The Flatlands, as a newspaper, welcomed conflict. The printed graphic in its first issue, listing the addresses of the city’s highest elected officials, served as an implicit warning to the powers-that-be: we know where you live, and we’ll bring the fight to you. The 1966 Ad Hoc Committee for Quality Education (AHC) boycott, its progress painstaking chronicled in the paper’s pages, epitomized its brash approach: by publicizing the inadequacies of a de facto segregated school system and campaigning for public support for the boycott, its organizers hoped to raise a fuss that the city couldn’t ignore.

The unrelated unrest at Castlemont High two days prior to the boycott’s scheduled launch left organizers on the back foot. The boycott went ahead as planned (although not without complication), as participating students attended “freedom schools” run by organizers, but city officials were quick to claim that the boycott campaign had been responsible for the disturbance. It was immaterial that police abuses, not the boycott, had motivated protestors, as the Oakland Tribune and other organs of the establishment repeated the city’s claims uncritically. Public comment at the first school board meeting following the boycott’s end took nearly four hours, as speaker after speaker rose to condemn the boycott for causing division and chaos.

One teacher at Castlemont, presenting a signed petition from 50 of her fellow teachers, called for “uniformed police [in the school] so we don’t have to run around calling them,” stating that she and her fellow teachers were tired of being “insulted, cursed, and called obscene names.” The $40,000 in damages to school property were laid at the feet of the boycott organizers as well, with one citizen’s committee calling for “full prosecution of anyone encouraging the illegal conspiracy of the boycott: ‘Does the help and encouragement of the FLATLANDS in promoting this boycott constitute conspiracy? If so, every editor and sponsor(several organizations were mentioned – most have nothing to do with the FLATLANDS) of the publication should be prosecuted!'”