The Oakland City Council’s decision to pass a resolution on Nov. 27 calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all hostages, and condemning the “recent rise of Antisemitic, Islamophobic, racist, homophobic, and xenophobic attacks” in Oakland and elsewhere has led many to wonder why the city’s leaders chose to get involved. After all, doesn’t Oakland have plenty of its own problems—crime, homelessness, potholes—that need fixing? Why wade into a complicated and contentious geopolitical issue thousands of miles away?
The council’s vote came on the heels of weeks of local protests by Palestinians and their allies, including attempts to block a military supply ship at the Oakland Port, civil disobedience at the federal building downtown, rallies, marches, and more. These protests included calls for the City Council to denounce the violence and call on higher levels of government for a ceasefire.
Disagreements abound over whether Oakland should have gotten involved and about what the council said or didn’t say in its resolution. But this isn’t the first time Oakland has weighed in on a global conflict—and it almost certainly won’t be the last time.
In fact, Oakland’s City Council has a long history of making statements about overseas wars, human rights abuses, immigration policies, nuclear weapons, and other matters traditionally outside the purview of municipal governments.
Every instance has been unique, of course, and none of the council’s historic resolutions are neatly comparable to the stand it just took on the war in Gaza. But each time, the city’s resolutions were prompted by local protests.
In some cases, there was less controversy and far more agreement between members of the public and the council on its official statements. At other times, Oakland’s leaders passed resolutions that weren’t in tune with the majority of Americans and caused intense divisions among councilmembers and the mayor.
Here are some examples.
Oakland called for an end to the Vietnam War
In the early 1970s, the United States was losing the Vietnam War, which had already claimed the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers and many more Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. The Pentagon Papers—classified documents leaked by a whistleblower—had just been published in newspapers, revealing that the government was lying to the public about the scope of the war. And war crimes by U.S. troops, like the My Lai massacre, had convinced a growing number of Americans to oppose the war.
One of these people was John Sutter, a first-term Oakland City Councilmember. In July 1971, Sutter introduced a resolution that said the war was diverting federal funds away from cities like Oakland, which desperately needed money to “fight poverty, provide jobs and housing, and assist with other city needs.” Sutter’s resolution noted the fact that Black and brown soldiers were dying at much higher rates, including some Oakland residents who’d been drafted, according to a July 21 report in the Oakland Tribune. It called for the U.S. military to withdraw from Vietnam by the end of the year.
Few Americans today want to defend America’s war in Vietnam. But in the early 1970s, some still strongly supported keeping troops in Southeast Asia.
Then-Mayor John Reading said the idea of speaking out against U.S. foreign policy made him want to “throw up.” Reading’s son was serving his second tour of duty in an Army helicopter unit. He called Sutter’s anti-war resolution “dishonorable,” according to newspaper reports.
However, most of the public who showed up to the meeting, around 250 people, urged the council to support the anti-war statement.
Toward the end of the night, the council approved a “watered down version” that called on President Richard Nixon and members of Congress to “move to end the war promptly and withdraw all American forces,” according to the Tribune.
Oakland’s council wasn’t alone in debating the war, nor was it the first to do so. New York’s council passed a resolution in 1965—when a majority of Americans still supported the war—proclaiming support for U.S. policy in Vietnam.
Berkeley was probably one of the first cities to dissent officially. Its council passed a resolution critical of the war in 1967, followed by other resolutions, including one that proclaimed Berkeley a refuge for draft resisters, according to reports in the Berkeley Gazette.
The 1980s: South Africa, refugees, and nuclear weapons
In the 1980s, Oakland inserted itself into foreign policy debates by issuing resolutions opposing apartheid South Africa, critical of U.S. foreign policy in Central America, and speaking out against the nuclear arms race.
South Africa’s official policy at the time was racist apartheid—a system similar to the Jim Crow laws of segregation and exclusion that subjected Black Americans to second-class citizenship until the 1960s. Black South Africans had been struggling for generations against this regime, and they found allies in the United States, including members of the Oakland City Council.
On Oct. 25, 1984, the City Council voted in favor of a resolution drafted by Councilmember Wilson Riles, Jr. to denounce South Africa’s apartheid government. Councilmember Richard Spees, the board’s only Republican member, abstained. But unlike the Vietnam War, city leaders were mostly on the same page about South Africa. Then-Mayor Lionel Wilson strongly supported the resolution.
The council also voted to divest Oakland from any relationship the city might have with companies doing business with South Africa. This led to questions about Bank of America, which was a lender to the apartheid government but also did business with Oakland.
