The many faces of Oak Park

Founded in 1887, Oak Park became Sacramento’s first suburb—a place for families and businesses outside of the city’s bustling core.

During its first three decades, the neighborhood had everything to make it something of second central city with affordable homes, shops, entertainment and restaurants.

Like many neighborhoods, however, the Great Depression and World War II greatly impacted Oak Park’s economy. Businesses were shuttered, jobs were lost and home values dropped. Soon, it became an oasis for African-Americans and other minorities because, unlike many other neighborhoods in the city, the area wasn’t subjected to the kinds of racial covenants that decreed property deed restrictions on nonwhite occupancy.

In 1962, the neighborhood was literally divided with the completion of Highway 99 on the west side of Oak Park. Today, the neighborhood stretches from Franklin Boulevard east to Stockton Boulevard and from just north of Broadway down south of 12th Avenue.

For decades, it’s continued as a tightknit community, but one that existed in various states of revival and disrepair.

These days, the neighborhood is, inarguably, undergoing a gentrification with houses being bought, fixed up and flipped. Housing prices, depending on the part of the neighborhood, have risen steadily, while the average rent is nearing $1,000 for a one-bedroom apartment. New businesses, like Capitol Floats, have opened along Broadway, while longtime fixtures, like Broadway Soul Food, have shut their doors.

But while many new people have flocked to the area, it is still home to legions of people who’ve lived here for decades. People who know that all this change is nothing new.

That’s been the state of its community for decades—turmoil, then redevelopment. Through it all, however, there were people who stuck around Oak Park, because the community was all they knew. Following are stories of survival, community and selflessness from, among others, a retired Little League coach, a Black Lives Matter activist and the man known, unofficially, as the “Mayor of Oak Park.”

‘We depended on our neighbors’

For Elaine Crump, 88, it doesn’t seem that long ago when she had to step over syringes, used condoms and broken glass while walking down Fifth Avenue taking neighborhood kids to Bret Harte Elementary in the ’60s and ’70s. Nor does it seem that long ago since she saw the Black Panther Party and the Sacramento Police Department battle it out on 35th Street in front of McClatchy Park in the 1969 Oak Park Riot. Nor does it seem like much time has passed since she was told by people throughout the city that she lived in the ghetto.

Crump and her husband, 99-year-old Harrison Crump, whose recent stroke limits his speaking capabilities, have weathered years of change; she says she remembers it all.

“[Oak Park] is like a roller coaster—up and down, up and down. We think everything is going fine, then all of a sudden …” she says before trailing off into thought.

The Crumps, married for 70 years, have lived in the same four-bedroom, two-bath house in south Oak Park since 1954. There, they raised 10 kids.

Over the decades they’ve been witness to much turmoil, including those riots, which took place 47 years ago this month.

Several events led up to the riots including the 1967 shootout between the Sacramento police and the city’s chapter of the Black Panther Party, which ended in multiple raids of the party’s office. Many Oak Park residents, Crump explains, didn’t trust the police department, and the racial tension between residents and police officers finally boiled over.

“I remember telling my boys, ’Get out of [McClatchy Park], because they’re about to start.’ But they wouldn’t listen to me,” Crump recalls. “[Black Panthers] started throwing those Molotov cocktails and they just started destroying Oak Park.”

Crump says her son, Gregory, was attacked with Mace. Her nephew was temporarily paralyzed after getting shot in the back during the melee.

A year later, in 1970, Sacramento police officer Bernard Bennett was fatally shot while patrolling Oak Park. Two members of the Black Panther Party, Jack Strivers and Mark Teemer, and two nonmembers, Booker Cooke and Ceriaco Cabrallis, later known as the Oak Park Four, were arrested for the killing.

The men were ultimately acquitted, but the damage that the murder and riots inflicted on the community had already taken its course. People started moving out of the area, businesses closed and people’s perception of the area began to change, Crump says.

“When they started the Black Panthers, and they started coming in and our boys started hanging in the park, that was the whole beginning of the whole thing,” Crump remembers.

From then on, she says, Oak Park was considered a ghetto—a place where gang members, drug dealers and addicts hung out.

And the city didn’t do much to help, Crump says. It was often dangerous when she worked as a teacher’s aide or doing yard duty at Bret Harte Elementary, shepherding kids across the overpass on Fifth Avenue that separates Oak Park and Curtis Park.

