Laney College

He taught you a lot about the blues.

Actually, Laney College had a very good music department back in the early 70s.

I learned how to play saxophone in junior college.

How about that? Thank you, Mr.

He

was 17, up from L.A. to go to Laney College near Lake Merritt when he joined up to help run programs like sickle cell anemia testing, a weekend bus shuttle to prisons like Soledad, Folsom and San Quentin so families could visit their loved ones.

Black Panthers started here in Oakland in October of 1966 in response to police brutality and evolved into a campaign for racial justice.

Live at Oakland, Holly Kwan, KCBS.

There's a ton of funding out to do those kinds of services, so we've been doing it pretty well with, with our healthcare programs.

We work with Laney College and Cal Regional, the healthcare providers, and it's been pretty successful for us.

Yeah, they actually, the community college district's California Chancellor's Office put out grants for that particular type of service, and we received two rounds of that grant, and we've been working from that, and it's been working out pretty well.

A, a couple thoughts on all of that.

Um, that game was played on a Saturday afternoon.

Um, I believe that game was played at Laney College, if I recall correctly.

And at one point there was no score at the half.

No one scored, and I was, like, wondering, I'm like, "Huh, well, Oakland Tech is hanging tough with them." And then Mac literally said, "Okay, that's enough of you." And McClymonds, they ended up b- beating Oakland Tech 30 to 14.

So I did research.

And eventually, after graduating from high school, I moved to Oakland, where I took a course at Laney College.

They were offering Black history for the first time, so that social consciousness, the Black history, and the fact that three blocks from our school, the Huey and Pete Newton trial was starting.

And I could hear from the Laney College campus, right, saying, free Huey, free Huey.

And so after my class, I walked through all the voices and went around.

And it was like the first day of court for healing.

[upbeat music] Are you good? Who are the three people that you can call when life becomes difficult? Like, what support do you need to finish this s- semester successfully?

In a cosmetology classroom at Laney College, young men explore these questions and find connection.

Sometimes a African American male is not so open to the idea of opening up to somebody that they don't know, but they'll, they'll have these deep, impactful conversations with their barber.

Today, recreating the barbershop on campus.

I'ma leave it on that one and get back to my brother.

This is Barbershop Talk.

It's a free event held inside the cosmetology department at Laney College.

About 50 Black and brown students are sitting in barber chairs getting their hair cut by neighborhood barbers while opening up about their mental health, guided by Black mental health practitioners.

Another listener, Gloria, writes, as a first-generation Mexican-American, UC Berkeley changed my life.

Transferring from Laney College, I graduated with a degree in criminology in 1975, an urban and city planning degree in 1979.

Surrounded by activists of the Chicano and Black Power movements, I felt all was possible and the world was open to me.

UC paved the way for me, and I hope other low-income young people will have the same opportunities that I did to see a world much bigger than the one I lived in.

So we went on, and moving on, we went on to correspond for the next almost three years, you know? And we talked about a lot of things.

You know, she was a, a professor at Laney College during that time and was wanting to study.

And I was in San Quentin, and I was working with the San Quentin News.

And I had a, a column called An OG's Perspective where I would have this conversation with, uh, a lot of the young men, 'cause now I'm an elder.

And the teacher shortage is a choke point on top of that.

Laney College in Oakland nearly lost its electrical program when its one full-time instructor retired.

The dean emailed every electrical business in the county and couldn't recruit a replacement.

Because employees earn more in the field than they do teaching.