The future of the I-980 highway won’t arrive without a reckoning with the harms inflicted on West Oakland’s Black community when it was built.
That was the message from the Black old-schoolers from West Oakland who showed up at what was dubbed an I-980 Block Party on Saturday. They came to participate in the Vision 980, an effort by Caltrans, the state transit agency, to reimagine the freeway by either capping it, removing it, or doing some safety upgrades but leaving it as is.
Hosted by Evoak!, an Oakland nonprofit dedicated to advancing equity and sustainability, the event took place on a rainy Saturday afternoon at Preservation Park, the stately, landscaped neighborhood created from the relocated Victorian homes of Black residents displaced by the highway between the 1960s and the 1980s…