Sobrante Park is a neighborhood located in

East Oakland, California East Oakland is a geographical region of Oakland, California, United States, that stretches between Lake Merritt in the northwest and San Leandro in the southeast. As the southeastern portion of the city, East Oakland takes up the largest portio ...

, which is partially separated from the rest of the city by two railroad tracks and

San Leandro Creek San Leandro Creek ( es, Arroyo de San Leandro) is a year-round natural stream in the hills above Oakland in Alameda County and Contra Costa County of the East Bay in northern California.U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-res ...

. It was built shortly after

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

, first as a White-Only Lockout and then gradually becoming a

White flight White flight or white exodus is the sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the terms became popular in the United States. They refer ...

red-zone in the mid to late 1950s, and in the early 1960s it became a working-class black neighborhood. It was projected by planners that there would be no in-road into San Leandro's Davis St. residential area which was developed during the same period. In the 1980s the neighborhood became a center of crack cocaine dealing. A large gang from the neighborhood gave itself the nickname, "11-5" (or "11-500") which refers to the section of California State's

legal code A code of law, also called a law code or legal code, is a systematic collection of statutes. It is a type of legislation that purports to exhaustively cover a complete system of laws or a particular area of law as it existed at the time the cod ...

for drug crimes. A memorial to 32 men and six women members of the gang who have been killed since then (as of 2002) was painted on the basketball court in Tyrone Carney Park, a local park named after a young man from the neighborhood who died in the

Vietnam war The Vietnam War (also known by other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam a ...

. The city installed a fence around the park in an attempt to reduce the murders and drug dealing that had been taking place in and around the park. Sobrante Park is a mostly

African-American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ensl ...

and

Latino Latino or Latinos most often refers to: * Latino (demonym), a term used in the United States for people with cultural ties to Latin America * Hispanic and Latino Americans in the United States * The people or cultures of Latin America; ** Latin A ...

neighborhood, with African-Americans forming 53.5%, and

Latinos Hispanic and Latino Americans ( es, Estadounidenses hispanos y latinos; pt, Estadunidenses hispânicos e latinos) are Americans of Spaniards, Spanish and/or Latin Americans, Latin American ancestry. More broadly, these demographics include a ...

forming about 3

Sobrante Park and the informally named " The Park, Oakland, California, Ghost Town" have been two of the most crime-ridden areas on Oakland. Recently, the Alameda County Department of Health, local organizations, and community members established a Time Bank project for the neighborhood in order to facilitate skill sharing among residents, rebuild trust, and revitalize the community of Sobrante Park. "How We Survive: The Currency of Giving (encore)
Making Contact, produced by National Radio Project. December 21, 2010.

References

{{Oakland, California neighborhoods Neighborhoods in Oakland, California Crime in the San Francisco Bay Area