San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/2020/06/page/2/)
At a Blacks Lives Matter protest, a young woman stares boldly into the camera’s lens, hoisting a sign that reads, “George Floyd isn’t a wake-up call. The same alarm has been ringing since 1619. Y’all just keep hitting snooze.”
The last time the alarm rang this loudly may have been when the Black Panthers built a nationwide movement. » Read more
Hundreds marched through San Francisco on Friday afternoon to mark Juneteenth, protesting police killings and calling for racial justice. The San Francisco Public Press followed the demonstration, which made its way from the Ferry Building to City Hall and then on to the school district building. Read updates from the march below, and hear a compilation of reflections from demonstrators in this recent episode of our radio program and podcast, “Civic.”
4:25 p.m.
With some 250 protesters still in front of the school district administrative building on Franklin Street, Indigenous dancers performed a ceremony while protesters sat and knelt. Lexi Hall sang “Lean On Me” with some demonstrators occasionally chiming in for the chorus.
“I think it’s definitely important for the youth to be a voice for the Black Lives Matter movement,” said Hall. “And we all came together, all of the creatives in San Francisco to put on a show and celebrate Juneteenth for the city.”
Hall’s partner, 19-year-old rapper Xanubis, had performed several times at the march that day. Xanubis and Lexi Hall.
City workers have moved more than 140 homeless Tenderloin residents into hotel rooms and city-sanctioned tent encampments over the last eight days in response to a legal settlement between San Francisco and the University of California Hastings College of the Law. The agreement requires the city to remove the majority of homeless tents from the neighborhood by late July, with the goal of eventually reducing the tents, which numbered 415 on June 5, according to a city count, to zero. That tent count doesn’t include the more than 20 tents at a city-sanctioned encampment at 180 Jones Street. The plan specifies no timeline for reaching a tent count of zero. As of Thursday afternoon, the homeless outreach team, fire department, public works and police had placed between 149 and 174 people in hotels, said Jeff Kositsky, manager of the Healthy Streets Operations Center, the multi-agency homelessness task force spearheading the operation.
As San Francisco marks the 50th Anniversary of the first LGBTQ rights march, the program “Out in the Bay” is returning to the air on KSFP, a radio station created by the San Francisco Public Press. “Out in the Bay” returns after a four-year hiatus. It ran weekly on public radio station KALW from 2004 to 2016, covering a pivotal period in the LGBTQ rights movement that saw the legalization of same-sex marriage, the enactment of hate-crime legislation and major advances in the rights of transgender people. Mel Baker, producer and contributor for “Civic,” spoke with “Out in the Bay” founding producer and host Eric Jansen and producer Truc Nguyen about the show and the parallels between the LGBTQ rights movement and the broader fight for civil rights. The brutal, homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998 energized nationwide protests against hate crimes, Jansen said.
La fotoperiodista Yesica Prado, miembro de la asociación CatchLight Local, reunió esta guía de recursos como parte de su proyecto que examina la cultura de vivir en vehículos en San Francisco y Berkeley. CatchLight, Dysturb, The Everyday Projects y San Francisco Public Press colaboraron para producir esta guía y carteles, que se publicaran donde los habitantes de vehículos puedan leerlos. » Read more
Yesica Prado / San Francisco Public Press and CatchLight LocalFloyd Brown Jr. wears a green facecloth mask and holds a portable hand sanitizer after LifeLong Medical staff tested him for the COVID-19 virus at the RV community on Eighth and Harrison streets in West Berkeley on Friday, May 8, 2020. » Read more
As San Francisco improves its ability to mitigate the spread and treat the effects of the novel coronavirus, the city is also grappling with the fallout of its economic shutdown. Dr. Grant Colfax, director of the city’s Department of Public Health, said at a virtual press conference on Tuesday that the city has rapidly expanded its testing and contact tracing capacity and improved its supplies of personal protective equipment. While the number of new cases has not reduced to the city’s goal, the number of hospitalizations has dropped and hospital capacity meets the city’s target. Colfax acknowledged, however, that the economic shutdown resulting from the city’s shelter-in-place order has detrimental public health effects as well as economic ones. He also said he expected to see case numbers increase as the city reopens.
Construction sites are coming back to life throughout San Francisco, but the surge in activity may not last long. Builders pulled 334 permits last week, up from zero 10 weeks earlier as the coronavirus shutdown took effect. That puts construction activity at about 58% of normal. In the year leading up to Mayor London Breed’s mid-March order for construction to cease, City Hall received about 580 permit applications a week. The number of permits has been on a slow climb since hitting zero, and began to accelerate on May 4, when Breed allowed construction to fully resume.
As damage from looting and property destruction added to the financial pain of African American-owned businesses already hurting from the coronavirus shutdown, Oakland nonprofits, business leaders and community members swung into action, collectively raising almost $1 million to help those businesses recover. » Read more
A few days after a new city-approved tent encampment, known as a “safe sleeping village,” had opened at Everett Middle School, District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman visited the site and then took a walk around the block to see how the number of encampments had changed. The Everett site is one of three city-approved camps for homeless people to set up tents, access showers and meals, and maintain social distancing. Members of the press are not allowed inside, but “Civic” spoke with Mandelman about his observations and his hopes for the site, which will be in operation for just six weeks. We also spoke with several people at nearby encampments to see how well news of the site had gotten around. Though one man said he was happy with his place at the site and especially pleased to have access to a shower, many who remained on the street expressed distrust of the program.