Are <i> You</i> Afraid to Go to Oakland? : Crime: The homicide rate is skyrocketing, but there is more to the city than guns and drugs. People are being healed, children are parenting children.

Oakland is well on its way to becoming a symbol of evil, a metaphor for hopelessness and for all that we no longer acknowledge as ourselves. Oakland is Detroit and Bedford Stuyvesant and the other side of the tracks.

Last weekend, at the World Figure Skating Championships in Oakland, a reporter asked a contestant, “Are you afraid to come to Oakland?” The reporter’s question came after an unprecedented spate of homicides in the city--56 murders since the start of the year. “We’re living in fear of our children,” said Mary King, president of the county board of supervisors.

Are you afraid to come to Oakland?

There are, of course, several Oaklands in this city of 372,000. This city that is predominantly black is not predominantly poor. Downtown Oakland looks prosperous and new. There are racially integrated upper-middle-class neighborhoods in the Oakland Hills. Mixed in with blighted areas are blocks of middle-class houses on broad and tree-lined streets. The Oakland we associate with violence--the danger zone--is known as the Flatlands.

In recent decades, one of the most important economic ties between affluent Oakland and the Flatlands has been the drug economy. White teen-agers and white secretaries and white businessmen from all over the East Bay would drive through the Flatlands to make their buys.

Suburban teen-agers took drugs to escape the American dream. Flatlands teen-agers entered the drug trade to buy into the American dream. There was thus the spectacle of black teen-agers mimicking the “values” of America with gold chains, gaudy clothes, fancy cars. The black teen drug dealer embarrassed us so much with his parody version of ourselves we refused to recognize him.

The other day, a man who recently moved to the Oakland Hills was remarking on the beauty of the view he has from his house, the lush hillsides, the quiet. “The other Oakland I see on TV seems a million miles away--I only hope it isn’t coming this way.”

The trouble with the Oakland Flatlands--the metaphorical place, the nightmare point on the map--is that it is real, flesh and bloody real. It is creeping up the hillside and across town. The Flatlands is, after all, only a few freeway exits away from where any of us live.

Fear is justified. No neighborhood is an island. Neighborhoods create one another and influence one another. Which is only to say, that the Flatlands implicate the entire metropolis. Drive along any of the Flatlands’ main thoroughfares and you will see neighborhoods abandoned by the rest of us. It is as though America has seceded from the Flatlands. The banks are gone; the stores are gone; the civic exchange has vanished.

“Once it was different, people were always coming by my project apartment, taking surveys, organizing for the PTA, doing voter registration,” remembers Evelyn Williams, known as “Big Mama” by relatives and friends, who has lost two sons to drug violence and a third to prison. “Now,” she says, “nobody comes by except the Avon Lady leaving samples. And she doesn’t wait to see who answers the door.”

Oakland has essentially been a black-run city for almost two decades--the triumph of a civil-rights Establishment that bought into the notion that politics would make the difference. But as a counselor at a Flatlands high school commented several years ago of then-mayor Lionel Wilson, “None of the kids here know his name or even what he looks like. Most of the kids think the mayor is Diane Feinstein.”

Do not think that children in the Flatlands grow up oblivious to the values of the outside world. When Al Davis took the Raiders “uptown”--from Oakland to Los Angeles--the kids of the Flatlands felt more proud than abandoned.

You do not have to be a sociologist to know that the impact of slavery on blacks was primarily familial. Slavery devastated the family. And generations after, the impact of slavery on the black family has yet to be healed. But blacks have also had communities, they have had extended families, they have had neighborhoods.

Out on East 14th Street, Al Parham, once a model-cities director, runs his own grocery store. For a decade, he has been the man behind the counter. Today, he gently urges a customer, an elderly man, away from the liquor rack and toward the orange-juice containers in the freezer. Another customer takes canned tuna fish home on credit. The store has never been robbed or burglarized. “The children passing to and from school need to see more people like me, like them, running stores like these,” he says--”the model city I wish we had built.”

Another professional, a psychologist born and raised in the Flatlands, runs a family-counseling center. He is torn over whether to stay on or leave to devote himself to private practice and teaching. No one is rewarding him to stay. Meanwhile, the University of California a few miles away is offering him a tenured position that will help integrate its psychology department.

Oakland moans. And the rest of the world shudders and retreats and lures away its most talented.

But do not come to the Flatlands or to Bedford Stuyvesant or Detroit--as some journalists recently have--only to conclude that those who remain are soul-dead, and that no values survive among the desperate.

Come to the Flatlands and be humbled. There are souls here. And there are people healing people. Every third Saturday, Rev. Bob Jackson and volunteers from his Acts Full Gospel Church go door-to-door in the neighborhoods that a friend in the police department identifies as the “hottest crime spots.” “Sometimes,” he says, “men who answer the door will end up weeping because a stranger came by to talk to them.”

His recruitment efforts have swelled his church to more than 3,000 members, many of them former drug and alcohol abusers. To accommodate its growing membership, the church moved from its store-front building to a complex that once housed the Black Panther Party School.

Joe Marshall, a math teacher at a San Francisco high school, says that crack has surely changed the black inner city. “Black mothers always took care of their children,” he says. But since crack, he has seen mothers try to sell their children to support their habits.

Mothers are not being mothers. But Marshall does not see the end of our responsibility with such an insight, he sees the imperative to action. For the last five years, with a white basketball coach, Marshall has organized the Omega Boys Club, which is nothing less than an extended family.

The Omega Boys Club recruits members from jails and schools and the streets. A handful of adults become parents to the many; and then the boys learn to parent each other.

Do we want to know such stories? Do we want to know that something more goes on in the Flatlands than guns and drugs?

The other day, a New York TV producer phoned for contacts. He wanted to dramatize the evil in the inner city. “Find me a remorseless killer.”