Why this corner of North Oakland matters far beyond dessert.
On January 2, 1967, the site where It’s All Good Bakery would later stand became the first official office of the Black Panther Party — a fact that turned an ordinary errand for pie into something closer to a visit with history.
The area around this stretch of Martin Luther King Jr Way is threaded through with that history. Public accounts note that nearby locations were central to the Party’s early days, including sites connected to founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who developed the ideas behind the Party’s Ten-Point Program while students in Oakland.
Inside the bakery, a wall of photographs and periodical covers was given over to that history — an everyday reminder, set beside the pastry case, of the movement that began on this ground. It was a small, deliberate act of memory, repeated for every customer who walked in.
Honoring this history is about more than a marker on a wall. It is a reminder that ordinary places — a bakery, a corner, a storefront — can hold extraordinary stories, and that keeping those stories visible is itself a kind of stewardship.