Bay Area reacts: Vigils condemn racism, honor victims.
Bay Area residents held vigils across the region Sunday to protest the weekend’s violent white-supremacy rallies in Virginia that led to the death of a socialjustice activist and murder charges against the man who drove his car into her.
As evening fell, several hundred people gathered at Civic Center Plaza at San Francisco City Hall. They sang folk songs, lit candles and spoke despairingly of the violence in Charlottesville, Va.
“It was very upsetting to see the violence, and the atmosphere in this country that the president has inspired,” said Sarah Hodgdon, 45, of San Francisco.
At Latham Square in downtown Oakland, a similar number of people gathered peacefully and quietly — as organizers Our Family Coalition and Hip Hop Caucus had hoped. Their Facebook announcement invited people to a familyfriendly vigil and asked them to bring poems on a theme of “unity, peaceful transitions and overcoming white supremacy.”
“We need to send a louder message of love than the prevailing narrative of hate and discrimination,” said Renata Moreira, 41, of Oakland, executive director of Our Family Coalition, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender family group.
Oakland police said they increased staffing for safety. Yet as speaker after speaker quoted Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, sang a few songs in Hebrew or joked about “Trump Traumatic Stress Disorder,” the crowd of hundreds sat rapt and remained peaceful well into the night.
Among those who spoke was Cephus “Uncle Bobby” Johnson, uncle of Oscar Grant, who was killed by BART police in 2009.
“It’s going to take a mass movement to effect systemic change ... and knock the head off and the brains out of white supremacy,” Johnson said.
Numerous other antiracism gatherings were scheduled throughout the day in Novato, San Anselmo, San Rafael, Point Reyes Station, Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Mill Valley, Albany, El Cerrito, Castro Valley, Mountain View and La Honda, many of them organized by Indivisible, a progressive political group.
In San Francisco, the rally started with an organizer criticizing the American Civil Liberties Union because that group had called for the right of the white nationalists to have their say in Virginia.
But many participants yelled that they were not there to bash the ACLU, only to condemn racism and mourn the death of Heather Heyer, who was struck and killed in Charlottesville when a suspected neoNazi plowed his car into a group of counterprotesters. Nearly everyone in the San Francisco crowd then walked across the plaza and began their separate vigil for that purpose.
On Saturday night, a rally that drew some 450 protesters in downtown Oakland temporarily shut down a portion of Interstate 580, but police reported no arrests, vandalism or injuries.