San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Protesters fell, graffiti statues as rampage, marches continue
A day after demonstrators toppled or spraypainted statues of major historical figures in Golden Gate Park, cleanup operations began, while marches in downtown San
Francisco continued and artists painted “Defund the Police” and “BLM” outside City Hall.
On Friday night, protesters riding the tide of a national reckoning on racism toppled statues of St. Junipero Serra and “StarSpangled Banner” lyricist Francis Scott Key. They also felled the statue of President Ulysses S. Grant, the victorious general in the Civil War.
A 30foot replica of Serra, wrapped in a friar cloak and gripping a large cross, capsized in seconds after protesters coiled rope around the base of the cross and pulled him to the
ground. Video of the incident went viral on Twitter, showing the founder of nine California missions teeter, and then fall, as a crowd cheers in the background.
Another video showed the felling of Key’s statue, which tipped forward and somersaulted before landing on its side.
On Saturday morning, Grant’s green statue lay in a roadway, partially covered in red spray paint, its pedestal empty.
Workers on Saturday powersprayed graffiti from yet another casualty of Friday night, a defaced statue of Miguel de Cervantes, the 17th century Spanish author of the literary classic “Don Quixote.”
The spree ripped through the park’s museum concourse, in the shadow of the empty new Ferris wheel. Vandals also targeted statues from the Midwinter International Exposition of 1894, including a man with a sword. Park staff later tabulated the damage: commemorative benches, Apple Cider Press sculpture, a sphinx statue, drinking fountains, pathways and a balustrade.
Police officers arrived in the area at 8:15 p.m. Friday, and found several hundred people vandalizing statues and structures, a police statement said. Officers called for assistance, and when backup arrived, the crowd “turned on police and began throwing objects at the officers,” police said. No arrests were reported. The crowd dispersed at 9:30 p.m., police said.
Early Saturday, crews from the Recreation and Parks Department loaded some toppled pieces into trucks and closed off the concourse with yellow tape (it reopened on Saturday afternoon). New graffiti messages splashed over Serra’s empty pedestal. “Stolen land,” read one scrawled in black over the yellowpainted words “Ohlone land.”
Steve MartinPinto gazed at the wreckage as he walked his dog, Sasha.
“It’s horrible,” said MartinPinto, a San Francisco resident. “It’s mob rule. These people taking down statues won’t be satisfied until they’ve removed every book and canceled every TV show.”
Mayor London Breed, commenting on the vandalism, acknowledged “the very real pain in this country rooted in our history of slavery and oppression,” but she said that ravaging a park is not the way to address it.
“Every dollar we spend cleaning up this vandalism takes funding away from actually supporting our community, including our African American community,” Breed said.
Serra, whose name adorns roads and schools throughout California, became a controversial figure long before he was elevated to sainthood five years ago. The Franciscan missions Serra established up and down the state to help establish Spain’s colonial foothold have been criticized in recent decades as subjugating native people.
After Serra fell, someone in the crowd pointed out that Key, a slaveholder, had a statue nearby, Barros said. The crowd also pulled down the statue of Grant, who had one slave in the late 1850s — William Jones, whom he freed in 1859. As army leader and president, Grant sought better conditions for black Americans and tried to crush the Ku Klux Klan — reasons he has risen rapidly in the presidential rankings in recent years.
More spray paint was deployed in downtown San Francisco on Saturday, as artists painted “Defund the Police” and “BLM” in large yellow letters outside City Hall.
Meanwhile, several hundred people marched up Market Street on Saturday afternoon from the Ferry Building to City Hall.
The march began with an attack on the protest organizer by a seemingly disturbed man, who rode off on his bike after trying to wrestle the organizer’s microphone away and shoving him. The organizer, Fernando Lorenzo of San Francisco, was uninjured and quickly returned to teaching chants and giving march instructions.
“I was startled. I was shocked,” Lorenzo said. “But I was not surprised because mental health issues are extremely systemic in our society right now and our leaders are not doing much about them.”
Tirtza Pearl, 69, of San Francisco, marched carrying a sign bearing a photo of her godson, Michael Christian King, who’s 21, lives in Citrus Heights near Sacramento and is Black. “I’m here for my godson’s safety,” the sign read.
“I talk to him and he talks about how nervous he is about going out and doing things, in ways that I don’t have to,” she said.
Her husband, Barry, 67, carried a sign reading: “I’d rather be here than in Tulsa,” a reference to President Trump’s rally in Oklahoma on Saturday.
Rachel Swan, Steve Rubenstein and Michael Cabanatuan are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com srubenstein@ sfchronicle.com and mcabanatuan@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan @steveRubeSF @ctuan