She recalls the city coming out to pick up the trash on occasion, but the needles and used condoms would always return. It remained that way for years, she says.

The landscape of Oak Park, however, started changing before that, in 1962, with the completion of Highway 99 on the west side of Oak Park. The freeway split the community in two. As the new addition to the area, the freeway routed people around the business on major streets like Stockton Boulevard and Broadway, forcing businesses to close.

As a result, she says, many people flocked from the area, leaving property owners to sell and rent homes at cheaper prices. Lower income families moved into the area. Still, Crump says people stuck together.

“Back then, we didn’t have nothing, so we depended on our neighbors. We were just like this,” Crump says, clasping her hands together.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that Crump says she started to notice sustained improvement. Just north of where she lives, near Broadway, there are new businesses and apartments. Houses once condemned are now being renovated to look new.

But though some may complain about the rising house prices and rents that come with redevelopment, Crump sees most of it as good. Rather than making the area seem destitute like people did in past decades, people are coming to Oak Park and rebuilding the neighborhood she’s known for more than half of her life.

“[Developers are] doing what we should have done,” Elaine says. “This place is for everybody. We’re a community again and we’re all coming together, finally. That’s a very important thing.”

‘I made sure I gave something back’

There’s a small piece of Sacramento baseball history that sits tucked away in the cramped confines of a narrow storage room in the backyard of an Oak Park home. Here, more than 100 awards, trophies and other accolades hang on the walls. Chipped and broken bats lie on the ground. And old baseballs and baseball gloves sit on shelves collecting dust.

Norman Blackwell Sr., the recipient of it all, sits on a chair in the center, revealing the story of each piece.

“My wife had this trophy room built, because she got tired of all of it being inside the den,” Blackwell explains as he looks at a picture of himself running with the 1996 Olympic torch in downtown Sacramento. The torch is also in this room, sitting on the bottom shelf in a case of wood and glass.

The piece represents one of the 83-year-old’s many accomplishments, most acquired during his 70 years of playing baseball.

Blackwell, who was born in Santa Monica, moved to Oak Park with his mother and siblings in 1941, shortly after his father died. The family settled into a house on 32nd Street and Second Avenue, a street that’s now part of Highway 99. Not long after, Blackwell started playing ball.

Growing up in the ’40s and ’50s and being the only black person on the team, Blackwell says he struggled to find acceptance on the diamond. That struggle only grew after he transferred from C.K. McClatchy High School to Elk Grove High School his senior year after his family moved to south Sacramento.

“I caught a lot of heck as the only black in the whole league,” he explains. “My last name—Blackwell—they took the “well” off. They called me ’Black N,’ ’Black Sambo,’ everything. That was up in the stands all the time. I come up to bat as a 17-year-old kid, and I wasn’t used to that coming from Oak Park.”

Although Jackie Robinson had already broken through boundaries as the first black man to play Major League Baseball in 1947, the country’s racial tensions still trickled down into the sport. In 1952, while playing semipro ball for the McClellan Pacemakers, the Sacramento County Baseball League team, Blackwell was offered a contract with the St. Louis Cardinals organization.

But Blackwell turned down this big shot on the advice of a friend. At the time, the Cardinal’s farm team that he would play for was located in Georgia, which, like most states in the south, was still segregated and, thus, a hostile, dangerous place for African-Americans.

“A white guy told me, he says, ’I want you to play ball, but down there, they won’t mess around. There won’t be any fighting, they just go on and shoot you or hang you,’” Blackwell says. “So I didn’t sign.”

A few years later, when Blackwell was playing for the then-Sacramento Junior College, he was offered one more chance with the Cardinals, but by then, he was 26 years old and married. He’d started a family, and was making more money in Sacramento than the team offered him. He decided to stay, and worked at Mather Air Force Base. Later, he coached Little League.

“In a way I [regret not signing], but I made sure that I gave something back, especially out here with the Little League,” he said.

For decades, Blackwell lived vicariously through his sons and the kids he coached in Oak Park Little League. Seven of his players even went on to sign contracts with professional baseball teams.

Some of those players include his sons Orlando Blackwell (San Francisco Giants) and Juan Blackwell (New York Yankees).

But these days, he says, Oak Park Little League is struggling to produce talent. However, Blackwell adds, the current organizers aren’t entirely at fault.

“When we ran Little League … we had more family support and community support,” he says.

