In spring and summer of 2021, Jilchristina Vest turned her two-story Victorian at the intersection of 9th Street and Huey P. Newton Way in Oakland, California, into the Women of the Black Panther Party Mural and Mini Museum. A twenty-year resident of West Oakland, Vest wanted to pay homage to the women who had inspired her to move to the neighborhood in the first place. Meanwhile, fourth generation West Oaklander David Peters was envisioning a Black Liberation Walking tour—an audio tour exploring the histories of the West Oakland neighborhood known as Hoover-Foster, where he grew up.During the unveiling of these two projects, I lived in West Oakland—around the corner from the Mini Museum. I attended both celebratory events; they were the kind of events that often attract new residents and thus remind me of the ways Oakland has changed since I was a child. But something about these events was different—more affirming. Amongst these crowds of residents new and old was a sense of acknowledgement of the site-specific histories of the streets where Black community leaders and everyday folks like Delilah Beasley, C. L. Dellums, Bobby Seale, and Huey Newton, as well as my aunt Dhameera Ahmad and my great aunt Loretta Thomas, once walked. Through narrative storytelling and educational programming, the Black Liberation Walking Tour and the Women of the Black Panther Mural make these site-specific histories of Oakland legible to a broader public.The Black Liberation Walking Tour is an exploration of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black histories of the West Oakland neighborhood of Hoover–Foster. David Peters, a community advocate and accountant, envisioned and created the tour. Liam O’Donoghue—host of the local history podcast, East Bay Yesterday—conducted and edited the tour’s interviews. The walking tour consists of a website (www.blwt.org) with nine audio stops, featuring a map of the neighborhood, as well as addresses for each of the stops. Each stop is a six-to-ten-minute walk away from the previous one. When clicking on each stop on the website, listeners are brought to a page containing large blocks of contextualizing information and one-to-three audio segments. There are no transcripts available for the audio clips on the website. And the tour doesn’t tell you where to go and how to engage with each stop—prompting you to decide how you’d like to engage with the sites.With this walking tour, the buildings I’ve passed my entire life reverberate with new meaning. The tour succeeds in highlighting how Black people have impacted and historically altered a changing landscape of West Oakland—forever influencing its culture and structure. The interviews, paired with the historical research, dig deep into the archive of resident’s memories and colloquial knowledge. With music and light sound design ushering in each clip, the interviews are transportive. For example, as you stand at the corner of Telegraph and 34th street, you can hear the freeways in real time as you listen to Hoover–Foster resident, Alternier Cook, explain how the building of this infrastructure destructively impacted the residents of Hoover–Foster.In one of the most impactful clips of the tour we hear former Black Panther Elaine Brown reflect on incarcerated organizer and thinker George Jackson’s funeral service at St. Augustine’s Episcopal church—the first stop on the tour. Sound-designed with reverb and ambient music, Brown’s words about George Jackson’s experiences at Soledad Prison leading up to his death are haunting and deeply resonant: “George is so powerful, he cannot die.” Brown’s words prompt listeners to engage with the magnitude of St. Augustine’s as a site within a broader history of an ongoing Black freedom struggle.Ultimately, this project sits at the boundary between a podcast and a self-guided walking tour. The artistic choices within the sound design and editing are transportive, but moving between each stop is somewhat abrupt and often feels jagged; there is no voice guiding you on this journey. Therefore, it’s unclear when the best time is to move from one stop to another. You must decide when to begin walking and navigating towards the next stop on the website. And although informative, the blocks of texts are long to read as you’re squinting at your phone while standing on a city sidewalk. This problem has much to do with the ongoing dilemma of how to present podcasts beyond the typical RSS feed. I can’t help but wonder what the effect of the segments would have been if the historical information had been recorded as part of the auditory part of the tour—as transitionary information leading from one stop to the other. It’s true that the current structure of the tour allows the interviewee’s voices to shine. However, as I was listening, I craved a voice to establish the stakes and the importance of the tour—someone to sonically hold my hand on this journey and elaborate upon its significance.As David Peters premiered this walking tour on Juneteenth, Jilchristina Vest was unveiling the Women of The Black Panther Party Mural and Mini Museum. In the Lower Bottoms neighborhood of West Oakland sits a brown Victorian house with a mural of four thirty-foot-tall Black women painted on the side. Painted by local artist Rachel-Wolfe Goldsmith, this mural depicts these women engaged in actions that exemplify the pillars of the Black Panther Party: protesting, practicing self-defense, giving out free groceries and caring for Black children.According to an interview with Jilchristina Vest, the creator of this project and the owner of the house, it was the women of the Black Panther Party who were at the forefront of survival programs that the Party became known for (free breakfast programs, sickle cell anemia testing, elder checks, etc.)