From San Francisco to East Oakland: Building Black Disabled Institutions Beyond the University
In 1991, I arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area and began a journey that would take me from San Francisco’s disability and community organizing movements, through Berkeley’s cultural and political struggles, into UCLA, and ultimately back to East Oakland. That journey has taught me a central lesson: Black disabled people cannot depend on institutions that marginalize our bodies, dismiss our knowledge, and displace our communities to create the cultural, political, and intellectual futures we need. We must build our own.
My work as an artist, organizer, writer, and scholar has grown from that necessity. Since the 1990s, I have challenged ableism, survived gentrification, helped develop Disability Justice, founded Krip-Hop Nation, fought inaccessible housing, and transformed community knowledge into Krip-Hop Theory. Now, as I enter the final year of my Ph.D. and prepare for dissertation fieldwork in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, and Brazil, I am working toward the next stage of this project: returning to East Oakland to help build the Krip-Hop Institute, a Black disabled-led center for art, research, political education, archives, and liberation.
I moved to the Bay Area in 1991 and spent the 1990s living in San Francisco, where I began building the foundation for my work as an artist, organizer, writer, and scholar. In 1995, I graduated with my bachelor’s degree. I worked with disability organizations, served on nonprofit boards, and became deeply involved with Poor Magazine, a community-based media and organizing organization that challenged poverty, racism, homelessness, and the exclusion of marginalized communities from public conversations. These experiences taught me that political knowledge does not belong exclusively to universities, professional researchers, or established organizations. It is also produced by people living on the margins, people organizing in their neighborhoods, and people whose experiences are routinely dismissed by those in power.
During the 1990s, I also began developing my own organizational vision. I understood that Black disabled people needed spaces where our experiences, creativity, and political concerns would not be treated as secondary to the priorities of predominantly white disability organizations or mainstream Black organizations that often overlooked disability. In the late 1990s, I started my own nonprofit organization, continuing my commitment to building community-based structures led by and accountable to people of color with disabilities. This organizing laid important groundwork for what would become my lifelong effort to connect disability, Black politics, art, culture, and liberation.
As San Francisco became increasingly expensive, I experienced the displacement that has reshaped the lives of so many working-class people and communities of pcolor. In the early 2000s, gentrification pushed me out of San Francisco and into Berkeley. But moving across the Bay did not mean leaving behind the political struggles and communities that had shaped me. Instead, I continued to build. With the help of Patty Berne, I helped start Sins Invalid, a disability justice performance project that became an important force in the emergence and development of the Disability Justice movement. Disability Justice challenged the limitations of approaches that treated disability as an isolated identity or focused primarily on individual access within existing institutions. It insisted on understanding disability through interconnected systems of oppression, including racism, ableism, capitalism, gender violence, and other forms of exclusion. It also emphasized leadership by those most affected, collective access, interdependence, and the knowledge generated through lived experience.
My involvement in this work reinforced a lesson that continues to guide me: cultural production is political work. Art, performance, music, storytelling, and community organizing can create new ways of understanding ourselves and challenge the systems that determine whose bodies, voices, and knowledge are valued. Yet I also saw the need to center Black disabled people more explicitly within conversations about race, disability, and liberation. This need helped lead me toward Krip-Hop.
In 2005, I started Krip-Hop Nation in Berkeley, building on years of disability organizing, hip-hop culture, and the political creativity of Black disabled communities. Krip-Hop uses hip-hop and other cultural forms to challenge ableism, racism, and the exclusion of disabled people from music, media, and political life. It is not simply about putting disabled artists onstage or asking the music industry to become more inclusive. It is about recognizing disabled artists as producers of knowledge, political critics, cultural workers, and leaders in struggles for liberation. Through music, poetry, performance, writing, and international collaboration, Krip-Hop Nation has worked to create platforms for disabled artists whose voices are too often excluded from mainstream hip-hop, disability institutions, and public debates.
Over time, my work has raised questions that go beyond artistic representation. What intellectual traditions emerge when we take Black disabled artists and organizers seriously as political thinkers? How does hip-hop change when disability is not an afterthought but a source of knowledge and cultural power? What happens when we place Black disabled experiences at the center of our understanding of the Black Radical Tradition? These questions have become the foundation of my developing framework, Krip-Hop Theory.
My journey has also exposed the contradictions between the language of access and the realities of disabled people’s lives. In 2020, I became part of a lawsuit with other disabled renters against a landlord over a broken elevator and other problems affecting our housing. For disabled tenants, a broken elevator is not a minor inconvenience. It can become a barrier to leaving home, reaching essential services, participating in community life, and exercising basic independence. When landlords fail to maintain accessible housing, disabled people can find themselves trapped in buildings that deny them meaningful access to the outside world. Our lawsuit was therefore about more than a broken elevator. It was about housing, dignity, accountability, and the right of disabled people to live in their communities without being made prisoners of inaccessible environments.
In 2021, after we successfully sued our landlord, another unexpected chapter began. UCLA approached me with an opportunity to pursue a Ph.D. At the time, I was living in a one-bedroom, Section 8 apartment affected by bedbug infestations. The contrast was striking: after decades of community organizing and cultural work, I was still confronting the everyday indignities of poverty and inadequate housing, yet I was also being invited into a major research university to develop my intellectual work. I did not arrive at doctoral study from a position of comfort or distance from the problems I wanted to research. I arrived with decades of lived experience, community relationships, artistic production, political struggle, and questions that had emerged through organizing.
My path to UCLA demonstrates why universities must recognize knowledge produced outside academic institutions. I did not begin thinking about Black disability, hip-hop, and liberation because I discovered these issues in a classroom. I had been working through them for decades in communities, organizations, cultural spaces, and struggles for access and survival. My doctoral education has given me an opportunity to develop and articulate this knowledge in sustained scholarly form, but it has not created the knowledge from scratch. The experiences of Black disabled people, the cultural work of Krip-Hop Nation, and the political lessons of community organizing are central to the intellectual foundation of my dissertation.