In 1999, he was honored as the partial namesake to the Crump-Blackwell baseball diamonds (Harrison Crump, a former coach and league president, is the field’s other namesake) in McClatchy Park to honor his 20 years in coaching.

Now, although Blackwell no longer coaches, he stays close to the league, working as a volunteer grounds keeper for the Crump-Blackwell fields. He also plays for the Sacramento Gold, a senior softball team.

“I still play for the love and the fun,” Blackwell says. “Some of the guys [on the team] criticize me saying, ’Hey, Norm, you gotta take it seriously here.’ I take it seriously, but I’m just having fun doing it.”

‘I just want the people’

It’s the first Thursday of June, and, just like every month, Tamika L’Ecluse is standing in the front of a small communal room in the Oak Park Community Center for the monthly Oak Park Neighborhood Association meeting.

Of the more than 50 seats set up in front of her, nearly half are filled with residents there to voice their concerns and address recent issues in their old but changing community.

The meetings also help strengthen bonds, L’Ecluse says.

“We’re just trying to get people to be good neighbors,” she says. “That doesn’t necessarily mean everything looks nice, pretty and pristine outside. A good neighbor is respecting the old and the new and everything that comes with it.”

L’Ecluse, 36, president of the OPNA, helps organize these monthly gatherings. A recent issue and worry? Oak Park’s current state of gentrification.

The preschool teacher has seen much change. She moved to Oak Park in 2005 with her then-boyfriend, now husband and father of her two sons. There’s been much growth in that time. When the couple first settled in, she says, Oak Park had its issues with drugs, prostitution and violence, but it wasn’t too different than the North Natomas area where she grew up.

“That wasn’t something that would scare me away from Oak Park,” says L’Ecluse, who teaches at McKinley Montessori Schools. “Even though growing up, it was always, ’Oh, don’t go to Oak Park. That’s where all the gangs are.’”

Now there are other problems to worry about. Like how to make sure the neighborhood improvement efforts aren’t done in a way that will force longtime residents out. Or how to preserve its history without silencing the voices of those who can tell it.

Then there’s the issue of keeping that tightknit community culture, despite the influx of new businesses and new faces.

“[I like] places that I’m just welcomed,” L’Ecluse said. “Like people’s porches … That’s the Oak Park for me. Businesses, they’ll come and go. I just want the people.”

‘We can see the potential’

Before he purchased the building in 1995, Pastor Isaac Cotton’s St. Jude Christian Tabernacle seemed to represent the state of the Oak Park area: condemned and riddled with drugs.

Despite outsiders’ perception of the area, however, the soft-spoken pastor says his concerns were never about the neighborhood, and he continued with the plan to move his church from its original Florin Road location to its current home on 33rd Street.

“It’s an unfair statement when you generalize an area, because when you’re looking at the overarching area it’s just a pocket of individuals that have decided that they have their own thought process of what they want to do,” he says, referring to drug dealers. “You can’t blame the whole community.”

Although Cotton says there were initial problems—money and construction issues, getting shot at during the church’s original renovations—the building was transformed. Four years after its purchase, the church opened as a place for community members to be part of a family.

“Where else can you go and have somebody look at you, and hug you, and tell you that you’re all right, when you’re living in an environment where others are telling you you’re not,” Cotton says.

The pastor’s been witness to many changes in Oak Park since—but that change isn’t just a regional thing, he says. From 2012 to 2015, Cotton worked with the Department of Environment & Energy in Washington, D.C., where he worked on getting low-income residents low-cost utilities with an incentive program.

There, he explains, he saw a similar transformation in urban areas, on a much larger scale, have positive outcomes. The same can happen in Oak Park if done correctly, he says.

“For those that have lived here and those who have just come in, we can see the potential,” Cotton said. “If the people in Oak Park can continue to see that potential, then it would allow people to have hope, and that hope will create that society that we need to improve the lives, overall, of the individual.”

‘I feel that obligation to help’

Right on the southwest corner of 34th and T streets, up the embankment to the side of Highway 50, there’s a small, makeshift garden made up of colorful bushes, flowers and cactus plants.

And, down in front of the garden there’s a plaque that reads: “Cactus plants donated by Raymundo Lujan, a.k.a. Cactus Ray, Mayor of Oak Park.”

Lujan says the plants came from his own overflowing garden that he started years ago.

