They’re threads in a pattern of exclusion stretching back decades in the Bay Area, determining which communities were able to plant roots and which would be systematically uprooted.

That tension — between visibility and erasure, celebration and systemic harm — is what makes Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain so vital. On view at the Oakland Museum of California through March 2026, the exhibition does more than document Black displacement; it honors the spaces we built anyway, and the ones we’re still reclaiming.

Curated by OMCA Associate Curator Dania Talley, the exhibit centers on two East Bay communities: West Oakland and the lesser-known Russell City, once a vibrant Black and Latino farming town.

Museum Director Lori Fogarty first learned about Russell City in 2021, while receiving a national award in Washington, D.C. She’d brought along Carolyn “C.J.” Johnson, CEO of the Black Cultural Zone, as part of OMCA’s delegation. Over dinner, Johnson shared how her family had migrated from Oklahoma and Louisiana to West Oakland, before being displaced to Russell City — one of many families who made a home there before the town was ultimately bulldozed in the 1960s to make way for an industrial park. Fogarty had worked at OMCA for nearly two decades without ever hearing the story. “That had to change,” she said.

The exhibit unfolds in three thematic zones: Homeplace, which explores domestic life under discrimination; Social Fabric, which celebrates community institutions; and Dispossession and Repair, which confronts destructive policies and lifts up grassroots resistance.

In Homeplace, artifacts like church fans, diplomas, and a suitcase belonging to Otis Williams, who moved from Louisiana to work in the Marin City shipyards, illustrate personal narratives of migration and “the individual carving out space under systems of exclusion,” as Talley explained at a press preview for the exhibit.

In Social Fabric, visitors encounter churches, jazz venues, and Black-owned businesses that sustained thriving communities. A special highlight is the Oak Center Neighborhood Association, formed in 1963 to fight the city’s redevelopment plans targeting West Oakland. The group ultimately saved over 300 historic Victorian homes from demolition in the mid-1960s, persuading officials to invest in rehabilitation instead. The Oak Center neighborhood remains a symbol of grassroots resistance and the power of residents to protect what they’ve built.

Dispossession and Repair examines the impact of the Housing Act of 1949 and redlining, while spotlighting resistance through maps, oral histories, and community records.

Three commissioned installations deepen the exhibit’s impact. One of the most arresting is by Adrian Burrell, a third-generation Oaklander, who created a towering bottle tree sculpture anchored by a steel base and adorned with glass bottles — an African American folk tradition meant to ward off evil spirits. Tucked within the branches are small video monitors playing intimate home footage: his grandmother’s block parties in Ghost Town, the somber ritual of her funeral, and tender scenes of family life that pulse with joy, grief, and resilience.

“This is about rehearsal,” Burrell explained. “Black folks have always practiced for catastrophe. What we’re doing now is just the latest act.”

At the Archive of Urban Futures, created by Dr. Brandi T. Summers, visitors can browse zines, maps, and multimedia documents tracing the erasure, commodification and reclamation of Black history in Oakland. “We still call Oakland home, even if we can’t afford to live here anymore,” Summers said. “This space is about holding on to that memory and building from it.”

A full-scale replica of 2928 Magnolia St. — occupied by Moms 4 Housing in 2019 — serves as both memorial and model for housing justice. Moms 4 Housing co-founder Dominique Walker shared that her son took his first steps in the house, underscoring the importance of having a place to stay. Councilmember Carroll Fife added, “The system that created homelessness is the same one that made Russell City disappear. We have to keep resisting and telling these stories.”

During the preview, gallery owner Jonathan Carver Moore, who moved to the Bay from D.C. nine years ago, said the exhibit reshaped how he sees these cities. “I never realized how Black San Francisco and Oakland once were. Seeing those photos, the bulldozers, the kids on top of them — it reminded me this was ours.”

Comedian and TV host W. Kamau Bell called the exhibition a necessary mirror. “This is exactly what the Oakland Museum of California does best — centering the voices, aesthetics, and needs of Oakland,” he said. “If there was ever a time to focus on reclaiming Black spaces, it’s now. And not just Black spaces, American spaces. This exhibit reminds us how.”

A statement painted on the gallery wall sums up its emotional core: “Black does not ask permission; it seeps, stretches, and stains. Black is the architecture of the uncontainable.”

This is not just a history exhibition. It’s a living memory project, a communal vision board, a space to mourn what was lost and to celebrate what still pulses beneath city streets. If you’ve ever walked past an empty lot and felt a story rise up in your chest—or wondered where the jazz clubs went, or why that corner store became a boutique—this show is for you. And if you haven’t, then it’s definitely for you.

‘Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain’ is on view through March 1, 2026, at the Oakland Museum of California (1000 Oak Street, Oakland). Details here.