Now, in the final year of my Ph.D. journey, I am preparing for dissertation fieldwork in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, and Brazil. These locations offer opportunities to investigate how Black disabled artists, organizers, and communities produce cultural and political knowledge across different geographic and social contexts. Through interviews, archival research, and engagement with artists and community organizations, I aim to examine the relationships among disability, hip-hop, Black radical politics, and decolonial thought. The purpose is not simply to document the existence of disabled artists. It is to understand how their experiences and cultural practices generate theories, strategies, and visions of liberation that dominant institutions have failed to recognize.
This research will help establish the necessity of Krip-Hop Theory as a Black diasporic, disability-centered framework grounded in lived experience and cultural production. Disability Studies has often been shaped by institutional traditions that do not adequately center Black disabled knowledge, while Black Studies has too frequently treated disability as peripheral to its analyses of race, power, and resistance. Mainstream media and political institutions also tend to marginalize disability as a central issue, particularly when the experiences in question involve Black disabled people living at the intersections of racism, ableism, and economic inequality. These gaps are not merely academic oversights. They affect which histories are preserved, whose ideas are funded, which artists are heard, and what kinds of political futures can be imagined.
Krip-Hop Theory responds to these gaps by insisting that Black disabled people are not simply subjects to be studied, populations to be included, or individuals in need of assistance. We are knowledge producers, cultural innovators, and political actors. Our music, language, organizing, and everyday survival can reveal dimensions of Black history, disability politics, and collective resistance that established frameworks overlook. The goal is not inclusion into institutions that remain fundamentally unchanged. The goal is decolonization: transforming the structures that determine whose knowledge matters and building institutions in which Black disabled people can define our own intellectual, cultural, and political priorities.
My vision extends beyond completing a dissertation or publishing academic work. I want to return to the East Bay, this time to East Oakland, to help build the Krip-Hop Institute. This return would bring my scholarly work back into the communities and cultural traditions that made it possible. The Institute would grow from more than two decades of Krip-Hop organizing, my relationships with artists and community leaders, and the knowledge developed through my doctoral research. It would provide a Black disabled-led space for music, visual arts, archives, education, research, political organizing, and intergenerational learning.
I envision building this work in collaboration with Poor Magazine, the Black Art Zone, Community Movement Builders, Alternative Minds Foundation, and longtime friends and collaborators such as Lateef McLeod, Gary Norris Gray, and Moore, alongside other Black disabled artists, scholars, organizers, and community members. Each relationship offers possibilities for connecting cultural production with political education, community knowledge, and collective action. The Institute would not simply be a building where programs take place. It would be a living cultural and political platform where Black disabled people could develop their own curricula, preserve their histories, support emerging artists, mentor young people, conduct research, and build networks across the African diaspora and internationally.
East Oakland matters to this vision because the work must remain connected to communities facing displacement, poverty, racism, and unequal access to cultural and educational resources. Returning to the East Bay is not about recreating the past or claiming that one organization can solve every problem. It is about carrying forward the lessons of my journey and creating a sustainable institution that can support work beyond the lifespan of any one project or individual. The Krip-Hop Institute would connect the intellectual work of the dissertation to practical resources: spaces to create music, opportunities to learn and teach, archives to preserve Black disabled histories, platforms for political debate, and networks through which artists and organizers can collaborate.
My journey from San Francisco to Berkeley, through housing struggles and community organizing, and into UCLA has taught me that access to an institution is not the same as having the power to transform it. A Ph.D. can open doors, but a degree alone cannot guarantee that Black disabled scholars will find meaningful employment, institutional support, or spaces where their knowledge is valued. Nor can academic recognition replace the community institutions that are necessary for sustaining cultural movements and passing knowledge between generations. The challenge is to make scholarship accountable to the people and movements from which it emerges.
For me, the Krip-Hop Institute represents that accountability. It is the next stage of a journey that began with community organizing and cultural resistance long before I entered a doctoral program. It is a way to transform research into resources, lived experience into collective knowledge, and academic training into community infrastructure. It is also a response to the question that has followed me throughout my life: Where do Black disabled artists, organizers, and scholars go when the institutions around them fail to recognize their knowledge or support their leadership? My answer is that we must continue building our own spaces, strengthening our relationships, documenting our histories, and creating institutions that answer to our communities.
Since arriving in the Bay Area in 1991, I have graduated from college, worked with disability organizations, served on nonprofit boards, helped develop Disability Justice through Sins Invalid, built Krip-Hop Nation, challenged inaccessible housing, and begun transforming decades of community knowledge into a doctoral research project. These experiences are not separate chapters. They are connected parts of a larger struggle to challenge the systems that devalue Black disabled lives and to create alternatives grounded in creativity, self-determination, and liberation.
As I prepare to complete my dissertation and conduct fieldwork in the Bay Area, New York, and Brazil, I am not simply looking backward at what I have accomplished. I am preparing for what comes next. The goal is to bring this work home to East Oakland and build the Krip-Hop Institute as a place where Black disabled people can make art, develop theory, preserve history, organize politically, and imagine futures beyond the limitations imposed by racism, ableism, poverty, and institutional exclusion. My journey has brought me from community struggle to doctoral research, but the destination is not the university. The destination is the community, where research must become a resource and knowledge must become a tool for liberation.
From San Francisco to Berkeley, from UCLA back to East Oakland: the next chapter is about building the Krip-Hop Institute and turning decades of resistance into an enduring institution for Black disabled cultural and political liberation.
Leroy F. Moore
10/12/26
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