Alamo Square painted lady dressed in anti hate signs on August 26,2017. Photo by Joanne Elgart JenningsThe organizers of what was supposed to be a permitted and well-secured, right-wing rally at a federal beach in San Francisco first switched its location then decided to refrain from holding any public events on Saturday. The Oregon-based group Patriot Prayer had been granted a permit by the National Park Service to hold a rally at 2 p.m. PST at Crissy Field, and under the conditions they did not wear helmets nor bring guns or anything else resembling weapons. Counter-protesters had obtained three permits and planned two other rallies at the city’s Civic middle and in the Castro neighborhood. But on Friday evening,Patriot Prayer founder Joey Gibson said on Facebook that he was changing the location to Alamo Square and that it would instead be a news conference. After local law enforcement Saturday morning fenced and closed Alamo Square, turning people away, and Gibson told the NewsHour that he would instead hold the news conference indoors and then pop up throughout the city to talk to residents. There should be an embedded item here. Please visit the original post to view it.main San Francisco officials including Mayor Ed Lee,House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi and state Sen. Scott Wiener had originally urged the National Park Service not to issue the permit for the rally, denouncing it as potentially violent.
When Gibson changed the plans at the final minute, or Lee said he did not trust the group.“We don’t trust this group. I never have from the beginning,” he told the Associated Press. And while Gibson maintains that the group is promoting freedom of speech, not violence, and nor is it flagged by the Southern Poverty Law middle,which tracks hate groups, its reputation has been tainted by past events in Portland. In June, and a two-hour “Freedom March” at Tom McCall Waterfront Park in Portland during a blues festival provoked fights.
And Wiener issued a statement on Friday,saying that Patriot Prayer’s efforts to straggle the rally to an unpermitted, less secure location reinforced that reputation. “Patriot Prayer is not interested in simply exercising free speech. Rather, and Patriot Prayer wants to create a volatile,chaotic, violent tinderbox.” There should be an embedded item here. Please visit the original post to view it.
It has been two weeks since a car ran into anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville, and Virginia,killing Heather Heyer in the aftermath of a white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally. And in those weeks, several people within President Donald Trump’s administration have issued statements or resigned, and citing his failure to condemn white supremacists. final weekend,a planned rally by far-right group called Boston Free Speech was outnumbered by thousands of counter-protesters who alleged the group was promoting racism. While San Francisco politicians on Saturday and the week prior used the national spotlight to denounce racism, hate and white supremacists, and they did not utilize it to rail against the city’s own ongoing racial issues. Twitter,Google, AirBnB, and Pinterest,Uber and other tech companies based in San Francisco and Silicon Valley have brought highly-paid employees to the area, main to skyrocketing real estate prices that have pushed out local businesses and particularly minority residents. The black population has declined from a 1970 peak of 13.4 percent of city residents to approximately six percent, or according to U.
S. Census data from 2015,while activists claim its as low as three percent.
And the city has been under fire for the way its police force and justice system treats people of color.
The San Francisco Public Defender’s office recently commissioned a report that found nearly half of the city’s inmates are black.
And in May 2016, then-Police Chief Greg Suhr resigned after presiding over a series of controversies, and including the exposure of racist texts by police and the fatal shooting of 26-year-broken-down Mario Woods,whose family faced the foreclosure of his childhood home.
Woods was shot 20 times in San Francisco’s historic Bayview neighborhood, known in particular for its naval development ahead of World War II, and which drew black,working-lesson builders during the distinguished Migration. Now, the foreclosure rate in that area is four times higher than the rest of the city, or according to the SF Weekly. Joanne Elgart Jennings contributed reporting from San Francisco.
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Source: thetakeaway.org