—women like my late aunt, Dhameera Ahmad. The mini museum inside the house is curated by Vest and Lisbet Tellefsen and edited, designed, and produced, respectively, by Linnea Du, Otherwise, and Art Kotoulas. After paying a twelve-dollar-fee and signing up online, visitors walk up six steps to a house where you are invited to take off your shoes upon entering. As you enter the bottom floor of this house museum, you are greeted by Vest, as well as eight-foot-tall panels, filled with information about the Black Panther Party. These panels snake around the house, leading you to walk in a circle.While the exterior mural is clearly dedicated to the women of the Black Panther Party, it’s unclear whether the interior of the house explores the lives of these women or rather, the organization’s local history in Oakland. The central panel of the museum reads “The Black Panther Party 1966-1982,” indicating that this is perhaps the title of the exhibit. Online, the museum is described as a “1000 sq ft museum honoring The Black Panther Party and Communal Survival Programs.” The panels elaborate upon Huey Newton’s notion of “Survival Pending Revolution,” including details about the Free Breakfast program and pictures of Black women conducting medical check-ups on Black babies and elderly folks in the neighborhood. There are archival photos and clippings from the Panther’s newspaper hanging throughout the house—exemplifying the importance that visual culture played in proliferating the Black Panther’s political messages. The back corner of the museum is dedicated to the Oakland Community School, led by Elaine Brown in East Oakland, as well as information on the Party’s efforts towards political education.One of the most striking panels in the exhibit, titled, “Changing the Face of The Revolution: Women Of The Black Panther Party,” contains a letter written by Peaches, a political prisoner and party member, to her parents. One of the final paragraphs of the letter reads:I have found what I’ve wanted out of life, I didn’t find it in the streets, or through dope, or through luxuries. I found what I wanted through the Black Panther Party. And this is to “Love and serve the People.” Please Mom and Dad, I love you for what you are and what you do can’t you love me for what I am and what I do?This letter illustrates the sacrifices Black women made when joining the party. These choices weren’t innate but were motivated by a “love” for the people of Black neighborhoods such as West Oakland. Moving throughout the exhibit, I craved to hear the voices of women like Peaches—through audio or written word. The public facing images of the women of the Black Panther Party are so clearly and powerfully represented on the outside of the house, but what of their interior lives? The mini museum missed an opportunity to go deeper into the narratives and lived experiences of the women that the mural represents, which would provide us with a window into what they knew and felt. Instead, this exhibition provides a hyper-localized history of the Black Panther Party’s community programs—one that is more site-specific than typical narratives that are churned out about the Party—in a house only a few blocks down from their fourth headquarters. The real-life experiences and material histories of the women of the Black Panther party are perhaps more powerfully presented on the project’s website—chronicling the average age of women of the party as well as closeup photos of female party members.Despite this shortcoming, the Women of the Black Panther Mural and Mini Museum and the Black Liberation Walking tour bring Black history to the streets of Oakland. These two projects emerged at the same time, independently, but not uncoincidentally. They are part of a wave of on-going efforts to acknowledge and memorialize the political, social, and cultural contributions Black people have made to the city and ensure that they aren’t forgotten among a massive influx of new residents.1Perhaps both projects could have benefited from a singular voice to guide, anchor, and orient the listener with how to engage with these materials. Additionally, both projects could have more rigorously acknowledged the indigenous lands upon which these projects traverse. However, there are some benefits to these projects being left up to the listener’s interpretation, without guidance from a single omnipresent voice or interlocutor. These projects don’t assume a certain background knowledge. Instead, they allow the viewer to dive in where they feel comfortable.These projects stand as alternative and community-oriented monuments that exist outside institutions that typically mediate our understandings of history—museums, universities, libraries, and historical societies. Both the tour and mural prompt participants to engage in these moments of stopping, looking, and listening. Crowds often gather, point, and congregate outside of the mural of these thirty-foot-tall women; people take pictures and film videos. This house, now, acts as a site of representation of women whose stories who have long gone neglected and underappreciated. On the side of the house, my aunt’s name is written in white. I like to walk by and say hello to her name alongside many others. As you pass by the Women of The Black Panther Party Mural, you’ll see a quote from Sandra Bland painted on the back of the house, in the same signature chocolate and sky-blue: “My Beautiful Queens & Kings, Someone Cares About You, Somebody Loves You & Knows You Can Do Great Things.”