Occupy Oakland seizes building to create “people’s library” (updated: police break up the party)
Around 7 am this morning, Occupy Oakland took over another building, this one at 1449 Miller Avenue in East Oakland, California.
About a dozen people went into the building and claimed to be setting up a library. They brought in books and set up a banner proclaiming it the “Victor Martinez People’s Library”.
photo by @PFailBlog
The building is owned by City of Oakland’s Redevelopment Successor Agency within the Office of Neighborhood Investment. It used to be a library at one point but has been empty for a number of years. In an email Monday, an agency spokesman said the city would issue a dispersal order with a set time to vacate the property.
Some of the squatters said that the goal is to use it for community purposes. ”All we ask is that you consider keeping it out of the hands of a city which will only seal the fence and doors again, turning the space back into an aggregator of the city’s trash and a dark hole in the middle of the community,” according to the group’s news release, aimed at residents of the surrounding neighborhoods.
Books already brought in include such fun and uplifting child oriented reading material such as “The Black Panthers” and “Academic Repression” a collection of essays with an anarchist orientation. Got to start that indoctrination early!
UPDATE:
Police came in in the early morning and boarded up the front where the building had been broken into. Occupy Oakland claims not to know how the doors became unlocked and were furious this morning at the police reclaiming the building.
Just a few of the many many opd. To take away books neighborhood kids had donated today. http://t.co/7UMURslu
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Biblioteca Popular (@BibliotecaPopul) August 14, 2012Yes, after Occupy Oakland broke into the building, they brought kids in to work on garden beds in the back of the library. These are some of the books they were bringing in for the kids to read:
Photo by @BibibliotecaPopul
In case you didn’t know-”Matanza” is it is a book on the communist revolt in El Salvador in 1932, “Mexico Profundo” – on indigenous resistance within Mexico, “Harvest of Empire” is, according to Amazon review, a “left leaning” look at Hispanic immigration in the United States.
