The view outside Micia Mosely’s apartment is inspiring. It’s not just the way Lake Merritt, the oldest designated wildlife refuge in the country, sprawls blue to the far shore where the city of Oakland rises. Dr. Mosely’s windows also frame the green lawn that rings the lake, and a long stretch of sidewalk.
On a summer evening, there might be drumming in the air; on a Saturday morning, the farmer’s market down the street welcomes a steady line of shoppers; on any given evening, the scent of unauthorized barbecues suffuses the air and cyclists fly by. Some nights, there’s swing dancing; other nights, break dancing.
“Sometimes people knock on the window as they go by, just to say hello,” said Dr. Mosely, 52. “Sometimes I go out there and say, ‘Hey, you just gonna walk by?’”
She might invite them to join her on the stoop and enjoy the sights and sounds and a cup of tea.
A native New Yorker, Dr. Mosely first came to the Bay in 1995 for a teaching job and was immediately drawn not to San Francisco, but to the East Bay.
“I’d heard of this mystical place called Oakland where Black people — Black lesbians! — thrived,” she said. “I wanted to find community, to find identity.”
In 1998, what she found was the rent-controlled one-bedroom across from the lake where she’s been headquartered ever since. The apartment has a spacious, light-filled front room with lots of art and boldly colored walls, an alcove she uses as a writing space and a kitchen big enough to eat in. The bedroom, in the back, is the one room without a lake view.
“It just immediately felt like home,” said Dr. Mosely. “There are only three units in the building, and the landlord lives downstairs. I’m 1.2 miles from my office. It couldn’t get any easier.”
Over the years, she and the landlord have negotiated over projects. For example, they split the costs of a new bedroom floor. “Our relationship is, ‘Let’s figure it out’,” she said. “What can he afford? What can I afford?”
$1,170 | Oakland, Calif.
Micia Mosely, 52
Occupation: Executive director and founder of the Black Teacher Project; comedian.
On what stable housing has meant: “I’m well aware that having affordable, stable housing has opened up opportunities for me my entire life. I’ve been able to take chances.”
When Dr. Mosely first moved into the apartment, she was teaching and going to grad school at the University of California, Berkeley, where she got a Ph.D. in education. She was also involved in an improv group and in the East Bay Church of Religious Science. “It had a Black church kind of feel,” she said. “We’d party Saturday and see each other Sunday at church.”
It was a busy, heady time, with lots of women’s performance and theater, and Dr. Mosely was taking in as much of it as she could.
Thanks to the apartment’s centrality, she also began to host regular game nights. “We played Taboo, Celebrity,” she explained. “I taught a lot of people how to play spades. I’m extremely invested in spades as a cultural practice. You sit with people, you talk trash, you bring people together in tangible ways.”
All the while, she was listening to the voices of the women dancing in her living room, laughing in her kitchen. By 2007, she’d successfully created a stage show called “Where My Girls At” — she played five different characters — that was getting some traction.
“And,” she said, “I was missing New York. So I wanted to figure out how to be bicoastal. I also wanted, finally, to live in New York as an adult.”
She’d hosted Pride events in San Francisco and Oakland and realized she also wanted to give comedy a shot. New York was the place for that, so she trotted off to Brooklyn, near her mother, and began auditioning.
All the while, she was going back and forth, sometimes subletting, sometimes just letting friends stay at the Lake Merritt apartment.
“I feel like half of Oakland has a key to my place,” she said. “A lot of artists have stayed here for different periods of time. It’s important to me that people feel like it’s their home too, their safe place. It’s beautiful to have a home base that’s not just mine.”
But New York brought a realization. “I got clear what I’d have to do to be successful in comedy and I realized it wasn’t what I wanted to do,” she said.
In 2015, Dr. Mosely returned to Oakland and founded the organization that is now her life’s work, combining her interest in education and culture: The Black Teacher Project. “We support Black teachers to transform schools, not just in Oakland but across the country,” she said. Working with a staff of five, the group provides professional and wellness training, workshops, job support and assistance for cultural programming.
“I work, I work a lot,” she said. “I feel fortunate to do work I care deeply about. But I also have a spirituality practice, and I incorporate body movement. And I’ve come to terms with the idea that comedy is seasonal. I do Pride, I do comedy at conferences.”
And she has her fans.
“Every time I see Micia perform, I laugh my ass off,” said Marga Gómez, one of the Bay’s busiest and most popular comedians. “Micia can be cheeky and upbeat, which is a tonic in these hard times.”
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