Tag: St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church

Please join N’COBRA Saturday, 25 January, 12 Noon, for our first Bay Area commUNITY gathering for Reparations at the beautiful Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St. in downtown Oakland (near the 12th Street BART station). Be prepared to offer serious views and action plans.

The featured front page story in the Feb. 18 San Francisco Chronicle begins, “The St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, a uniquely San Franciscan storefront ministry dedicated to the music and preachings of the soulful sax man, is facing eviction and may be gone as soon as Sunday’s sermon ends. Let your voice be heard by signing the petition in full support of the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church remaining in the West Bay Conference Center.”

Among the crowd of 150 activists were four young people holding a sign that simply read, “Last 3 Percent.” The words refer not directly to police violence but to the broader problem of the mass exodus of African Americans from San Francisco. Thousands have left their city of birth not because of any personal preference but because of political decisions and economic policies, many set into motion several decades ago.

The Bayview, which was once 70 percent Black, has been increasingly fighting a high rate of foreclosures that is resulting in yet another form of gentrification. Wells Fargo Bank has been responsible for many of the foreclosures in the community. Help your neighbors by joining the Stop the Wells Fargo 27 Holiday Foreclosure and Evictions campaign.

The day is Buy Black Wednesday. I am setting foot in the Pan Afrikan Market Place called Little Nubia, modeled after Harlem in its “hey day,” old Timbuktu and Black Wall Street. So there are over 600 Black businesses in a 10-square-block area. Red, black and green is everywhere. Flags from every Afrikan nation flutter in the summer breeze.

At his ground-breaking Feb. 15, 2012, press conference, San Francisco Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting announced “the first audit of foreclosure records in the state of California.” This nationally publicized report revealed that laws were not followed and that the neighborhood hit the hardest was “the Southeast part of town, which is very diverse, probably the lowest income area of San Francisco.”

The City of San Francisco has applied for a $14.6 million grant to fund the infrastructure for dirty developer Lennar to build 10,000 luxury condominiums and a stadium on the Superfund site of the Hunters Point Shipyard and Candlestick Point. Tell the state to just say NO!