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.

Through the Decades

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 rapper23.4× the global rate.

Oakland under-produces politician — only 0.4× the global rate.

  1. Football118
  2. Baseball102
  3. Actor85
  4. Basket52
  5. Politician50
  6. Music47
  7. Singer35
  8. Artist35
  1. Rapper2623.4×
  2. Baseball1028.8×
  3. Basket524.1×
  4. Artist353.4×
  5. Music473.2×
  6. Novelist112.7×
  7. Film241.9×
  8. Lawyer321.8×
  1. Politician500.4×
  2. Writer230.7×

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.

18001825185018751900192519501975
  • Sports
  • Music
  • Film & TV
  • Politics & Law
  • Writing
  • Art & Design
  • Other
All1,016
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Showing 24 of 1,016 notable people

0025 PSYCHOLOGIST

Lillian Moller Gilbreth

1878 - 1972

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0110 CHEMIST

Frederick Gardner Cottrell

1877 - 1948

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0115 ACTOR

Nance O'Neil

1874 - 1965

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0294 ARCHITECT

Arthur Brown Jr.

1874 - 1957

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0382 ACTOR

T. D. Crittenden

1878 - 1938

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0414 RUNNER

William Garcia

1877 - 1951

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0441 ARTIST

Frank Tenney Johnson

1874 - 1939

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0535 EXPLORER

Joseph Nisbet LeConte

1870 - 1950

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0568 ACTOR

Laura Oakley

1879 - 1957

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0649 PHILOSOPHER

Theodore de Laguna

1876 - 1930

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0743 BASEBALL

Bull Perrine

1877 - 1915

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0753 POLITICIAN

Otto J. Zahn

1872 - 1965

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0820 POLITICIAN

Rutherford B. Irones

1877 - 1948

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0825 ACTOR

Gladys Kingsbury

1876 - 1958

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0843 BASEBALL

Charlie Frisbee

1874 - 1954

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0847 BASEBALL

Doc Moskiman

1879 - 1953

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0866 PLAYWRIGHT

Vida Ravenscroft Sutton

1878 - 1956

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0892 COMPOSER

Reginald Hazeltine Bassett

1878 - 1951

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0920 SCREENWRITER

Lanier Bartlett

1879 - 1961

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0926 BASEBALL

Will Smalley

1871 - 1891

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0948 PAINTER

Pauline Powell Burns

1872 - 1912

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0968 EMPLOYEE

Edwin T. Baker

1873 - 1936

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1013 INVESTOR

Ernst D. van Löben Sels

1879 - 1965

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1016 POLITICIAN

John R. Jones (Washington politician)

1876 - 1972

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