The first known headquarters of the Black Panther Party will soon become a residential development in Oakland.
The new development will honor the history of the building and its significance to the group, the San Francisco Business Times reported.
“I wasn’t even aware the building was the Black Panthers’ first headquarters, but I was so excited by it, being a young kid growing up in Oakland and being a part of their breakfast program,” Kim McClure, who owns the property, told the Business Times.
The two-story building at 5622 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Oakland currently houses four apartments above the It’s All Good Bakery, but for just under a year in 1967, the Black Panthers leased it for office space.
In 2019, McClure submitted a pre-application to redevelop the 0.15-acre property into a five-story building with 20 apartments and ground-floor commercial space. He also informally looked into having the building declared a historic resource, but the city ultimately concluded that the building was ineligible for consideration because it had been significantly altered since the Black Panthers called it home more than 50 years prior.
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One of the supporters of the proposed redevelopment is Fredrika Newton, widow of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton and president of the foundation that works to uphold the party’s legacy.
Despite the support, some members of the community have spoken out against the project, expressing concerns about the project’s design, which is inspired by Black Panther posters and African-American quilt patterns, and asking if an Black architects are employed on the project.
“I don’t really see that the proposed building design responds to what I see as issues of African American culture in any way,” Architect Chris Andrews, a member of the Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board, said. “It looks like a generic, dominant culture building to me that you can find all over this country and the world.”
McClure says a majority of the concern is coming from misinformation and assumptions that there is a big corporation or white developer trying to force out a local, Black-owned business. But this project is his dream.
“I’ve owned this building [for] more than 20 years. Nobody prior to me acknowledged the Black Panthers,” McClure said. “No one ever even paid attention or gave a damn about the history until I brought it to their attention.”
On Monday, the board agreed it didn’t want to delay the project any further and voted to allow the project to proceed, as long as principals agreed to further evaluate the site for historic resources, do more community outreach and show concrete plans to permanently commemorate the building’s history.
[SFBT] — Victoria Pruitt