The Bay Area Roots of Black Lives Matter 

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When the local labor council withdrew its support for the fight against Walmart, PUEBLO was left alone to oppose the world's biggest retailer. They lost, and the store, now one of two in the area, opened in 2005. "That was heartbreaking," she says. "That's politics at its worst."

Garza left PUEBLO and spent a year organizing college students across the state with the UC Student Association, before returning to Bay Area activism. She was hanging out with a friend from SOUL one night when the friend mentioned that her organization, People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) was looking to hire someone to start a black organizing project in San Francisco's Bayview.

"I was like, 'Me, sucka!'" Garza recalls. She started the job in March 2005.

If you drive southeast down Evans Avenue, past the Third Street commercial corridor that anchors the Bayview, past the massive U.S. Postal Service complex and India Basin Shoreline Park, you'll end up in Hunters Point, at the entrance to what is now called The San Francisco Shipyard.

"Welcome Visionaries," reads the branded signage on chain link fences shielding construction zones.

Only a few of the planned 12,000 homes have been built on the site of the former San Francisco Naval Shipyard, but the battle to get this far was one of the most bitter and divisive in a long history of bitter and divisive San Francisco land use battles.

When Garza began organizing in the Bayview with POWER, she worked on campaigns to increase funding for public housing maintenance and to get assistance for homeowners on the hook for paying to move power lines underground. But the Hunters Point redevelopment plan was the big kahuna — a $7 billion project to completely transform 250 acres of land, some of it toxic and contaminated with radioactivity, in the corner of the city least served by public transportation.

In 2005, four POWER organizers published a book analyzing how capitalism and imperialism were remaking San Francisco and the Bay Area. They charged the city's "ruling elite" with developing an "agenda of economic apartheid" that threatened to displace working-class communities of color.

The bad faith and criminality of a predatory financial industry would lead to wide-scale displacement, the activists warned, and African Americans were most vulnerable.

"San Francisco is so small and dense that in order to reshape itself, we knew it was going to have to clear space. Bayview was the only place that was still kind of wide open for development, and who lived in Bayview? It was the largest remaining predominantly black community left in the city," says Garza of her approach when she began working at POWER. "We saw that there was a contradiction between community-driven development that was going to serve the needs of people who lived in that community and corporate-driven development which was going to push those people out in favor of an expanding class of workers that were looking to relocate into the city."

Or, as Pastor Yul Dorn, a lifelong Bayview resident and leader of the Emanuel Church of God in Christ, puts it, "They don't mind working-class people working here. They just don't want you living here."

POWER went all in, fighting Lennar Urban, the project's developer, tooth and nail. The group formed a coalition — the Stop Lennar Action Movement (SLAM) — with the Nation of Islam, some progressive community groups, the Sierra Club, and residents, such as Archbishop Franzo King of the St. John Coltrane Church, who were concerned about toxic pollution from construction at the former shipyard.

"We would have town hall meetings every week, every Thursday on Oakdale," Garza recalls. "We'd get hundreds of people coming week to week to talk about gentrification and take action together."

"The organizing shook City Hall," says Ed Donaldson, a housing counselor and neighborhood activist. "I remember going down there and the place was packed. Members of the Nation of Islam standing on every floor. You had sheriffs freaking out."

Archbishop King, the chief "rabble rouser" for SLAM, says he was motivated to keep the Bayview black. "They tell you, 'If we build this, your property value will go up.' I didn't buy my property for it to go up and for black people not to be able to move in here anymore," he says. "I came over here because it was a black neighborhood."

In June 2008, the battle came to a head with two competing ballot initiatives. Proposition F, placed on the ballot by petition gatherers with POWER and its allies, required that 50 percent of the housing at Hunters Point be affordable to residents earning 30 to 80 percent of the area median income (AMI). Proposition G, which was supported by Mayor Gavin Newsom and much of the Democratic Party establishment, would authorize redevelopment with less affordable housing available to residents at higher percentages of AMI.

A ballot measure requiring 50 percent affordability in a new housing development might not seem far-fetched in a city that this year saw the San Francisco Giants offer 40 percent affordability for its Mission Rock project and the entire progressive establishment — including the San Francisco Labor Council — come together to support a total moratorium on market-rate development in the Mission, but Prop. F divided those forces in 2008.

The San Francisco Labor Council, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE, which was known at the time as ACORN), and the San Francisco Organizing Project (a coalition of Christian congregations) negotiated a community benefits agreement with Lennar that committed the developer to offering 32 percent of the housing units at rates affordable for residents at 60-160 percent AMI and provided $37.5 million to the Bayview community. It was seen as a good deal, but it wasn't close to what SLAM and POWER wanted. The agreement put the negotiating parties on the side of Prop. G in the election, a calculation that many involved in the Prop. F campaign still see as a betrayal.