Evicting the Black Panthers’ vision: The fight for Aunti Frances and the Self-Help Hunger Program

by Tiny, daughter of Dee, POOR Magazine

“This is the Black Panthers’ vision, and it’s being evicted,” said Aunti Frances Moore, revolutionary founder of the Self-Help Hunger Program and poverty skola and teacher with POOR Magazine, speaking on the impending eviction from her North Oakland home of eight years and the base of her deep rooted revolutionary community work with the Self-Help Hunger Program at Driver Plaza, a small pocket park at 61st and Adeline, a block away from her apartment.

The devastation of eviction is something that destroys the spirit of anyone it touches, but for elders and children, as documented by POOR Magazine in 2014, it’s elder and child abuse. In the case of Frances Moore, this is abuse of an elder, of community love, power and liberation.

The triplex that houses Aunti Frances was sold to Natalia Morphy and her parents, James and Alexandra Morphy, in 2016. Oakland’s rent control laws limit how much landlords can raise the rent on existing tenants and follow the tenants even when the building is sold. Median rents have skyrocketed in this gentrifying city and can only be raised to market rates when tenants move out.

So even though Aunti Frances has been an “excellent tenant,” paying her rent on time, the Morphys want her out. Aunti Frances was served eviction papers on Nov. 19. This is the Morphys’ third attempt to push her out.

The devastation of eviction is something that destroys the spirit of anyone it touches, but for elders and children, as documented by POOR Magazine in 2014, it’s elder and child abuse. In the case of Frances Moore, this is abuse of an elder, of community love, power and liberation.

Rent control should make this impossible, but there are gaps in the law for unscrupulous landlords to exploit. If the eviction is successful, it is unlikely that Aunti Frances will be able to find other housing. She’ll either be forced out of the city, or into the streets.

“I am just tired, Tiny, so tired of fighting for everything and then fighting just to live.” Frances and I speak all the time because she is an integral part of our Elephant Council at POOR Magazine, our teaching staff at our liberation school, Deecolonize Academy, and the revolutionary building project us poor people have created called Homefulness, a poor peoples solution to homelessness. Frances is a Theatre of the POOR teacher, a radio producer and a published author of the POOR Press publication called “The Making of Aunti.”

“I am just tired, Tiny, so tired of fighting for everything and then fighting just to live.”

“We need to build Homefulness in North Oakland too,” said Aunti Frances at a recent POOR Magazine DegentriFUKation Tour held at Homefulness, East Oakland. Aunti Frances and the Self-Help Hunger program embodies everything we land liberators and community revolutionaries claim to be and do and she is a very important leader in the Oakland community who carries all of her spirit, her poverty scholarship and her love into all she touches. But this eviction has truly dealt her another blow, pulling her into the depression, fear and loss that plagues all of us houseless and formerly houseless folks.

“Thank God for Aunti Frances and this community; otherwise, I wouldn’t eat,” said Sam B, a Black elder, life-long Oakland resident and POOR Magazine reporter who became houseless when his family home was stolen with the fakkke paper trail of an unpaid tax bill, only to be predated on by one of the many salivating gentrifiers that predate (i.e. become predators) on all of us poor people every day in America.

The work and struggle of the long-time Black residents of North Oakland who are participants in the Self-Help Hunger program that feeds, clothes, supports and offers love at Driver Plaza every week and this eviction threat aimed at Aunti Frances is in so many ways a metaphor of American hypocrisy and supposedly Black-Panther-admiring Oakland hypocrisy.

The Black community who built the spirit of Oakland, who walked liberation and Afrocentric deep structure are the very people who have lost their homes, economies and lives behind the lie of settler colonizer paper trail theft.

Elders and leaders like Sam B and Aunti Frances shouldn’t even be fighting to stay here. Matter of fact, the Oakland gentrifiers and the Oakland city politricksters should be paying reparations to the people who made Oakland, Oakland.

If you care about food justice, Aunti Frances is food justice. If you care about tenants rights, Aunti Frances is tenants rights, If you care about unhoused folks, Aunti Frances is the liberation of unhoused folks and all of us. Please show up for her, because when you show up for her, you are showing up for all of us.

If you care about food justice, Aunti Frances is food justice. If you care about tenants rights, Aunti Frances is tenants rights, If you care about unhoused folks, Aunti Frances is the liberation of unhoused folks and all of us. Please show up for her, because when you show up for her, you are showing up for all of us.

For more information, go to DefendAuntiFrances.org or find Defend Aunti Frances on Facebook. POOR Magazine and Krip Hop Nation and others will be making a demand to the City of Oakland to pay into the Bank of Community Reparations so we can build more homefulness projects. To learn more or to join us, email [email protected].