Growing up in West Oakland isn’t easy. Right across the bay from shiny San Francisco, the struggling city is riddled with gangs and has one of the highest homicide and robbery rates in the country. It’d be easy for the skateboarding scene to die off, or not exist at all, under such difficult circumstances, but Keith “K-Dub” Williams is making sure that doesn’t happen.
In 2008, the full-time art teacher decided to take matters into his own hands and approached the city to open up a skatepark right in the heart of West Oakland. With no funding to speak of, K-Dub built ramps out of found wood and funded other materials out of his own pocket while encouraging local skaters to get involved to help build the park up completely from scratch.
The park solidified itself in 2014 when Levi’s Skateboarding partnered up with K-Dub and upgraded the park from old, repurposed wood to full concrete. For our newest installment of Locals, we talked with K-Dub, a founding father of West Oakland’s skate scene and the lead organizer of Town Park, the city’s constantly growing DIY skatepark.