An Oakland Homecoming: Space, Place, and the Politics of Return

By: Jenn M. Jackson, PhD

The air was crisp when I exited the Oakland Airport in January 2026. It felt different than I remembered. Coming home, the weather always surprised me. Not because it was out of the ordinary but because it has always been strange to remember things like the scent of dew in the air and the cool, calm breeze that never seems to leave my hometown. 

I was born in Oakland, California in the 1980s. And, while I can’t remember much about those early years, I can say that my life has been distinctly Oakland. 

I grew up in East Oakland, right off of High Street and MacArthur. As native Oaklanders, we always locate ourselves based on the land and turf that raised us. While I was raised off of this main thoroughfare on Oakland’s east side, my family life took me to the Deep East neighborhoods of the 70s and 90s on the regular. My hair shop and social life through Emeryville, Berkeley, and Richmond. I went to Oakland Technical High School in North Oakland which is right around the corner from Kaiser Hospital (where I was born). My church life remained in West Oakland at Evergreen Missionary Baptist Church. So, in many ways, I am a child of the Bay, inclusive of all of its parts. All of Oakland made me.

My family is known in the Bay Area, in part, because of our large size. My great grandparents had nine children. From those four daughters and five sons came dozens of children, mostly girls. Because of this, I have generations of women above and below me in age who shaped my early life. We are the descendants of Roosevelt and Hester Cherry. Oakland is our homeland.

The Cherry Family name has traveled Oakland streets since the 1950s and 60s when my mother’s family migrated from Arkansas to Washington to California. We are a Great Migration family that had the resources to move from the South to the North and West. Like many Black families fleeing lynching and terror in the South, my ancestors and elders sought refuge in what seemed like a promised land. 

My great grandmother was the matriarch who grew tomatoes, greens, and peppers in her backyard. Though the family was desperately poor, she fed cousins and community members from her garden. Fables of her vegetables have traveled generations. 

“One time, I left your great grandmother’s house with a trash bag full of collards,” a church member once told me. I was never lucky enough to meet my great grandmother. But, my imagination has gifted me with an image of her that is undeniably shaped by my grandmother.

My grandmother and a few of her siblings; Left to right: Great Aunt Birdie, Great Aunt Queenie, Great Aunt Sevilla, My Grandmother Lucille, Great Uncle Al

My grandmother Lucille raised me with my mother. I am one of those Black people whose family and community stepped in when my father’s alcoholism and drug issues kept him from being present. Grandma Lucille passed down Mama Hester’s green thumb first to my mother and then to me. Even though she lived in Section 8 housing, Grandma Lucille stuffed that small space with monstera and pothos plants. She even gifted my mother a monstera plant when I was born. That plant lived in a chitlin’ bucket (with no drainage) for at least two decades and still thrives today. 

Grandma Lucille had three children, my mother being the eldest. She was a nurse who struggled to keep a roof over her children’s heads as my maternal grandfather abused her and eventually abandoned the household. I’ve heard stories of his violence and how his love affair with alcohol splintered the family. My mother, the darkest skinned child in the family, took the brunt of his ire. I’ll never really know what my grandmother and mother endured to survive that terror. But, I am thankful they did. 

When my mother was growing up in dilapidated housing in Berkeley and West Oakland, she was also fighting for her life in community. She and her siblings and cousins benefited from the free breakfast program facilitated by the Black Panther Party. They traded clothes with one another, handing down dresses, pants, and school uniforms. This tradition of family hand-me-downs continued into my generation. I can still remember a single sailor style dress that each of my cousins wore on picture day. Just like them, I donned that dress in my school pictures.

I went to catholic school for elementary, getting kicked out in sixth grade for unruly behavior. Looking back now, I understand how my Blackness, autism, and working-class norms disrupted that overwhelmingly white and Asian space. There was the Oakland I came from and the Oakland they came from. We were the poor folks in the lowlands and they were the wealthier folks in the hills and suburbs. 

After catholic school, I went to Bret Harte Middle School before my life shifted into catastrophe. 

In my junior year of high school, my mother abandoned me, leaving my life on the street corner in trash bags in front of my childhood home. I can’t be sure but I think that was where my inner self split into two. At sixteen years old, my life changed into the before and the after. Before abandonment, before the sexual violence, before the trafficking, and before the homelessness. Then, there was the after.

These were the hardest years of my life. Years I wish I didn’t have to remember. These were years when I prayed to leave this place. I prayed to wake up in a different body, in a different universe, in a different life. Those trash bags and that street corner where I found them became my identity. I was the one who was thrown away. I was the kid that Oakland no longer wanted. Home wasn’t home anymore. 

I fought for myself. I fought just like the women who made me fought to stay alive. I hustled on the streets for money and food. I rode in cars with men who terrified me. I got jobs to help me stay alive. And, despite the uncertainty and terror of waking up each day, I understood that there were only a few ways out of my predicament: sports or school. Because I was diagnosed with a heart condition called Marfan Syndrome in middle school, I understood that sports were no longer an option for me. I turned to academics, hoping that my affinity toward mathematics and physics would deliver me.

