Podcasts by East Bay Yesterday
East Bay history podcast that gathers, shares & celebrate stories from Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond and other towns throughout Alameda and Contra Costa Counties.
Further podcasts by East Bay Yesterday
Podcast on the topic Gesellschaft und Kultur
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“A new Pacific frontier”: The beginnings of Berkeley from 2022-02-09T22:57:28
In many ways, Berkeley is a city defined by dichotomies. The hills and the flatlands, academia and industry, counterculture and The Establishment. Despite the city’s progressive reputation, Berkele...
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"He stole the town": Oakland's founding father was a villain from 2022-01-27T22:57:38
Some cities were founded by warriors, prophets, or idealistic visionaries. The man who established Oakland was an unscrupulous lawyer looking to get rich quick. This 1877 newspaper quote captures t...
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“Black Art was her language”: Searching for the mother of a movement from 2022-01-12T16:04:28
In 1968, an exhibition titled “New Perspectives in Black Art” opened in the Kaiser Center Gallery of the Oakland Museum. The show was curated by Evangeline “E.J.” Montgomery, a woman who was at the...
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"More than just the 1960s": Following the footsteps of rock & roll legends from 2021-11-22T19:59:49
The Bay Area’s status as a rock & roll mecca may have peaked during the psychedelic sixties, but the party didn’t stop after the hippies took the flowers out of their hair. Following the height of ...
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“The porters were fed up”: C.L. Dellums and the rise of America’s first Black union from 2021-11-03T17:46:19
In the early 20th century, the largest employer of Black men in the United States was the Pullman Car Company, which operated luxurious trains that carried millions of passengers around the booming...
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“Like a neon space carnival”: The trippy memories of a 90’s “Raver Girl” from 2021-10-12T19:26:33
Samantha Durbin’s acid was just kicking in as she entered an Oakland donut shop to score a handmade map to a secret warehouse party. On that chilly winter night in 1996, she ended up dancing to pul...
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“There’s no reason to be San Francisco”: The mixed legacy of Oakland’s ambition from 2021-09-22T21:48:19
Thanks to its natural deepwater port, San Francisco quickly emerged as the West Coast’s leading metropolis during California’s Gold Rush era. In the decades since, many of Oakland’s development pat...
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“It was my whole universe”: William Gee Wong on growing up in Oakland’s Chinatown from 2021-09-08T23:02:39
William Gee Wong almost didn’t exist. A few years before Wong was born, his father was shot four times over a dispute involving Oakland Chinatown’s underground lottery. Thanks to the quick work of ...
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“Dear Brown Eyes”: How a stash of old letters helped heal a family from 2021-07-28T17:01:42
A few years ago, Aussie Holcomb was going through a divorce, and her relationship with her dad wasn’t going well, either. Feeling lost and lonely, she began reading her grandparents’ old love lette...
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“Who ordered the hit?” Investigating Mac Dre’s tragic murder from 2021-07-16T20:37:30
The quickest way to start a dance party in the Bay Area is to play a Mac Dre song. Countless times, I’ve seen mellow crowds instantly transform as soon as the first few beats from hyphy hits like “...
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Hoover-Foster Stories, Vol. 2: “You become an art anthropologist” from 2021-06-16T23:20:29
When Andre Jones (AKA Natty Rebel) does a mural in Oakland’s Hoover-Foster neighborhood, he doesn’t just paint whatever he feels like. Andre meets with longtime residents, shop owners, and other lo...
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Hoover-Foster Stories, Vol. 1: BBQ, books, and big banks from 2021-05-04T22:47:21
Oakland’s Hoover-Foster neighborhood encapsulates more than a century of Black Liberation struggles. It was a destination for migrants fleeing the Jim Crow South to find work in the East Bay’s boom...
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“We’re no longer afraid to be Black”: Before the Panthers, this group was the vanguard from 2021-04-07T22:31:07
Before Huey Newton and Bobby Seale started the Black Panther Party, they spent years learning from the leaders of the Afro-American Association. During the early 1960s, when the struggle for racial...
