Beginning in 1963, civil rights groups in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley organized a series of protests against businesses that practiced hiring discrimination, under the banner of the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination. Pickets at the Sheraton Hotel in San Francisco and on Auto Row in Oakland helped to publicize the prevalence of discriminatory practices in the Bay Area, and the Committee provided a space for the building of connections and organizational skills among local activists.
As frustration grew with the continuing segregation and underfunding of Oakland schools, a group of these activists came together to form another such group: the Ad Hoc Committee for Quality Education. The AHC was spearheaded by attorney John George, later a Democratic congressional candidate in 1968 and an Alameda County supervisor from 1976-1989, and it worked in cohort with other local community organizations to press its agenda with the Oakland Board of Education. In particular, it had close relationships with the North, East and West Oakland Christian Parishes, community ministries staffed by radical young seminarians and pastors, and with local chapters of the Community for New Politics, a Berkeley-based New Left organization run by Ramparts editor Robert Scheer.
AHC’s top priorities in the spring of 1966 were its campaign to provide needy students with free lunches, the curtailment of harsh and arbitrary disciplinary measures, and continued efforts toward desegregation and equity in the education system. Over the summer of 1966, as the committee continued to organize around these issues and loudly publicize its criticisms, its members began to gear up for an unprecedented confrontation with the “power structure” in the fall: the Committee would spearhead a three-day walkout from Oakland schools, organizing Southern-style “freedom schools” for striking students; it would also come in for harsh criticism following the Castlemont riots in East Oakland, which coincided with the boycott.