So, I ran away. I left for college in 2002, scraping together cash from abusers who had used my body for entertainment. I yearned for the home I had known growing up, but I felt too wayward to find home again. When I did visit home, street corners triggered me. Just hearing names of men in my community sent me down a spiral of terror. Seeing high school friends reminded me of the abandonment. I couldn’t step foot in Oakland without envisioning myself as that unhoused abused disabled girl with nowhere to go. 

Months turned into years, years into decades as I navigated the loss and emptiness in my body where my homeplace once was. It wasn’t until my 40s that I came to realize that I would never be able to return home to myself if I didn’t make peace with the home I lost in Oakland.

Trauma taught me that everything at home was dangerous. In some ways, it taught me to not only fear my own people but to fear myself. Who am I at home? Who was I back then? Who do I want to be and become? I know that it took me leaving my homeplace to answer those questions. I needed to escape a cage of my own and my mother’s making. But, I hadn’t yet figured out how to be whole. 

January 2026 was my homecoming. I scheduled a book event at the historic Marcus Books with my comrade and friend Malkia “Mac” Devich-Cyril. Mac is a child (or a “cub”) of the Black Panther Party. Their mother, Janet Cyril, ran the free breakfast program in Harlem and Brooklyn in the 1960s. Over the five or so years I have known Mac, I have come to understand myself and my place in community better. When my beloved grandmother Lucille was dying during the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, Mac held me in community and offered me a space to grieve. If not for my best friend and co-editor, Amber Butts, I would never have found this soft landing place that Mac kept safe for us.

Malkia Devich-Cyril and I in conversation at Marcus Books

During those years, Mac modeled for me what it means to be my own first advocate while also moving in alignment with the Black, Brown, queer, trans, disabled, and working-class folks around me. Though I never met Mac’s mother, I am grateful for the ways her lessons have shown up in Mac’s life and in mine. I know that her roots in the socialist community building models of the Black Panther Party shaped Mac’s activism and organizing. Through Mac, Janet Cyril not only brought me back to my people, she probably saved my life. 

On that January day, Mac held me in ways that only they can, both physically and spiritually. Alexis Pauline Gumbs once told me that Black Feminism is a spiritual practice as much as it is an intellectual one. I can honestly say that knowing Mac and their commitment to my Oakland community has illustrated what that means for me.

Still tender from the loss of my grandmother and the increasing distance from my birth mother in January, I came to Oakland wounded. I came home half expecting to be hurt again. Instead, Mac looked me in my eyes and said, “Welcome home.” I looked out over the audience of readers, childhood friends, family, and onlookers, taking in the abundance that Oakland has always held. It was a moment filled with complex emotions. Sadness. Disappointment. Rage. Relief. And then, joy. 

At that moment, I realized that I had been waiting to be welcomed back to something that had been torn away. For the first time in decades, I could imagine being whole in the place that had hurt me.

While I have never been able to return to my childhood home because the hurt is still too vast, I am working toward my return to that little home in East Oakland one day. My aunts and uncles have reminded me that there is never going to be a day when I am not welcome there. They brought me to church on Easter Sunday and stood me up in front of my church family like I had never left. They bought every copy of my book in stock and demanded that I sign each one.

Since leaving Oakland, I’ve become a mother, navigated my neurological and physical disabilities, earned my doctorate, and spent years organizing toward a freer world. Those experiences have changed how I understand care, community, and what it takes to make a place where our people can live and thrive. With Black Life Everywhere Oakland, we’re gathering writers, artists, and organizers to explore the nuances and full dimensions of Black life in the city, including its revolutionary history, everyday experiences, relationships, and struggles. For years, I couldn’t imagine myself belonging here again. Now, I’m contributing to the political and cultural life of the city that raised me. I don’t need Oakland to give me back the person I was before I left. I want to be here as the person I’ve become.

I can’t say I have it completely figured out. I’m new to this. There are still places I haven’t been able to visit and parts of my life I’m learning how to reconcile. But I want my before and my after. I want all of myself, including the girl who believed she had been thrown away.

Now, I understand that home wants me, too. 

Jenn M. Jackson, PhD (@jennmjacksonphd) (they/them) is a queer, androgynous Black woman, an abolitionist, a lover of all Black people, and an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Political Science. Jackson’s research is in Black Politics with a focus on Black Feminist movements, racial threat and trauma, gender and sexuality, policing, and political behavior. They are the author of BLACK WOMEN TAUGHT US (Penguin Random House, 2024) and POLICING BLACKNESS (expected in 2027). Jackson has written peer-reviewed articles at Public Culture, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Social Science Quarterly, and the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy. Jackson received their doctoral degree from the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago in 2019 where they also received a graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies.