Oakland Afterlives

A powerful account of how Black Oakland survives displacement and erasure—and what its story reveals about the future of Black cities everywhere.

What happens to a Black city when its people are displaced but their presence refuses to disappear? In Oakland Afterlives, Brandi Thompson Summers turns to her hometown to trace seven decades of both the unmaking and the persistent reinvention of Black Oakland. She chronicles the systematic destruction of Black urban space while revealing how Black Oaklanders have continually fought to claim the city as their own. 

Drawing on archival research, interviews, and cultural analysis, Summers introduces the “spectral city” to capture a striking paradox: Black Oakland is disappearing as a demographic reality even as it remains a ubiquitous cultural force. Moving from the legacy of the Black Panther Party and the branding of Oakland as a Black city to the work of artists and filmmakers who imagine alternative urban worlds, Summers shows how aesthetic activism, capitalist consumption, speculation, and recovery become powerful tools for resisting erasure. Both a vital history of Oakland and a moving cultural account of Black life and urban change, this book reveals how Black communities persist, resist, and reimagine urban futures.

Brandi Thompson Summers is Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University and is author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City.