Feature Archives

On April 8th, over 200 people demonstrated in San Francisco BART stations to push for justice and accountability in the murder of Oscar Grant. Protesters took various trains and chanted "No justice, no rush" — slowing their walk onto trains in order to disrupt BART's normal rush hour schedule. Police began to try to push or pull demonstrators out of train car doorways. BART trains were disrupted and delayed about 15 minutes in both directions by the action. One person was arrested on misdemeanor charges which have since been dropped.

On Sunday, April 4th, Homes Not Jails took over a building in San Francisco's Mission District that had been empty for two years. The occupation lasted for 24 hours until the SFPD and the landlord came battering at the door. The house is the former home of 80-something Jose Morales, who had lived there since 1965 and fought off eviction attempts for 14 years. Morales was finally kicked out of his home of 43 years through the Ellis Act, a state law that caused over 3000 families to lose their homes in San Francisco.

Tiny Garcia was arrested for the crime of living houseless in America. From that experience she co-founded POOR Magazine, a media organization that is much more than a weekly journal. Tiny describes the magazine as "a family of poverty scholars teaching on and speaking on issues of poverty, racism, disability, border fascism and indigenous resistance" in this interview with Angola 3 News.

After the recent uprisings in Portland in response to two police murders, a call has gone out for "West Coast Days of Action April 8th and 9th, From the Bay to the Sound: No More Police Killings!" The call to action reads in part: "Organize protests and autonomous actions in your own city!" Announced actions include non-violent civil disobedience at Embarcadero BART station in San Francisco on April 8th and an Anti-Police General Assembly in Portland and a march against police brutality in Seattle on April 9th.

Over 150 unauthorized copies of a poster were hung in BART trains in the early morning of March 31st, replacing the usual advertisements. The stark black and white poster showed a woman clinging to an olive tree with a soldier lurking behind her in a jeep. The poster's tagline read “US Funded Israeli Apartheid.”

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will soon be voting on a law that would make it illegal to sit or lie on any sidewalk in San Francisco. On March 27th, actions were held across San Francisco to educate local residents that historically sit/lie laws have been discriminative in nature, and are unnecessary. San Francisco had a sit and lie law in the late 1960's through the 70's, but it was ultimately struck down because it was found to be unconstitutional.

An estimated 2,000 immigrant rights advocates marched from Justin Herman Plaza to Sen. Dianne Feinstein's San Francisco office at Market and Post on March 24. They called on her to push for immigration reform this year.