Feature Archives

It has been 60 years since the the Cuban Missile Crisis, and now may be the closest the world has been to a nuclear war since then. In October, anti-war activists in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Central Valley joined others across the nation to demand that elected leaders work to reduce the risk of nuclear war. On November 10, Youth vs Apocalypse, CodePink, Veterans for Peace and others rallied at Lockheed Martin's San Francisco office.

On November 3, close to a hundred demonstrators protested the US blockade of Cuba at San Francisco's Federal building. The action was timed to coordinate with the UN's 185 to 2 vote to condemn the US economic war against Cuba. After music and speeches, the demonstrators marched to, appropriately, United Nations Plaza and held another rally in front of the statue of Simon Bolivar, a hero of South America's liberation struggles.

Born and raised in San Francisco, Tony Coleman led campaigns to get a killer SFPD cop fired and to resist Prop 21. Tony later made his mark in West Oakland supporting arts and community. Tony was a key organizer in the Justice for Oscar Grant Movement and founded One Fam and Bikes 4 Life. Tony passed away on September 23 after battling cancer. Hear him in his own words in video and audio in a collection of posts on Indybay.

On September 23, over a thousand young people and their teachers left their classrooms to join the environmental justice protest in Oakland's Frank Ogawa Plaza, part of the worldwide "Fridays for Future" movement. As part of an uptick in Bay Area climate actions, JP Morgan Chase's "Corporate Challenge" foot race in San Francisco was disrupted by Extinction Rebellion street theater to highlight the bank's role as the world largest fossil fuel funder.

An abortion rights protester was removed from a Golden State Warriors championship game for attempting to display a banner that read, "Overturn Roe? Hell No." Kareim McKnight was strapped to a gurney and handcuffed, then injected with a drug called Versed by an EMT with the SFFD. In response, she has filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city and county of San Francisco for violating her Fourth Amendment right to control her own body.

Protesters spilled into the streets on June 24 soon after the much anticipated Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization was announced. In San Francisco, protesters gathered en masse in front of the Phillip Burton Federal Building for a rally that morphed into a march with a sit in at Market and 8th streets. An estimated 3,000 people converged on the intersection while thousands others protested in other parts of the city.

Outrage swelled after two of the latest mass casualty shootings, one at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY, and another at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Ten were killed in Buffalo, mostly African American elders, and twenty-one in Uvalde, nineteen small children and two teachers. Both shooters were only 18 years old when they bought the assault-style weapons used in the attacks. On June 11, Bay Area cities will protest on a national day of action against gun violence.