Tag: Super Bowl

“On the weekend before Super Bowl 50 in downtown San Francisco, Officer Joshua Cabillo aggressively put his hands on me. It was a peaceful protest and I sensed the hatred in his eyes,” says protester Deja Caldwell. Not only did Officer Cabillo unnecessarily assault a woman who was protesting police killing, but he is a killer cop himself! On June 5, 2012, as a South San Francisco police officer, Joshua Cabillo brutalized, restrained and eventually shot to death 15-year-old Derrick Gaines. Officer Cabillo is a child killer with a long record of abuse, yet SFPD hired him.

I am writing this from the Bay Area, where tent cities are now slowly re-forming under bridges, and where there is still a palpable buzz about Beyoncé’s performance in the Super Bowl halftime show (sorry, Coldplay). In fact, it’s a topic with far more currency here than the actual dud of a game, and for good reason. This is the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in the Bay Area.

More than 100 million people tuned in to watch Super Bowl 50 Sunday night. In addition to seeing the Denver Broncos beat the Carolina Panthers, viewers also witnessed one of the most political halftime shows in the Super Bowl’s history as the legendary singer Beyoncé paid tribute to the Black Panthers and the Black Lives Matter movement. Her dancers posted a photo on Instagram holding a sign reading “Justice for Mario Woods.”

There are so many untold stories of how and why people become un-housed. Loss of a job, a partner, the onset of an illness or a crisis, but most of the time, in the Bay Area, it’s because of a greed-inspired landlord raising rent, evicting for profit so he or she can house the droves of 20-30-something wealthy, mostly white people streaming into town for the tech industry.

The message for the protectors of the white corporate and financial elite is that it does not matter if you execute a kid in cold blood in front of a dozen witnesses or you are caught on video murdering Eric Garner or 12 year-old Tamir Rice; you don’t have to fear prosecution from the state. It is now open season when it comes to policing and controlling the dangerous class of poor and working class Black people.

The Battle of the Bay, the annual pre-season game between the Raiders and the Forty Niners, is something most football fans look forward to every summer. It just so happens that this year’s game took place in one of the worst Funk Seasons in recent memory.

Renowned artists and athletes meet once a year in Lake Tahoe to play golf and raise money for charities. Michael Jordan, John Elway, Kevin Nealon, Aaron Rodgers, Dennis Haysbert, Jerome Bettis, Jim Harbaugh, A.J. Hawk, Jim McMahon and many other entertainers and sports figures participated in this fun-in-the-sun annual event.

The minute the Jacoby Ford caught that 49-yard bomb in overtime against the KC Chiefs, “playoffs” could be quietly uttered in the Raiders locker room.

At his funeral service at St. Ignatius Church on the campus of the University of San Francisco this past Wednesday, Burl Toler was remembered as a humble, kind and upstanding man. Toler was that and more. He was a trailblazer in San Francisco athletics and education. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, May 9, 1928, Toler arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1947, after a brief stint at Lemoyne College. His family decided living in California would be a good move for him and joined his Uncle Louis King, an Oakland based entrepreneur.