Oakland wasn’t alone and was hardly the first to take a stand against apartheid. Berkeley’s City Council had taken up the issue more than a decade earlier. San Francisco, New York, Boston, and other cities had passed similar resolutions years earlier.
But according to the Bay Area Free South Africa Movement, a local political network helping the African-led freedom movement, Oakland’s divestment ordinance was especially strong, and other cities soon copied it. Eventually, the state of California took an official position and divested from South Africa. Today, it’s widely recognized that grassroots protests, including City Council resolutions, played a role in influencing the U.S. to eventually pull support from South Africa’s apartheid government, which was abolished in the early 1990s with the formation of a democratic government.
Also in 1984, Oakland declared itself a “city of refuge” for immigrants from El Salvador and Guatemala, two nations that were in the throes of civil war. These conflicts were being stoked by President Ronald Reagan and other U.S. leaders who were providing aid to right-wing paramilitaries in Central America in the name of stopping communism.
The 1980s were also a time of growing fear about the threat of nuclear war, and Oakland was one of many cities to pass a nuclear-free zone ordinance. The law restricted companies that helped build nuclear weapons from getting contracts with the city.
Human rights, the ‘war on terror,’ government spying, and immigration
In 1996, Oakland took a stand against human rights abuses in Nigeria, where the government was killing people who stood in the way of the unfettered expansion of the oil industry. The most notorious case was the killing of Ken Saro Wiwa, a prominent journalist and leader of the Ogoni, an ethnic minority whose homeland was being polluted by the fossil fuel industry giant Royal Dutch Shell.
In April, the City Council voted to prohibit any company doing business with the Nigerian government from bidding on city contracts. According to newspaper reports at the time, this resulted in several companies losing their contracts, including a lobbying firm employed by Oakland. But as with other resolutions aimed at international conflicts, the bigger impact was probably symbolic.
“The Oakland City Council should continue a leadership position among American cities in defending human rights the world over even if others find excuses for political expediency,” Tunde Okorodudu, a Bay Area resident and union leader, wrote in an op-ed praising the council’s move.
Foreign policy resolutions continued in the 21st century
Over the past 20 years, the number of times Oakland has weighed in on global conflicts and foreign policy issues has grown, according to a review of legislation.
After the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks that killed 2,996 people, President George W. Bush and Congress pushed through the PATRIOT Act, which greatly expanded the power of the federal government to spy on American citizens and even indefinitely detain immigrants without trial. Oakland was one of 19 cities that condemned the law.
The city officially endorsed a massive April 5, 2003, march against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which began two weeks later. “The residents of the city of Oakland have historically advocated for a diplomatic approach to world conflict and supported world peace,” the council wrote in their resolution, which Councilmember Nancy Nadel introduced. “The City Council opposes a U.S. invasion of Iraq.” In 2005, the council passed a resolution calling on the governor and federal government to withdraw California National Guard troops from Iraq.
In 2007, while American soldiers were still fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other nations under the umbrella of the “war on terror,” Oakland leaders voted to oppose and condemn the United States’ use of secret prisons in Eastern Europe where detainees were held without the ability to see a judge, and many were tortured. These prisons were “an affront to basic human rights and an unwarranted challenge to the Rule of Law in American society,” the council said in a unanimous vote.
Starting in the mid-2000s, Oakland began to weigh in on federal immigration laws frequently. In 2005, the council made a statement opposing the growing number of civilian militias patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border. Two years later, then-Mayor Ron Dellums and the City Council passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on federal immigration raids and reaffirming the “city of refuge” statement Oakland had first made in the 1980s. “The City of Oakland has a strong tradition of embracing and valuing diversity and respecting the civil and human rights of all residents, regardless of their immigration status,” the resolution read.
When Arizona lawmakers passed Senate Bill 1070 in 2010, making state police enforcers of immigration laws, Oakland passed a resolution “denouncing” the law. Oakland’s resolution also included a city boycott of companies headquartered or doing business in Arizona.
After the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, Oakland reaffirmed its “city of refuge” status again and issued a resolution denouncing Trump’s efforts to build a border wall to prevent undocumented immigrants from entering the U.S.
When the Islamist militant group Boko Haram carried out a mass abduction of female students from their school in 2014, the council condemned the kidnappings. According to the resolution, authored by then-Councilmember Desley Brooks, Oakland had “strong ties to Nigeria,” including through a sister city relationship with the city of Bauchi, and this link made the vote all the more important.
Besides the Gaza ceasefire resolution, Oakland’s most recent statements on global conflict include a resolution passed in May condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and honoring “the courage and spirit of the Ukrainian people in their resistance against unjust aggression” and a resolution passed in January condemning the Iranian government’s repressive attacks against women, Kurdish people, and other minorities.
