America 250 - 160th Buffalo Soldiers Luncheon & National Black Business Month Celebration

Yerba Buena was born in 1776, as a sweet aromatic breath on the edge of the continent, where fog curled like a whispered promise around the Spanish Presidio’s new adobe walls. The world was changing elsewhere, but here the land waited, listening, holding space for futures yet unimagined.

Then came Honorable William Alexander Leidesdorff Jr., a man of African Cuban, Danish Jewish with development fire and impossible vision. In 1841, he stepped onto the shore, and the city seemed to rise to meet him. He launched the first steam vessel across the bay, built the SF City Hotel, opened the first school, and stitched commerce, diplomacy, and hope into the fabric of a place still learning its own name. His footsteps became the foundations of San Francisco.

Decades later, the Buffalo Soldiers rode through the streets of San Francisco protecting President Theodore Roosevelt dedicate Dewey Statue in Union Square. From the SF Presidio gates horses beat steady rhythms into the earth, carrying along the California Buffalo Soldiers Trails toward Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks, where they carved trails through ancient silence. Today, known as Brigadier General Charles Young, he led the way as guardians of the giant trees, tended the wild, and left their courage in the granite and the wind.

In 1945, the world gathered in San Francisco to dream of a new world order. The United Nations was born where Soldiers had marched and Leidesdorff had built, as Pan African voices pressed for justice that would take generations to unfold.

By August 2004, Black Business Month rose from the city’s entrepreneurial pulse, echoing Leidesdorff’s legacy. And in August 2021, the Permanent Forum for People of African Descent carried those early demands into global halls of power.

Now, in 2026, at our San Francisco Marine Memorial Club and Hotel we come together in a city shaped by centuries of African‑descended resilience, still writing our story into the world.