10 10th Street, Oakland 94607
Originally known as the Oakland Civic Auditorium, the Kaiser building has a long and storied history as a site for public events and concerts.
Oaklanders proudly remember it as a site where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to a crowd of over seven thousand in 1962, and where the Black Panther Party distributed free breakfasts. A 1914 Beaux Arts building and historic landmark, it is a regular feature on architectural tours. Less likely to come up is that in 1925, a local order of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) held a mass rally here, inducting new members and publicly flexing its racist muscle.
More than a terrifying or embarrassing blip in East Bay history, the presence of the KKK at Oakland’s civic auditorium should be understood as part of an ongoing, violent, white-supremacist project that stretches back to initial conquest and forward to the rise of the alt.right in the 2010s. Indeed, formally organized white-supremacist activity in the Bay Area goes back to the slaughter of Native groups across the US West, and to the call to repopulate the West as part of Manifest Destiny, which has persisted in anti-immigrant movements. By the 1920s, what historians describe as the second Ku Klux Klan established beachheads in many cities outside of the US South, where whites who declared that they were “native-born” were already primed to hate Black people, Jews, Catholics, and nearly all immigrants. This “second KKK” has been characterized as the largest right-wing movement in US history, a movement that saw national KKK membership swell to between four million and six million. Locally, KKK members ran for public office and sought positions throughout government, leaving an ideological legacy that no doubt remains in some quarters, even as Oakland has shifted toward multiculturalism in many ways.
In 1925 the KKK brought a show of force here to the center of Oakland when eighty-five hundred members and supporters from across the country filled the Oakland Civic Auditorium for a swearing-in ceremony, which was said to include cross burnings inside the huge civic space. While this moment was stunning, Klan events of the 1920s mark many East Bay geographies. Sociologist Chris Rhomberg writes about a ritual rally that took place in the Oakland hills in 1922, during which the organization brought some five hundred new members into its ranks. Soon, three thousand members marched through the city of Richmond to an initiation ceremony in the El Cerrito Hills. By 1924 Oakland had at least two thousand men enrolled in the Klan. Downtown, Klan office No. 9 provided a centralized presence.
The growth of the KKK intersected with the expansion of explicitly racially restricted new suburban housing opportunities in East Oakland and the Oakland Hills. With deed covenants calling for racial homogeneity,
these areas became core strongholds for the organization and provided opportunities for it to expand its reach into civic activities, like taxes and city services. Although Klan No. 9 dissolved in 1925 amid internal disputes, the KKK was still active in Oakland through the end of the 1920s, having a wide support base and several political, civic, and fraternal leaders within its membership. Elected Klansmen, however, turned out to be (unsurprisingly) unscrupulous, and their poor performance and occasional violence may have done more to undo their organization than any broader objection to overt racism. Two Oakland Klan-affiliated officials were both indicted, convicted, and sent to prison following a grand jury investigation into graft. The KKK faded from formal politics but, according to Rhomberg, conservative downtown-business elites continued with more subtle promises to maintain a stable social order of white control of land, jobs, and wealth.
Oakland still struggles with this legacy of long-held beliefs in white racial supremacy, right up to debates over how the empty Kaiser center should be redeveloped, who is responsible for its decline, and who “deserves” to have such a storied building at the heart of their city. (With research by David Woo)