OAKLAND—The owners of the Oakland A’s (Major ­­­­­­­­­League Baseball team) had set their eyes on the Laney College site for a new stadium. To many, this was impending doom for the neighborhood and Laney Community College.
Many seemed resigned to hopelessness or dreamed about what they could gain from a stadium deal. A fiery group of staff & students from Laney Community College and community groups organized against the capitalists and their administrative stooges. After over six months of fightback, the college bosses were forced to halt plans with Oakland A’s.
Institutional Racism
Crooked chancellor, Jowel C. Laguerre, and a native of Haiti, has a history of shifting moneys into his own pockets at Solano and Peralta Community Colleges with Measure B funds (tax money that was supposed to be used to hire more part-time teachers). He met with the A’s­ president, Dave Kaval, several times to try and spur deals. The Chancellor tried to sell the bitter pill of a Coliseum takeover of Laney property with the sugar coating that this would bring more revenue to the “starving” Community College budgets.
The A’s owner is John Fisher from the Fisher family, founders of the GAP clothing company. They are also the owners of the Mendocino Redwood Company, the lumber company in Northern California. The Fishers are players in the third most unaffordable housing market on the planet, San Francisco. They will be responsible for tenant evictions and displacement of mainly Black, Latin, and Asian working-class people.  
The new Stadium will drive up the cost of living and housing for its current residents. It will spur the development of residential and commercial properties catered toward non-working-class people. This is an ongoing trend of racist displacement throughout Oakland.
Worker-Student Alliance Fight Back
An alliance of students, staff, and community members fought back. Because of collective organizing, hundreds attended the past four Board of Trustees meetings to give personal testimony to why the A’s deal was nothing more than a land grab and a push to gentrify the Oakland land next to Laney College. The organizing efforts included: emails, phone calls, classroom meetings and articles circulated about how stadiums damage working-class neighborhoods.
While the Board sat perched like faux royalty, many antiracists spoke passionately about why Laney College and the surrounding community are a remaining oasis for the multiracial, immigrant working class in Oakland.
Speakers denounced the institutional racism of a Board decision or the Chancellor’s support for a deal that could lead the way to privatization of Laney College, which now serves a population that is mainly Black, Latin, Asian, immigrant and low-income students.
The A’s management wined and dined fans before the Board meeting and brought them to testify about how important the A’s were to Oakland. They also tried to sway people with stories of exceptionalism (rags to riches from Haiti) or stories of money for shrinking budgets.
But ultimately, these misleaders serve the ruling class and use identity politics to confuse and conquer. We need to see those pretending to speak for the community, like the Chancellor tried to, as predatory servants of big money-capitalists.
After many months of struggle, the teachers union, PFT (Peralta Federation of Teachers), finally endorsed the fightback collective and said “NO” to the stadium deal. This was powerful. The PFT leadership only acted after members pushed for it, after the anti-stadium collective pressured the union.
This working-class pressure from below forced the Board of Trustees to instruct Chancellor Laguerre to stop deal-making conversations with the A’s. Yet, even after the Board of Trustees officially voted, the Chancellor made sure to mention to the San Francisco Chronicle “the door is never closed” on such deals.
Within a week of this victory, the Oakland Unified School District elected Board (k-12) voted to cut $9 million from the mid-year school budget over the protest of hundreds of teachers, students, parents and community. The racist dismantling of public education continues.
PLP members and others responded from the knowledge that deal or no deal, the current trend is one of dismantling public education for the multiracial working-class students at Laney.
Mobilization and Lessons
It was everyday workers (especially a multiracial group of women), students, and staff that had the most to lose who showed up and spurred each other on to fight. Through the struggle, individuals gained confidence in their ability to contribute.
During the fight back, there were efforts made to formalize the organizing coalition, but those who continued to fight, refused to let a hierarchy of leadership form. People in the coalition stressed the need for collective responsibility and to instead allow for informal parings and groupings to fuel the fire.
This was a positive environment to bring up how a communist collective society could function, a place where the motivation was “serve the people” not “what’s in it for me.”
The Oakland A’s team colors of green and yellow do not represent the working class. Instead, let us cheer for everyday workers, ourselves, to have a healthy, educated, meaningful, collective life. That color is revolutionary red.
PLP members aim to build a movement and a Party for a communist society. We have confidence that the working class will destroy capitalism and create and rule a society with no borders. Join us.