I remember there had been threats of disruption in the weeks prior to that October 23, 2019 school board meeting. Protestors, still upset by the closure of their children’s school just weeks earlier, had publicly declared, there would be a price to pay and that it would not be business as usual.
“As we sat listening to public comment,” former Board President Jody London recalls, “the last speaker started her comments, and a phalanx of others in the audience joined her, many dressed in black. Then at the speaker’s signal, the crowd surged forward, and began to jump over and into the barricade [in front of the stage].”
Before I knew it, eight OUSD police officers ran by me in a rush to fortify the gate and stop the demonstrators from reaching the Board members, staff, and superintendent.
Still in disbelief, I heard one of the officers say with force, “we need to get you all upstairs.”
As we were escorted off the stage and into secure quarters, I looked back to catch one more glimpse as the disruptors rushed our seats: some in full costumes and masks, some with signs and banners, all headed to stand up for their cause.
In another instance, during the Oakland Teacher’s strike earlier that year, as I attempted to enter a meeting, I was surrounded by an angry mob of about 300 teachers and their supporters, who told me there will be no meeting today. “We have barricaded the doors,” one said, “and your colleagues are trapped inside!” This continued for hours. The meeting was finally canceled and my board colleagues— two of them student board members— and their support staff were let free only to be escorted into a van, that was then surrounded, blocked, and shaken by the angry mob outside with the still frightened passengers inside.
These were a few of the actions taken by protest groups in Oakland against the school board over the last few years. Protestors have even shown up at my house on numerous occasions and posted their propaganda on my neighbors’ doors and cars.
These protestors are all Democrats like me. I believe us all to be relatively liberal minded people who love the privilege of living in Oakland and in the Bay Area. We call ourselves informed. And there is pretty much universal agreement in our little neck of the woods that “Barbara Lee Speaks for Me.”
I raise this up to say how can we speak so strongly against the thugs that lay siege to the Capitol Building? How can we call that treason— as it was— and not speak strongly against the same crimes at a local level?
How can we say to Trump and his Proud Boys that we are about discourse and dialogue, and that there is no place for violence, when there are those people within our own ranks that have threatened our democracy in the ways described above?
Those people that came to my house, that surrounded me and barricaded the doors to prevent a legislative body from meeting were there because they believed that my decisions were causing harm to them and their communities’ well being. That’s the same thing the Proud Boys and Girls believed.
We cannot allow our beliefs to dictate when it’s okay take over a council or school board meeting or threaten a public official no matter how much we believe in our cause. Because if it’s okay for you to do it for your local movement, then it’s okay to lock down the Capitol, right? When it comes to the Constitution, does the scale of the infraction matter? If we’ve set up a system to preserve justice, then a progressive cause doesn’t give license to storm a legislative body either.
In their minds, the group that came to my house, and posted my address on Twitter inviting others in their network to join them in support of their agenda cannot point a finger at Donald Trump who used Twitter to direct his masses to violate our system of government.
If we are to solve the serious challenges in our cities and our nation, we must rely on dialogue and debate first to settle our disagreements and always resist the temptation to physically disrupt.
Post Story Reflection:
I had a chance to talk with my former school board colleague Jody London, who led the Board during much of the tumult of the last year and a half. And she shared the following reflection about the closure of Kaiser Elementary in 2019, which led to the meeting takeover described above:
“What was the issue that motivated these people for five months to stage elaborate street theater protests at School Board meetings that prevented others who had come to observe and participate in the democratic, deliberative decision-making process?”
“Well, the Board had voted to merge the school that their children attended with another school whose students were predominantly poor and Black. Only 28 out of 270 students at the school we were merging lived in the neighborhood attendance area; 30 percent of them lived near the school with which they were merging. As I see it, our decision was based on the needs of the students most historically underserved by the school system.”
I think this is a brave observation with which I agree. In Oakland, a lot of the time we say we want equity or we say we want what’s best for all children, but do we really mean we want what’s best for our children as long as we are not personally inconvenienced?
What I noticed in my time on the school board is that when people with time, access, and privilege are worked up about an issue, disruption happens, and it usually leads to change. So I am by no means against peaceful protest, but I do want to know who is going to protest for the children no one seems to speak for— those who haven’t missed out for a year, but those who have been missed and overlooked for decades?
On average, about 3 out of 10 Black children in district-run and charter schools in Oakland read on grade level. Is that not worthy of protest, right now?