Martinez fighting back against racism
East Bay, national activists rally after pair deface mural
A viral video that captured a white couple defacing a Black Lives Matter mural in Martinez this month has thrust this closeknit East Bay town onto a national stage amid a reckoning with racial injustice and a racist backlash fueled by President Trump himself.
In the liberal Bay Area, the Martinez incident shocked many residents who may have thought their communities were insulated from opposition to the rising antiracism movement. And it has forced neighbors — and the Contra Costa district attorney, who filed hate crime charges against the couple — to take sides.
“It’s obviously exposed the racism that is hidden in our East Bay towns,” said Tessa Maria, 20, who decorated her van with “Black Lives Matter!” and the names of victims of police brutality. “We’ve seen protests in San Francisco and Oakland for years, and it’s kind of become normal to just be in the outskirts of the East Bay watching it happen — not being involved or impacted . ... (But) we are going to be bringing a lot of light to the hidden racism.”
On Sunday evening, hundreds of Black Lives Matter protesters — from groups that travel the country as well as the homegrown Martizians for Black Lives — descended on the city in a peaceful show against racism.
Fearing violence from counterprotesters, the Martinez police
asked the groups to postpone the protest but said they declined to. A few counterprotesters jeered, but they had little impact on the event. Marchers — mostly wearing masks — walked from the Contra Costa County courthouse to Waterfront Park chanting, “No justice. No peace. No racist police.” They listened to speakers on topics ranging from racism and police brutality to voting and mental health. They also knelt for eight minutes, 46 seconds of silence — the amount of time a Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck, killing him in May.
Activists organized the protest at the end of June, after police found flyers threatening Black Lives Matter supporters in the name of a whitepower group. But the incident that has transformed Martinez into a national symbol for racial justice unfolded on July 4.
Martinez resident Justin Gomez had just finished painting “Black Lives Matter” in giant letters running 165 feet across Court Street downtown, when a white man and woman — identified in court documents as David Nelson, 53, and Nicole Anderson, 42, of Martinez — pulled up in a white Nissan pickup and unloaded paint and a roller. Nelson recorded Anderson as she rolled black paint across the yellow block letters.
“What is wrong with you?” a bystander asked Anderson in a nowviral video.
“We’re sick of this narrative, that’s what’s wrong,” Nelson replied. “The narrative of police brutality, the narrative of oppression, the narrative of racism. It’s a lie.”
Three days later, District Attorney Diana Becton charged each of them with violating Gomez’s civil rights — the hate crime — by knowingly defacing his property in an effort to intimidate and interfere with his freedom of expression. Officials also charged Nelson and Anderson with vandalism and possession of tools to commit vandalism. They face up to a year in county jail.
In the video, Nelson is wearing a Trump 2020 shirt and hat. And President Trump has made clear which side he is on.
He has criticized Black Lives Matter as a violent, antipolice movement. And when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio recently participated in painting “Black Lives Matter” across Fifth Avenue, the president tweeted:
“Maybe our GREAT Police, who have been neutralized and scorned by a mayor who hates & disrespects them, won’t let this symbol of hate be affixed to New York’s greatest street. Spend this money fighting crime instead!”
Now, civil rights activists in the Bay Area say that the county district attorney’s decision to file hate crime charges against Nelson and Anderson is a symbol of solidarity.
“The community needed it,” said Gomez, a stayathome dad who obtained a city permit to paint the street mural. “We needed to know that the justice system acknowledged that what happened was an act of hate, that there’s malice in their hearts. They were out there to make a statement against Black lives.”
Becton declined to comment for this story. But last week she told The Chronicle that the mural “was a powerful way, as we’ve seen all over the country, that has been used to think about the importance of Black lives.”
Gomez said he cried when he heard that Becton had levied hatecrime charges against the couple. After his mural was defaced, Gomez cofounded Martizians for Black Lives and has since repainted it with help from supporters.
No one answered the door Thursday at the Martinez home that Nelson and Anderson share. A reporter’s calls to Nelson went unanswered, and attempts to reach Anderson by phone and email were unsuccessful.
The crime they are accused of jolted many residents.
“Tensions are high — people are just on edge,” said Che Travers, who sat behind a Plexiglas barrier inside Gilded Frond Clay + Textiles, the art shop she owns down the street from the mural. She hung “Martizians for Black Lives” signs on her door. And her shop featured “Racism is for Losers” stickers.
Travers said her family in Ohio heard about the Martinez mural debacle on national news. The attention keeps the conversation going, Travers said, but she worries it might draw people to the town for the wrong reasons. She said she would board up her windows ahead of Sunday’s protest.
Gomez kept a lookout on his front porch Friday, hours after he said opponents leaked his home address online. A car circled his home and snapped photos of his property as his family ate dinner Thursday evening, he said. He installed a second camera and floodlights.
Attorneys said the hate crime enhancements against Nelson and Anderson send a political message that will be tough to uphold in court.
Under California law, a hate crime is defined as the act of harming, threatening or harassing a person because of gender, nationality, race or ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation, or because of a disability or association with a person or group with one of more of these characteristics.
Prosecutors will have to prove that Nelson and Anderson were motivated by bias and that the alleged crime caused a victim to suffer an injury, or that the defendants have the ability to violently commit an injury, among other factors, said Harmeet Dhillon, a civil liberties attorney in San Francisco and the former vice chairwoman of the Republican National Committee in California.
“I don’t see how the government can prove any of the elements of a hate crime here,” Dhillon said. “I don’t think it’s necessarily motivated by a bias of any kind to say, ‘I don’t want political slogans painted on my public street.’ I see it as a form of counterprotest.”
Bertrall Ross, a UC Berkeley law professor, agreed that the hatecrime charge will be hard to prove.
“It requires a certain level of motivation proven by a hatred toward a particular class of individuals,” he said. “Sure, you can describe the defacing of the mural as a targeting of the Black Lives Matter movement and saying it’s about targeting African Americans or Black folks generally, but it’s a tough jump to make.”
But Gomez said the hate crime charge makes perfect sense to him because the act of defacing the mural hurt people.
“There were people who were there that day, who are Black, who watched (it happen) and experienced trauma,” he said. “There were people from across the country who reached out to me, who said they watched the video and couldn’t even finish it because they were triggered and upset.
“It had an impact on more than just paint on the street,” he said. “It cut our community deep.”