Building a Movement

Carroll Fife helped homeless moms take over an empty Oakland house. Now she’s trying to get inside a system she doesn’t trust.

- By Jamilah King

AS A GIRL, Carroll Fife never quite knew what her grandfather James did for a living, but she knew he was a somebody. He was a factory worker, like most everybody else in Muskegon Heights, Michigan, but it was the way people gravitated toward him that suggested he was something more. Once, when Fife was working at Sears as a teen, she saw him walk into the store. She saw how her colleagues, who didn’t know he was her grandfather, clamored around him: “Hey Mr. Fife...Do you need anything?...Wanna use my employee discount?” Same thing happened at the grocery store.

What Fife knew with certainty about her grandfather was that he believed in people having homes. He’d built houses for all of his children, and Fife remembers tagging along with him and her father as they put in insulation and subfloor and drywall. “This is what I wanna do,” Fife thought. “I want to build.”

“I guess ultimately I’ve done that,” the diminutive 44-year-old with shoulder-length locs and a penetrating stare tells me as we sit in DeFremery Park in West Oakland. “Just without a hammer and nails.”