Professor
Gregory Downs

Welcome to our first WOCAN Member Spotlight!

On this recurring Q&A series, we will chat with some of our esteemed members about their careers and why they feel so invested in the West Oakland Cultural Action Network.

Up first, we’d like to feature Professor Gregory Downs, the History Department Chair at UC Davis, author and historian. Professor Downs has extensively studied slavery, emancipation, Civil War and Reconstruction, while also doing work with National Parks and other memory preservation sites.

Thanks to Professor Downs for all his support over the years, as he has been one of the biggest believers in the Black Liberation Walking Tour (BLWT) since its inception in 2020.

This Q&A has been edited for clarity:

WOCAN: Thanks for taking the time to chat today. I see your studies focus on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era. In 2025, how does that intersect with WOCAN’s mission, especially the BLWT?

DOWNS: The heart of my research is in the 19th century and the 1800s and has been mostly around the transformations of the U.S., end of slavery, emancipation, the battles over the forms it would take and the transformations it created. Mostly set – but not only – in the Southeast where 4 million enslaved people lived and where these transformations were most visible.

So in that sense, there's a sort of space between that and the heart of the BLWT – which does have a late 19th century component, but it's primarily 20th century. With people studying the things I study, we’re almost always motivated by a desire to understand the roots of racial inequality and racial oppression in the United States. Many of those roots go back into slavery or go back into what was – and was not – accomplished after the Civil War in the Southeast. But of course it doesn't end there.

So since coming here (to California), I still do a lot of work with history projects that are far away in South Carolina and Virginia and other places. And I love that; that's where my research is most directly relevant. But I also got interested in helping students connect with California history, teaching more about that, helping grad students with reparations history project for Sacramento and helping them work with native Ohlone organizations in the East Bay.

Then I heard about Dave's effort and I was like, I want to let's go on it. So I brought my teenage daughters one day, it sounded fun. This was really historical, really detailed and really the best walking tour of that type I'd ever seen – and I've seen a lot as a professional historian.

Afterwards, I reached out to [WOCAN Founder] Dave [Peters] and we got to know each other. He's great at building the tent and widening the circle, as you know.

WOCAN: When it comes to the tour, what’s striking is you only walk about 10 blocks and yet you see so many things.

DOWNS: That impressed me, along with how well Dave narrates about those different eras, which is a key historical concept, and also what it shows about continuity.

For example, I've taught Delilah Beasley and had students who wrote about her, but I didn't really perceive how close her house was to some of these post World War II sites that he takes us to on the tour – from the labor leaders, then the sites of Black Panther organizing and then to the sites of the battle against foreclosures.

I didn't have any perception of how directly you could map that onto a pretty small area. Dave does a really masterful job of tying it all together. And the idea that the houses are there and the site is there, gives it a concreteness that I think makes it visible to people who aren't historians and struggle sometimes with the abstractions when we say things like, ‘oppression’ or ‘inequality’ or, ‘white supremacy’ or ‘black organizing, black resistance.’

Then when you see it all compact like that, it really makes it come to life. I was just really blown away.

WOCAN: How important is that oral history component as well to kind of bring those characters to life? And the fact you can hear from the sources firsthand?

DOWNS: All historians want to hear – not just from the big names – but also from people who experience these changes but might easily be left out of the record.

And people also really are drawn to voice, right? People automatically perk up, I think, when they hear someone talking about their experience. Even if they don't agree with every piece of a person's experience, they do feel there's a credibility in that that is different than the narrator, or the author, or the guide.

It’s not just multiracial, but multivocal, right? That people have different places they came from to get to that neighborhood and different ways of experiencing it.

WOCAN: When you take the tour and see the rundown state of Grove Shafter Park, below the freeway maze cutting through West Oakland, what do you think about the effects of redlining that are still being felt in 2025?

DOWNS: I think that is the spot that had the biggest impact on my wife and teenage daughters, because it is so specific, right? It is so concrete, you can't miss it.

Whereas words like ‘redlining’ or ‘under-resourced’ or these kind of sociology words – they're important because they capture commonalities in experience – but when you stand there and Dave talks about the noise … well, you hear the noise of the highway and you just really can't miss it.

I think it really strikes home that the city just sort of plowed through, or bulldozed through this neighborhood and used it for other ends, and didn't give the kind of concern for the human beings there that the city might have done in other neighborhoods. I think that's a really vivid place.

WOCAN: Just in general, why do you think organizations like WOCAN are still important in 2025?

DOWNS: A place and a people – and eventually a country, or the world – depend upon the real-life interconnection of human beings who make common cause around common interests and viewpoints, and sometimes morality. Not because they agree on every single thing, or because they're carbon copies, but because they're able to build bonds of connection and trust that allow them to articulate what they do hold in common. And to me, everything in our world, in our country, in our region, in our neighborhood – depends on those bonds.

Social media is amazing at bringing people into the tent and making things available – and that's incredible – but it doesn't, to me, build the kind of resilience, and the ability to work across some subjective difference that comes out of in real-life connections. And a thing that unifies many of the stops on the tour, is that those people reached out to neighbors, they reached out to other people, they built interconnections. Those interconnections, those human ones, built the resiliency for them to stand up and stand tall and to speak out, even when there was not any kind of sense that anybody wanted their opinion or would listen to it.

To me, that's the way that we're going to not just rebuild the country or save the country, but build a better Bay Area, a better region, better country, a better world by being able to connect with people and to be able to find where we share common ground and to resist the things that pull people apart.

WOCAN is the kind of hyperlocal organization that can seem small in the sense of covering a little area, but is central to making savings of parts of the world we've got and making a better world as the bigger, better known national organizations.

Then the example that Dave sets of being out on his porch, of opening up his backyard, bringing people in and helping them find both personal ties and define what connects them and to build off of that. To me, that's the essential thing of organizing. It has come from people who are able to sit around a table, or a living room with people who on certain things they might disagree, but who find their common ground, common purpose and focus and build on that.

I worry that skill has been lost, not just on people who I disagree with, but even among people who otherwise I agree with. If you look at the long history of organizing, whether you're talking about, say, the canonical moments of the Civil Rights era when, they brought together both labor unions and Southern-based organizations and Northern-based organizations and people who were anti-communist and people who were themselves, either communists or communists sympathizers. And they said, you know, our job is not to build a smaller circle, but to find out what we all share. That this project of normal government segregation has to be attacked. And they kept that together for decades, right?

Or if you look at earlier organizing, either around Black Civil Rights, or the growth of the NAACP or movements like the women's movement, which somehow in fractured forms stayed together from 70 years from its founding in 1848 to the 19th Amendment, that it comes from people enduring, you know, conflict, but finding ways to keep bringing people back into the tent and articulate what gives them a common purpose. And I think Dave has that commitment as strongly as anybody I've ever met, right?

You see it on his porch, how he calls out to people, and you see it in his backyard, how he brings people in and people leave not just connected to him, but in some way into different degrees connected to each other. That's awesome. And that's what we need if we're going to save the world.