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“We’re uncovering a lost civilization”: A look at the New Deal’s local legacy from 2021-02-27T20:45:01
It’s nearly impossible to summarize the magnitude of the New Deal’s impact in the Bay Area. From the creation of Lake Anza, Woodminster Amphitheater, and Treasure Island to countless murals, school...
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BART, bathhouses, and beyond: The friendship behind “The Cruising Diaries” from 2021-02-11T21:18:12
Two decades ago, Brontez Purnell fled his Christian family in Alabama, landed in a warehouse full of punks in East Oakland, and quickly got to work hooking up with as many guys as he could get his ...
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“We were here before California was a state”: Talking Latino history with Jose Rivera from 2021-01-15T19:19:10
When Jose Rivera started researching the Bay Area’s Chicano history, he was frustrated by how difficult it was to find information. To remedy this problem, Jose created Oakland Latinos Unidos as a ...
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“It was like a carnival”: The betrayal of Oakland’s 1946 General Strike from 2020-12-29T21:40:15
In 1946, a few hundred department store employees, mostly women, walked off the job and started a picket line in downtown Oakland. Within a few weeks, more than 100,000 workers joined them, filling...
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Goodbye, Telegraph Avenue: An audio time capsule of the past decade from 2020-12-04T07:01:17
Greetings to whoever finds this time capsule. If you want to know what’s inside, you’ll just have to listen.
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“We’re not selling a neighborhood”: A new guidebook spotlights landmarks of conflict and resilience from 2020-11-06T20:31:43
Amidst this year’s bombardment of campaign ads and nonstop election news, it’s easy to forget that the ballot box is only one of many ways that people participate in politics and drive systemic cha...
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“A home burned every 11 seconds”: A deadly tragedy that could happen again from 2020-10-08T19:28:27
On the morning of October 20, 1991, towering clouds of black smoke blocked out the sun as “diablo winds” whipped flames hot enough to melt gold throughout the hills above Oakland and Berkeley. By t...
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“They insist on being here”: Oakland’s official bird refuses to be moved from 2020-09-17T18:06:43
A few years ago developers destroyed downtown Oakland’s largest rookery of black-crowned night herons. Workers removed dozens of nests before chopping down the curbside ficus trees where the birds ...
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Why Dorothea Lange still matters: Q&A with Oakland Museum's Drew Johnson from 2020-08-18T19:36:41
The first part of this episode originally aired three years ago, when the Oakland Museum opened an exhibit of Dorothea Lange photos called Politics of Seeing. Now, the Oakland Museum is launching a...
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“How you organize that rage”: Challenging the police before Black Lives Matter from 2020-07-24T18:01:41
Massive protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death have brought unprecedented attention to the intertwined issues of police violence and structural racism, but the legacy of challenging police ab...
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EBY Q&A Live: Opening up about oysters from 2020-06-28T19:28:18
Oysters may seem like a simple creature at first glance – they can’t even move on their own – but their presence can determine the health of an entire ecosystem. Just like tree rings hold clues to ...
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A town within The Town: Oakland Army Base workers on its rise and fall from 2020-05-19T19:13:15
From World War II until Desert Storm, the Oakland Army Base was the U.S. military’s largest seaport West of the Mississippi. This site had been a sandy marsh the previous century, and for millennia...
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From war to love: My grandma remembers the Oakland Army Base from 2020-04-24T21:17:15
I never planned to make an episode of this podcast about my own family history, but I’ve been spending more time thinking about my relatives, who are scattered across the country, ever since the co...
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“We were being erased”: The woman who saved California’s Black history from 2020-04-06T18:05:12
Delilah Beasley didn’t have much education or money, but when she saw that African Americans were being ignored by history books, she knew she had to do something. Beasley ended up spending nearly ...
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EBY Q&A: The Bay and beyond with Chris Carlsson from 2020-03-25T00:50:29
Since I’ve had to postpone my boat tours due to the Coronavirus crisis, I’ve decided to move the discussion about Bay history to the podcast. My guest is Chris Carlsson, who also leads boat tours o...
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EBY Q&A: How did it get so expensive to live here? from 2020-02-17T19:54
How did the Bay Area’s housing crisis get so bad – and what might be done to solve it? These are the main questions Oakland-based New York Times reporter Conor Dougherty tackles in “Golden Gates: F...
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“OK, let’s go crazy”: How an unusual contest became the pride of Piedmont from 2020-02-08T20:13:32
In 1963, a Piedmont High science teacher decided to liven up biology class with a bird calling competition. This hatched an annual tradition that led to students shrieking and squawking in front of...
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Unfair housing: Why racism and real estate are so hard to untangle from 2020-01-07T22:05:27
In 1963, Northern California’s first African American State Assemblymember, Byron Rumford, championed a Fair Housing Act designed to prevent racial discrimination that severely limited where people...
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EBY Q&A: Leland Stanford, the original tech bro from 2019-11-23T20:45:42
It's almost impossible to image what Oakland would look like today if the Western terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad hadn't been established here in 1869. Where there had once been marshy we...
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“It wasn’t part of my childhood”: Chicano Power and the rise of Día de los Muertos in Oakland from 2019-10-28T18:34:27
Many Mexican-Americans growing up during the 1950s and ’60s had no awareness of Día de los Muertos. Due to the pressures of assimilation, relatively few Chicano families celebrated this ancient tra...
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EBY Q&A live: A wild ride through BART history from 2019-10-16T18:53:11
Why did BART come "within a gnat's eyelash" of being derailed by voters before the first track had ever been laid? How did Berkeley force BART to go underground? What's the deal with BART managers ...
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EBY Q&A: Betty Reid Soskin's century of chaos and hope from 2019-09-11T17:08:23
Betty Reid Soskin is a living link to America’s long history of slavery. As a young woman, her best friend was her great-grandmother, who was enslaved for the first two decades of her life. When Be...
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EBY Q&A: 50 Years of free health care from 2019-08-21T20:36:57
As hippies and radicals flooded into Berkeley during the sixties, the city faced mounting public health problems that ranged from bad acid trips to riot injuries. The Berkeley Free Clinic launched ...
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Deep in Canyon, part 3: “A community of choice” from 2019-08-01T23:05:55
The previous episodes in this miniseries covered the early history of Canyon and this town’s fight for survival during the height of the hippie era. The conclusion of this trilogy explores this unu...
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EBY Q&A: The earth-shattering history of a small East Bay town from 2019-07-10T22:43:36
One of the Bay Area’s first business booms was the rapid growth of explosives manufacturing following the Gold Rush. The power of nitroglycerine and later dynamite enabled industrial-scale mining, ...
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EBY Q&A: Taking South Asian history to the streets from 2019-06-26T22:17:33
How can history be used to challenge hate crimes? For the past 7 years, Barnali Ghosh and Anirvan Chatterjee have been exploring questions like this through their Berkeley South Asian Radical Histo...
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“I enjoyed every day”: A tribute to Ruth Beckford from 2019-06-11T19:16:24
Ruth Beckford was known as “the Dance Lady” because she mentored several generations of young women through her popular classes and introduced the Bay Area to Afro-Haitian styles with her electrify...
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EBY Q&A: How to do nothing in Oakland with Jenny Odell from 2019-05-23T22:34:07
Jenny Odell wrote that her inspiration for “How to Do Nothing” was “grounded in a particular location, and that is the Morcom Amphitheater of Roses in Oakland, California.” Odell’s countless hours ...
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“If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with”: When Ronald Reagan sent troops into Berkeley from 2019-05-08T00:02:39
50 years ago, a group of students, activists and community members transformed a muddy, junk-filled parking lot into a park. When the University of California, under heavy pressure from Gov. Ronald...
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EBY Q&A: Exploring Lake Merritt and Children’s Fairyland from 2019-04-25T04:03:46
With the weather warming up, I thought now would be a great time for a deep dive into Lake Merritt (not literally!). First, this episode will explore the wild side of this body of water (which is t...