“I had, at one time, 2,000 plants. As they multiplied, I would break them off and start new ones,” Lujan says of the cacti he used to give new residents of Oak Park as a welcoming gift.

Many in the neighborhood know the 73-year-old Lujan by one of those two nicknames: Cactus Ray or the Unofficial Mayor. The monikers are unrelated by origin, but both are synonymous with the person who bears them.

Lujan, who moved to Oak Park in 1995, has long played an active role in the community. He’s served on the board of several local nonprofits, worked as an interpreter for Spanish-speaking residents and still volunteers as a yard duty at the three St. Hope public schools during the school year. It’s that type of work that, Lujan says, led people in the area to call him the Mayor of Oak Park.

“Anything that I can do for the people in my community, for Oak Park, I feel that obligation to help,” Lujan says. “Regardless of whether it’s Mayor [Kevin] Johnson or the poor guy that’s out here asking for a quarter, I just have the urge to help people meet their needs.”

And the people help him, too. In 2003, Lujan, who is epileptic, had a seizure and crashed into a tire shop on Stockton Boulevard and Fruitridge Road. As a result, he gave up driving.

It didn’t slow him down, however. With the help of his Oak Park neighbors, many of whom Lujan has aided in the past, he hasn’t had to drive since. Instead, he rides a tricycle donated by the local Station 6 firehouse near the Oak Park Community Center.

Now, he rides the blue, adult-sized tricycle with a trailer on the back everywhere in Oak Park, starting off with a daily morning trip to Old Soul where the bike can often be found parked on the side of the building.

Lujan says he enjoys the freedom the tricycle brings him.

“Because of my condition, if I’m active, the seizures stay under control. But if I’m just idle at home and thinking negative, it tends to bring them on,” he explains.

The bike isn’t the only thing the community has given back to its famed unofficial mayor. In March, some friends started a GoFundMe account to help raise money for his granddaughter, who was diagnosed with leukemia in 2015. Lujan says people he’s never met before have donated, as well as some of the nonprofits he works with and members of the community.

“That alone is more than enough pay for me volunteering, because they are helping one of my family members survive,” Lujan says. “That, to me, is more than I have, or can ever do, for them.”

‘People of color just aren’t getting a lot of opportunities’

It’s just after 1 p.m. on a Saturday in May, and Tanya Faison is canvassing the streets of Oak Park. Walking down 33rd Street toward 12th Avenue, Faison, along with five other members of Sacramento’s Black Lives Matter chapter, Incite Insight, preps for the days-long work of collecting data on how gentrification affects the people of color who’ve lived in the area for years.

The group starts the day where their previous efforts left off—the end of Sixth Avenue near Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Before knocking on doors, they split into groups of three, then later into groups of two to cover more ground.

One group, led by Faison, walks up to a house. Faison knocks three times, and the door opens. “Hi, we’re with Black Lives Matter,” Faison says. “And we’re canvassing the neighborhood to gather information about people’s experiences in Oak Park. Do you mind answering a few questions?”

Faison, 41, started Incite Insight in August 2014 following the officer-involved shooting that killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Since then, the Sacramento chapter of BLM has held rallies against police brutality and injustices in local government.

One of their current battles, which Faison says she knows all too well, is the area’s gentrification.

“I think it’s all beautiful, but people of color just aren’t getting a lot of opportunities here,” Faison says. “All of these new businesses are coming in from other neighborhoods, other cities or other states, and there’s plenty of people in Oak Park who want to have their businesses open here.”

Faison says she realizes that the redevelopment process can’t necessarily be stopped.

“It’s something that has been happening for over 10 years now,” she says.

She’s not against change, exactly.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have new businesses and streets, but we just want to have people of color, and those who have lived here for a long time, to have their voices heard.”

The Oak Park native says she has a lot of memories of the neighborhood she grew up in. Whether it was hanging out with friends at McClatchy Park, walking down 33rd Street and talking to neighbors or just eating at the now-closed Broadway Soul Food.

Now, she says, things are changing, and it’s not benefiting the minorities who have called the area home for decades. Instead, she says, the new business and residents are causing rents to rise and the people who have live there for decades, including herself, to be pushed out.

“I think it’s really important that, going forward, all of the community is included in the conversations on what happens,” Faison says. “The actual people that are victims [of gentrification]. The people that are living in poverty, they need to be included and given opportunities.”