37.9074° N, 121.0764° W
OAKLAND
Most Famous People Born in Oakland, United States
- Notable people
- 1,016
- Peak decade
- 1940s
- Median birth year
- 1949
- Most distinctive
- Rapper 23.4×
The Rapper bench here runs at better than twenty-three times the global baseline — Too $hort, MC Hammer, and the entire Bay Area hyphy lineage compressed into one line of the panel, a regional rap dialect invented the way New Orleans invented jazz. The deep Baseball count is the other Oakland story, the A's dynasty years and the West Oakland sandlots that produced Rickey Henderson, while the outsized Artist bench still runs on Black Panther-era visual culture.
One face per decade — the most globally famous figure born in Oakland during each.
Notable Births by Decade
Click a decade to filter the list below. Peak: 1940s with 138 notable births.
What Oakland Is Known For
Click any row to filter the list of people below.
Football is Oakland's biggest profession — 12% of all notables (118).
Oakland over-indexes on rapper — 23.4× the global rate.
Oakland under-produces politician — only 0.4× the global rate.
Profession Mix Over Time
Each band shows a profession family's share of Oakland's notable births by decade. Hover the chart for the breakdown at any decade.
- Sports
- Music
- Film & TV
- Politics & Law
- Writing
- Art & Design
- Other
- Filtered to 1870s Clear ×
Lillian Moller Gilbreth
1878 - 1972
Frederick Gardner Cottrell
1877 - 1948
Nance O'Neil
1874 - 1965
Arthur Brown Jr.
1874 - 1957
T. D. Crittenden
1878 - 1938
William Garcia
1877 - 1951
Frank Tenney Johnson
1874 - 1939
Joseph Nisbet LeConte
1870 - 1950
Laura Oakley
1879 - 1957
Theodore de Laguna
1876 - 1930
Bull Perrine
1877 - 1915
Otto J. Zahn
1872 - 1965
Rutherford B. Irones
1877 - 1948
Gladys Kingsbury
1876 - 1958
Charlie Frisbee
1874 - 1954
Doc Moskiman
1879 - 1953
Vida Ravenscroft Sutton
1878 - 1956
Reginald Hazeltine Bassett
1878 - 1951
Lanier Bartlett
1879 - 1961
Will Smalley
1871 - 1891
Pauline Powell Burns
1872 - 1912
Edwin T. Baker
1873 - 1936
Ernst D. van Löben Sels
1879 - 1965
John R. Jones (Washington politician)
1876 - 1972