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Deep in Canyon, part 2: “It wasn’t utopia... it was real.” from 2019-04-09T21:25:25
During the 1960s, young people from all over the country flooded into a small village tucked behind the Oakland hills amidst a grove of towering redwoods. Some of them just came to party, but many ...
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Deep in Canyon, part 1: “Paradise with a dash of chaos” from 2019-03-20T23:53:43
During the Gold Rush, Canyon had more residents than Oakland, but today few people know that this tiny village nestled in the East Bay hills even exists. The “Deep in Canyon” mini-series will explo...
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Bonus episode: Q&A with “Evolutionary Blues” director Cheryl Fabio from 2019-01-17T18:43
Instead of the usual narrative format, this episode is a one-on-one interview with Cheryl Fabio, the director of “Evolutionary Blues: West Oakland’s Music Legacy.” I interviewed Cheryl for my KPFA ...
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“The Silent Generation was over”: Building Berkeley’s 1960s student movement from 2018-12-12T17:05:31
Stories about Berkeley’s rebellious student movement of the 1960s often start with the launch of the Free Speech Movement. But the roots of this pivotal event go all the way back to the previous de...
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“Getting shot was one of the best things that happened”: Life after an Oakland assassination attempt from 2018-09-20T23:14:01
Growing up in Oakland, Mike lost many friends and family members in the streets. Three years ago, he almost became a victim, too, when he was shot seven times while sitting in a car with his daught...
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“Respect the patch”: How Oakland’s oldest Black motorcycle club survived nearly 60 years from 2018-08-26T21:14:20
Tobie Gene Levingston left behind his life as a Louisiana sharecropper in the mid-1950s to work at a Oakland metal foundry. Within a few years, he started the East Bay Dragons, which grew to be one...
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“It’s in the DNA of hip-hop”: Tracing the local roots of a musical movement from 2018-07-24T23:11:19
The style, music and politics of the East Bay have had a major influence on hip-hop since even before the very first rap album dropped. Photojournalist Eric Arnold recently mapped out the most impo...
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“Get to know us first”: Longtime residents reflect on Oakland’s transformation from 2018-06-19T23:16:17
North Oakland’s Golden Gate neighborhood has undergone a rapid demographic shift over the past decade as many longtime Black residents have moved out and wealthier, younger white people have moved ...
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“This strange monument”: The story behind one of Oakland’s most prominent abandoned buildings from 2018-05-31T01:43:47
The abandoned pink building on the corner of MacArthur and Martin Luther King Jr. Way has visually dominated that busy intersection for so long that it feels like a monument. But what this monument...
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Long Lost Oakland, chapter 5: Overcoming racism, Lew Hing became king of Oakland’s canning industry from 2018-05-08T00:10:39
Following the 1906 earthquake, Oakland’s Lew Hing supported thousands of victims from San Francisco’s Chinatown who were turned away from official relief camps due to rampant discrimination. On the...
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Long Lost Oakland, chapter 4: Balloons, booms & busts from 2018-04-07T20:44:39
In the early 1900s, newspapers proclaimed that Oakland would become “the great metropolis of the West Coast.” During these boom years, East Bay politicians and business leaders celebrated a hot air...
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Long Lost Oakland, chapter 3: How battles over sacred sites have revived Ohlone culture from 2018-03-22T23:55:12
Out of all the features on the Long Lost Oakland map, the Ohlone shellmounds have drawn the most questions. Many of those questions were addressed in an earlier episode, so I’m sharing it again. He...
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Long Lost Oakland, chapter 2: “When the shipyard closed, my dad came home and cried” from 2018-03-15T21:37:38
Oakland’s Black population nearly quintupled during the 1940s. Tens of thousands of African Americans fled the Jim Crow-era South to work in East Bay shipyards like Moore Dry Dock Company. The back...
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“I’ll die if I let go”: After the earthquake, West Oakland came to the rescue from 2018-02-15T22:32:37
When the Cypress Freeway collapsed during the Loma Prieta earthquake, many Oakland residents risked their own lives to rescue victims trapped in the ruins. In this episode, a collaboration with Sna...
