Join us for a book launch and celebration of Soul City: Oakland, U.S.A. with Ken Light and Ishmael Reed in conversation with Lewis Watts.

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Uncovered after 50 years, an absorbing and illuminating photographic archive of Black West Oakland in the 1970s, featuring a stirring foreword by celebrated author and longtime Oakland resident Ishmael Reed.

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In 1974 Ken Light, a young underground press photographer recently arrived in California, was encouraged by residents of West Oakland to document daily life in the neighborhood. A white activist building relationships in an eminent Black community, Light was invited into homes and churches, flagged down on the street for impromptu portraits. The resulting images, taken over two years, ended up unpublished and nearly forgotten for half a century.

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Now made public for the first time in Soul City, they form a stunning and historically important archive of Black urban life in a major American city in the 1970s. These photographs reveal the deep pride running through West Oakland, despite the formidable attempts of local governments and agencies to tear the neighborhood apart. Soul City presents the everyday experiences and emotions of West Oaklanders: hard work, love, determination, resistance, humor, delight. 

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The conversation will be followed by a book signing.

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About the Speakers

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Ken Light has worked as a documentary photographer and filmmaker for over fifty years, focusing on social issues facing America. His books include Course of the Empire, What’s Going On? 1969–1974, Valley of Shadows and Dreams, Witness in Our Time, and Picturing Resistance. His work has been presented in over 250 exhibitions worldwide, and he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts photographers’ fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts survey grant, and the Dorothea Lange Fellowship. Light is the Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He is represented by Contact Press Images, NYC. Visit his website at kenlight.com.

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Ishmael Reed is the author of novels, plays, poetry, and non-fiction and has received prizes in every category, most recently including the 2023 Hurston/Wright Foundation’s North Star Merit Award, the Anisfield-Wolf 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award, and the University of California at Berkeley’s Distinguished Emeritus Awardee for the year 2020. His most recent novel, The Terrible Fives, the fourth in Reed’s “Terribles” series, is forthcoming from Baraka Books in November 2026. The Terrible Fours was published by Baraka Books in June 2021.

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To commemorate its 50 years in print, in 2022 Scribner’s released a new edition of Mumbo Jumbo, which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. says, “would be among my top 10 books of all time,” and Harold Bloom listed as one of 500 great books of the Western Canon. It includes a new introduction by Reed. Scribner’s released a new edition of Flight to Canada, Reed’s fifth novel, commemorating its 50 years in print in 2026, also including his new introduction. Reed’s tenth play, The Slave Who Loved Caviar, focused on the dynamics of the New York art world, particularly as demonstrated in the relationship between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, premiered Off-Broadway at Theater for the New City in December 2021 and was published by Archway Editions in 2023. His fourteenth and newest play, King Ludd’s Revenge, will be presented in staged readings at San Francisco’s Theater33 in December 2026.

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Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist/curator and Professor Emeritus of Art at UC Santa Cruz. His research and artwork centers around the “cultural landscape” primarily in communities in the African diaspora. He is the author of "Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era” Chronicle Books 2006 and “New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition” UC Press 2013. His work has been exhibited at and is in the collections of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Citè de La Musique, Paris France, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, The Oakland Museum of California, The Neuberger museum of Art, Purchase NY, The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, Hartford, Conn, Light Work, Syracuse NY, The Paul Sack Collection, San Francisco among others. He is currently working on photographic projects on “the Black Presence in France” and migration throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

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This program is presented in conjunction with Thrive@MoAD, a free community day sponsored by Kaiser Permanente.

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