Oakland’s history teaches us that the freedoms we now defend — ethnic studies, community schools, culturally responsive teaching — were once considered dangerous ideas.
By the time Carter G. Woodson founded what would become Black History Month in 1926, he already understood a hard truth: history, when told honestly, unsettles power.
A century later, that truth still holds.
When I think of Black History, I think of the individuals who had the greatest impact on me. Mrs. Gaines, my second-grade teacher, always gave me an extra snack during recess. Archie Jones, my high school basketball coach, demonstrated being competitive while also being a loving father and husband. Then there was Mr. Matin Abdell-Qawi, my direct supervisor at Oakland High School, who hired me for my first position within the Oakland Unified School District, and carried himself in a way that exemplified the phrase, “rising tides raise all ships.”
Working at the Oakland Public Education Fund, daily I hear the echoes of people who believed — often at great personal cost — that our Black students deserve more than survival. They deserve dignity, rigor, joy, and access. Oakland, long caricatured by the nation as a place of disruption, has in fact been one of the country’s most consistent laboratories for educational freedom. This work was never polite, and it has never been safe.
Dr. Marcus Foster understood this.
As superintendent of Oakland Unified School District from 1970 to 1973, Dr. Foster led with a vision that centered on children rather than ideology. He believed public schools should be sites of care, nourishment, and excellence — especially for Black and Brown students who had been systematically denied all three. Under his leadership, Oakland expanded early childhood education, prioritized community voice, and rejected punitive models of discipline that criminalized Black youth before they could dream.
Dr. Foster’s refusal to bend to extremism — his insistence that liberation required coalition, not coercion — made him a target. His assassination in 1973 remains one of the most painful reminders that radical love, not just radical rhetoric, can provoke violence. Hate groups often grow in the shadow of transformative change. That does not mean the change was wrong. It means it was necessary.
Dr. Ruth Love picked up that unfinished work.
Serving as Oakland superintendent from 1975 to 1980, Dr. Love brought a scholar’s rigor and a strategist’s resolve to a district still reeling from loss. She advanced desegregation, championed instructional equity, and insisted that Black students be seen not as problems to manage, but as intellects to cultivate. Her later tenure as superintendent of Chicago Public Schools and her return to the Bay Area as a professor at UC Berkeley cemented her national influence. When Dr. Love died in 2024, Oakland lost not just a leader, but a bridge between generations: a woman who understood that policy without history is fragile, and that reform without memory repeats harm.
And then there was Mr. Oscar Wright.
Less nationally known, perhaps, but no less consequential. For more than two decades, Mr. Wright dedicated his life to making Black academic excellence visible. Through the African American Students Honor Roll, he created a space where Black students were publicly affirmed, named, and celebrated in a system that too often rendered them invisible.
From 2000 until his passing in 2024, Mr. Wright’s work reminded Oakland of something essential: equity is not only about dismantling barriers; it is about building platforms. Recognition is a form of resistance. Celebration is political.
To ensure that the stories of Carter G. Woodson, Dr. Foster, Dr. Love, and Mr. Wright are not reduced to February soundbites, we need to continue highlighting stories like these so they are embedded into how we define educational success itself.
Listening recently to scholar Jarvis Givens discuss Black education history, I was struck by how often Black educators have been labeled “radical” simply for insisting on humanity. The backlash they faced — surveillance, defunding, violence — was not accidental. It was a response to their potential success.
Black History Month, at 100, is not a celebration of the past alone; it is a reckoning with the present. Taking the radical approach on behalf of the disenfranchised is part of our history. It’s what we do. It is not a comfortable history. But it is an honest history.
And as Carter G. Woodson warned us a century ago: a people without knowledge of their past is easily controlled. Oakland has never been easy to control. For that, we owe thanks to those who made education a battleground and a beacon for Black liberation.
By Geral Lowe, Associate Director of Programs, Oakland Public Education Fund