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Long Lost Oakland, chapter 1: Grizzly bears & redwood trees from 2018-01-24T23:35:34
Up until the 1850s, the East Bay was home to hundreds of grizzlies and some of the tallest redwoods in the history of the planet. Within about a decade of the Gold Rush, nearly all of the bears and...
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“They can’t believe he lived here”: Why John Muir settled down in the East Bay from 2017-12-21T23:37:52
John Muir died on Christmas Eve of 1914, but his gravesite is finally just opening up to the public now. In honor of this occasion, we’ll take a look at a side of “the father of America’s National ...
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Lenn Keller and the roots of the East Bay’s lesbian of color community from 2017-11-22T01:13:12
Although Oakland has one of the highest concentrations of lesbians in the country, the history—and impact—of this community is relatively unknown. Lenn Keller is trying to change that with the upco...
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“You can’t replace that with photos”: Why so many buildings in Oakland have been picked up and moved from 2017-10-11T18:45:46
What do a Buddhist Church, a lighthouse, a 72-room hotel and a whole block of Victorian houses have in common? They’re all Oakland buildings that were picked up and moved from their original settin...
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True shorties, vol. 1: Horse heads & bullet holes from 2017-09-06T23:26:29
Instead of one long story, the 25th episode of East Bay Yesterday features four shorties. In one interview, a man reminisces about using very unusual bait while fishing with his grandpa at the Berk...
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“The freest time of my life”: Richard Pryor’s transformative East Bay experience from 2017-08-15T23:31:42
Richard Pryor was one of the most influential comedians of all time, but when he first arrived in the East Bay, he said: “I don’t think I have a style yet.” This episode explores how living in Berk...
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“The queen of the West Coast blues”: Sugar Pie DeSanto serves up sweet & spicy stories from 2017-06-27T22:05:39
From jumping off pianos with James Brown to running the streets with Etta James, Sugar Pie DeSanto has led a wild life. In this episode, the soul singer shares memories of performing in Oakland’s l...
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“I believe in the elders”: Pendarvis Harshaw on gathering OG wisdom from 2017-06-07T23:02:09
“OG Told Me” isn’t just a new book, it’s a survival guide packed full of advice that Pendarvis Harshaw gathered from more than 50 interviews with Black elders. This episode takes a trip back in tim...
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“Monsters rising out of the mud”: From industrial wasteland to renegade art gallery from 2017-05-24T22:52:49
For decades, millions of drivers passing through Emeryville saw an ever-changing array of giant statues along the bayshore. In addition to the towering wooden vikings, dragons and other whimsical c...
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“What about the underdog?”: Dorothea Lange never stopped fighting for freedom from 2017-05-11T20:34:51
Dorothea Lange is one of the most famous photographers of all time, but the local work she did during her many decades as an East Bay resident is often overlooked. This episode explores how she wen...
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Before the A’s: The East Bay’s earliest baseball teams from 2017-04-19T16:19:01
Long before the Athletics moved to Oakland, teams like the Colonels, the Larks and the Aztec Stars played baseball in the East Bay. Special guest contributor Cyrus Farivar digs into the roots of ou...
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“They knew it was a lie”: Exposing the cover-up behind Japanese-American mass incarceration from 2017-04-03T19:07:35
Four decades after the U.S. government incarcerated nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans, long-hidden evidence revealed that the reason behind the mass imprisonment was a lie. This episode explores ho...
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“Where are those ancestors now?”: How battles over sacred sites have revived Ohlone culture from 2017-03-23T23:00:51
Have you ever wondered what the East Bay was like before colonization? In this episode, Corrina Gould of Indian People Organizing for Change shares knowledge of how her ancestors, the Ohlone people...
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Bruce Lee’s Oakland years: From a legendary fight to a new philosophy from 2017-03-14T22:50:02
Bruce Lee’s time in the East Bay affected him profoundly. This episode explores how a legendary fight sparked an evolution that changed martial arts forever. Charles Russo, author of “Striking Dist...
