There is a certain kind of history that never makes it into textbooks. It does not live in university archives or curated museum exhibits. It lives in the memory of a man sitting at his kitchen table, remembering the exact sound of a police helicopter circling above the treetops in East Oakland at 9:35 on a Tuesday night in 1973. It lives in the smell of Hostess Twinkies and dill pickles raided from a neighbor’s kitchen in Brookfield Village in 1958. It lives in the image of 100 young Marines sitting in wheelchairs at Oakland International Airport before sunrise, their amputated limbs wrapped in fresh dress uniforms, hidden from the public until dark.

Back In The Days Of Old School Oakland is that kind of history. Written by Frederick Mickey “The Quiet Deacon” Williams, this memoir is a collection of short stories spanning from 1954 to 1991, covering one Black man’s life in East Oakland from childhood through Vietnam, from the rise of the Black Panther Party to the 1989 earthquake and the devastating 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm. It is not a political thesis. It is not a civil rights manifesto. It is something rarer and arguably more valuable: a primary source account of what ordinary Black life in America actually felt like from the inside, told by someone who was there for all of it.

The Author Behind the Stories

Frederick Mickey Williams was born in Natchitoches, Louisiana, on January 19, 1949, and raised at 9982 Empire Road in Brookfield Village, Oakland, from 1954 onward. His path through life reads like a compressed version of mid-century Black American history. He graduated from Castlemont High School on June 16,

1967, entered the Vietnam War on July 24, 1967, and was discharged in September

1971. He went on to work for Pacific Gas and Electric in Oakland, Richmond, San Francisco, and Vallejo for over three decades, later earning a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in 2016.

What makes Williams credible as a narrator is not just the timeline of his life but the specificity with which he recalls it. He remembers the exact issue of Jet magazine where his neighbor appeared on the cover in 1953. He remembers the names of the barbers at Howard’s shop on 98th and Edes Avenue. He remembers that Richard Aoki, the FBI informant embedded inside the Black Panther Party, later became a professor at UC Berkeley and died in 2009. These are not reconstructed impressions. These are the details of a man who lived it and wrote it down while the memory still had teeth.

Why This Book Matters Now

Oakland in 2025 is a city in the middle of a conversation about its own identity. Gentrification has reshaped entire neighborhoods. The flatlands that Williams grew up in look nothing like they did in 1959. The barbershops, the family cafes, the Jet magazines stacked in the corner, the vacant lots where kids played, the drive-in theaters and corner grocery stores: most of it is gone. What Williams has done in writing this book is create an act of preservation that no city planning document, no real estate database, and no Instagram archive could replicate.

He recalls attending the Black Panther Party’s second headquarters at 45th Grove while in the 11th grade, watching young men his own age standing armed on the steps of the Alameda County Courthouse in black leather jackets and black tams. He writes about James Brown arriving at Oakland International Airport in 1967 on a private Learjet, pulling three young airport baggage handlers aside and telling them: “Don’t be too impressed with all of this stuff. Education is more important.” He writes about loading military duffel bags onto charter flights headed to

Vietnam the night before he himself boarded one of those same flights at Gate 9.

These are not anecdotes. They are coordinates in time. They locate an entire generation of Black Oakland at a specific moment in American history that is rapidly becoming unreachable.

Stories That Stay With You

The book’s power comes from its refusal to be solemn when it does not need to be. Williams writes with the ease of a man who has been telling these stories at reunions and family dinners for decades. The chapter about three boys hiding in the girls’ shower room at Madison Junior High in 1963 is genuinely funny. The story of a bike ride with his friend Michael that goes wrong in a very particular way will make readers laugh out loud. The chapter about his grandmother’s cafe on Alcatraz and Adeline, the three sisters who ran it, and the March of Dimes booklets he helped fill as a child has a warmth that is impossible to manufacture.

Buy the book at Amazon, and you will find yourself reading chapters out of order, pulled by titles like “Giddy Up, You Old School Cowboys,” “The Worst Day of My Life,” and “Talking With Mr. James Brown One on One for Nearly an Hour.”

Preserving Memory Before It Disappears

Oral history projects get funded, photographed, and then shelved. What Williams has done is bypass all of that and deliver the thing itself: unfiltered, deeply personal, historically grounded testimony from a man who grew up in a neighborhood that produced some of the most consequential political and cultural movements of the 20th century and who watched all of it from ground level with his eyes wide open.

Every city has a history that belongs to the people who actually lived it. Oakland’s version of that history, the one that is not in the Tribune archives or the Chamber of Commerce brochures, is in this book. It deserves to be read while the generation that lived it is still here to confirm the details. Frederick Mickey Williams has done his part. The rest is up to the reader.

Frederick Mickey Williams is the author of Back In The Days Of Old School Oakland (1954-1991): As Seen Through My Eyes.