96 Hours to Reclaim King's Radical Legacy: Friday in the Fillmore

From: “January 15th protest in San Francisco” by Bob Gorringe, 1/15/16 at
http://occupysf.net/index.php/2016/01/15/january-15th-protest-in-san-francisco-by-bob-gorringe/
Beginning this weekend honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King, what began in the late afternoon at the Church of John Coltrane in which speakers addressed the issues of police impunity in San Francisco, the unity of Black and Brown in confronting the same, and the attempts to drive Black San Franciscans from the City in what has been a descending spiral of a population of 18% in the 1960’s to less than 3% today, a hundred or so of mostly spirited activists in their twenties took to the streets and eventually took over those same streets blockading traffic on Geary Boulevard and Webster Street.


Chanting “whose streets, our streets” reminiscent of the chant that began four and a half years ago when Occupy paralyzed business as usual throughout this country from New York to San Francisco, the protesters presented themselves as a new wave of the disenfranchised young_Black, Brown, Asian, and White, ready to pick up the baton and expose the corruption within City Hall, calling for the Eviction of Mayor Lee, who has sold Black Lives and Brown Lives through capitalistic favoring of the gentrification of San Francisco over the survival of the working people of this city as plantation owners in the past put black human beings on an auction block to be sold to the highest bidder.


Toward the end of the march as the protesters paraded down Fillmore Street past the district police station, cops once again took to surrounding their fortress but especially the parking lot with metal barricades and their military posturing reflecting their childhood fantasies of defending the Alamo.
The protesters marched right past them, caring less whether their dramas of misplaced masculinity amounted to even an acknowledgement.
–Bob Gorringe

Page May is an activist in Chicago.
To read her article published on Jan 18, 2016 on truth-out.org, click on
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/34444-reclaim-mlk-beyond-sanitized-narratives

We must be intersectional, strategic, studious and creative. We will be met with increasing violence. Our righteous rage will always be deemed irrational and dangerous. And no messiahs or superheroes will come to save us.

It is up to us, but we are not without: We have our ancestors to mentor us. We have each other to protect us. And we have our dreams to guide us. And that is plenty.

If we recognize all who are here, trying to get free, we will see that we are enough. That our lives matter. That our resistance matters. As King reminds us:

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.... We must move past indecision to action.... Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world.