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America’s first sanctuary city: The missing chapter in a story of resistance from 2017-02-28T23:50:59
Although rarely credited, Berkeley became America’s first sanctuary city on November 8, 1971. This episode explores how an ancient idea was revived in protest of the Vietnam War and again to suppor...
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The East Bay punk explosion: How a scene rose from the ashes to create a music mecca from 2017-01-25T23:49:18
In the mid-1990s, the East Bay was the center of the punk rock universe. Lookout Records co-founder Larry Livermore shares his thoughts on the surprising origins of the scene that produced the bigg...
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The rise and fall of the Oakland Ku Klux Klan from 2017-01-10T17:51:22
The East Bay’s KKK started by burning crosses in the hills, and they quickly captured power in City Hall. This movement didn’t last long—their rise and fall all happened around the time of the 1920...
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California’s only black whaling captain: William Shorey’s journey from sailor to celebrity from 2017-01-03T18:00:32
“Black Ahab’s” adventures made him an Oakland hero and one of the most powerful men of color in California—but there’s a dark side to his story that’s rarely discussed. This episode weaves together...
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10,000 years of Oakland, 1 piece of land from 2016-12-20T17:34:24
When Brock Winstead bought a house in the Golden Gate district, he decided to research the history of his property and find out the identity of every single person who had ever owned that plot of l...
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“We were in liberation education”: Exploring the lost lessons of the Black Panthers’ school from 2016-12-13T16:41:50
From 1973 until 1982, the Black Panthers operated a school in East Oakland that has been called “arguably the Party’s most important organizing legacy.” Although the school solved many problems tha...
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From “one-hit wonder” to “legend”: 30 years later, a singer gets to re-live his dream from 2016-12-06T15:45:54
Bobby Mardis had one hit song in the 1980s and then hung up his leather pants and retired his dreams of pop music stardom. Thirty years later he was re-discovered, thanks to a random encounter at t...
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Goodbye to the “flying saucer”: Why many Oaklanders are taking the demolition of a diner personally from 2016-11-29T18:07:15
“When they demolished it, it’s like a little part of you… goes with it.” That reaction from a former regular customer of Biff’s Diner was shared by many when the spaceship-shaped building was final...
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Before “1984” & “Hunger Games”: How the first modern dystopian novel was born in Oakland sweatshops from 2016-11-04T06:18:21
What better time than election season to explore the first novel to predict the rise of fascism and a brutal government run by corporate elites? This episode features Tarnel Abbott, the great-grand...
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I grew up in Oakland’s oldest cemetery from 2016-10-29T08:10:05
Loretta Nguyen spent the first few decades of her life living in the only house on the grounds of Oakland’s oldest cemetery. As a young girl, she learned that people are much scarier than ghouls an...
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Oakland’s “lost” Latino neighborhood from 2016-10-25T06:01:09
Get in the mood for Día de los Muertos with this history of Oakland’s “lost” Latino neighborhood. Tina “Tamale” Ramos and her mother Natividad share delicious stories from their decades of running ...
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“Celeste Guap is not the first”: A history of sexual abuse, the OPD, and a refugee community from 2016-10-18T06:50:43
Oakland has been an epicenter of minors engaged in the sex trade for a long time. A recent OPD scandal put a spotlight on this crisis, but failed to illuminate the roots of the problem. This episod...
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From garages to galleries in Uptown from 2016-10-11T14:59:58
Ronald Reagan inadvertently sparked the birth of one of Oakland's most renowned and visionary art organizations. Find out how in this new episode that explores the explosion of "outsider" art, the ...
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Oakland's oldest soul food chef doesn't want to quit from 2016-10-04T05:47:58
Nellie Ozen has been cooking soulfood in the East Bay since 1950! Find out why the Raiders loved her, her connection to Huey Newton and her thoughts on the history of this African-American cuisine.
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Oakland's first "celebrity" librarian from 2016-09-23T23:07:52
Here's the story of how one of the Bay Area’s brightest literary stars became the reigning “goddess” of Oakland’s first public library....
Back in the day, poetry was a lot like the hip ho...