Taking back our communities: From San Francisco to New Orleans

“There is a correlation between what is happening in Iraq and what is happening in BayView Hunters Point,” said Ebony Colbert, managing editor of the San Francisco BayView national Black newspaper and a featured speaker at an April 14 community meeting sponsored by the Troops Out Now Coalition (TONC) of Northern California. “The U.S. is blowing up people’s houses and mosques in Iraq and blaming it on the Iraqis. The police do the same by playing communities against each other in BayView Hunters Point. This is war at its best,” Colbert added.

BayView Hunters Point, home to a large segment of San Francisco’s African American community, is under attack by greedy land developers and real estate interests. According to Willie Ratcliff, the publisher of the SF BayView Newspaper, the city is trying its hardest to get BayView Hunters Point declared a “blight” area so that the African-American community can be evicted and the area can be gentrified. Colbert clarified this further by stating, “Blight as defined by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency is ‘Black people.’”

Tonight’s event began with a performance by a young rap artist, Rap for Rights, who eloquently exposed the racism and genocide faced by African-American youth and the Black community in San Francisco.

The TONC meeting also featured Minnie Bruce Pratt, a contributing editor to Workers World newspaper, who recently completed the “Walkin’ to New Orleans” march organized by Veterans for Peace, Saving Ourselves in Mobile and the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund in New Orleans. Pratt noted that the march followed a road that “had been laid down by the Black freedom and liberation movements” in this country.

A strong bond has developed between the Black community in this city and the Katrina survivors in New Orleans. Malik Rahim, once a public housing rights activist in BayView Hunters Point, now is working in New Orleans with the Common Ground Collective for justice and the right of Katrina survivors to return and rebuild their communities.

The African-American community of New Orleans, along with its supporters around the country, is fighting to return and rebuild their devastated communities. Pratt, in her talk, said that Katrina survivors on the march were heartened by the overwhelming support displayed in the South to their struggle.

When the march went through New Orleans’ 9th ward, former home of that city’s African-American community, “It looked like the day after an atom bomb was dropped,” Pratt stated. She also noted that “every bomb dropped on Iraq explodes on the Gulf Coast,” drawing, like Colbert, a connection between the war at home against the poor and oppressed and the war abroad against the Iraqi people.

Colbert, a 24-year old activist and writer, could relate her experiences to that sight. “Here in this city, schools are being shut down, job opportunities are nonexistent, public housing is rundown and punitive. You can’t live in public housing if you are suspected or convicted of a drug related offense,” she said.

Colbert talked about the demonstration earlier this week to shut down Pacific Gas and Electric, which has been poisoning people in the BayView Hunters Point public housing project for many years. On April 11, nearly 100 community residents, environmental activists, Gray Panthers, students and others picketed in the pouring rain for two hours. PG&E had missed another deadline to close its plant. “If the government won’t, the people will—shut it down,” the demonstrators chanted in front of the plant. Just across the street sits a public housing project where many residents, especially young children, have asthma and other medical complications due to emissions from the PG&E plant.

Marie Harrison, a member of Greenaction and the BayView Hunters Point Mothers Committee, chaired the rally outside the plant. She introduced several children who came out to the protest and who suffer from serious asthma. “We say enough! Not one more delay,” Harrison stated. The protest ended at one of the plant gates where Harrison and other protesters chained the gate shut.

Colbert urged everyone to get involved—to stand up to the police brutality faced by youth in BayView Hunters Point and to say no to the land grab that is underway. The SF BayView Newspaper has done an excellent job in exposing the Redevelopment Agency’s threat of gentrification and the phony label of blight being forced on the community. Housing activists throughout the city are beginning to realize that if the people don’t stop gentrification and the destruction of BayView Hunters Point then the Mission and other San Francisco communities will be next.