Left in the Bay
@leftinthebay
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Histories of people's struggles in the San Francisco Bay Area | email: [email protected]
Bay Area
Joined June 2020
Continuing protests and pressure from the community culminated only in very minor reforms in the SFPD and the resignation of police chief Greg Suhr, though the five officers who murdered Woods never faced criminal charges. His family still calls for justice in his name
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A wave of demos took place in the aftermath of his death, including a march of over 200 people to interrupt the opening day of the 2016 Super Bowl in San Francisco. Former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick cited the murder of Woods as a cause for his activism in the NFL
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10 years ago, December 2 2015, 26-year-old Mario Woods was shot to death by five SFPD officers in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco, generating a surge in the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests against police violence in the Bay and around the country
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The Labor Council called an end to the strike on Dec 5, mere hours before a CIO mass meeting on "strike unity" was to be held. Union leadership, some of whom had opposed the "revolutionary" strike, secured only a promise by police to stop escorting strikebreaking truck drivers
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One eyewitness later wrote: "Never before or since had Oakland been so alive and happy for the majority of the population... In that city of over a quarter million, strangers passed each other on the street and did not have fear, but the opposite"
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On December 3, 20,000 workers joined pickets downtown, amid a joyous carnival atmosphere. One participant recalled: "It was like the earth stood still. Everything stopped." The police fled from Hasting's as masses of people danced in the streets to free jukeboxes
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The following day, 10,000 workers gathered in downtown Oakland, despite the refusal of union leadership (other than bartenders' and teamsters' unions) to officially call a strike. As a general strike had already materialized, the AFL Labor Council called one for the next day
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On the morning of December 1st, strikebreaking truck drivers from Los Angeles reached the department stores with a massive police escort. Outraged, streetcar drivers abandoned their vehicles, causing a major work stoppage, as passengers found themselves unable to reach their jobs
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The retail workers received strong support from other workers in heavily-unionized Oakland. The East Bay Labor Journal compared Hasting's management to "the Nazi heel," and local teamsters refused to deliver merchandise to the department stores
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The General Strike grew out of a struggle for union recognition by downtown retail clerks, almost all of whom were women. Early on, some local retail stores caved to union demands, but the largest, Kahn's and Hasting's, refused. In late October, workers at both stores walked out
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79 years ago, December 2 1946, 10,000 workers amassed in downtown Oakland in solidarity with striking retail store clerks. The rank-and-file action marked the true beginning of the Oakland General Strike, one day before it was officially called by the AFL Central Labor Council
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FUCK U was founded in the early days of the SF State Third World Liberation Front student strike, which established Ethnic Studies at SFSU. ICSA members wanted to bridge the gap between radical Asian students and the mostly poor Chinatown community
57 years ago, November 6 1968, the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State University began the longest student strike in US history, spawning the departments of Black Studies and Ethnic Studies at SFSU, and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley
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57 years ago, November 28 1968, members of San Francisco State's Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action founded the Free University for Chinatown Kids, Unincorporated (FUCK U), which taught free classes on Asian-American history and struggle to working-class youth in Chinatown
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As in other California agricultural strikes of the period, women workers played a leading role in Vacaville. Despite a high degree of violence and racist agitation by police and vigilantes, the strike held firm for several months. It was broken in January
92 years ago, December 4 1932, brutal rioting broke out as hundreds of striking tree pruners organized by the Communist Party's Cannery & Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union marched to the Vacaville Library to hold a mass meeting about police brutality against strikers
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The workers, organized by the Communist Party's Cannery & Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union, were striking several fields owned by Congressman and orchard heir Frank H. Buck over pay cuts, racist discrimination against non-white pruners, and other intolerable conditions
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93 years ago, November 25 1932, hundreds of striking Vacaville orchard workers, many Filipino and Japanese, battled cops with sticks and rocks for over an hour, leaving several badly injured on both sides. The police attempted to escort a truck of scabs past the picket line
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a fragment towards the end of a piece by Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, written in 1968 while imprisoned on false charges for inciting a riot, sent to his comrade & friend Ben Morea who published it in the final issue of Black Mask.
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Good historic example of worker power in action
41 years ago, November 24 1984, ILWU Local 10 longshoremen refused to unload South African goods from the cargo ship Nedlloyd Kimberly, which had docked at San Francisco’s Pier 80. The eleven-day picket was the largest workplace action in the US against apartheid
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Students marched to University Hall where a brief sit-in ended in three dozen arrests. The following spring, a massive student occupation movement swept the country ultimately leading to divestment from South Africa at many major universities
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