Art, Cultural Resistance & Transformation

African Americans built San Francisco and I don’t just mean the bricks. In its earliest origins, historian John Templeton said that there were four Black men involved in what San Francisco was going to become. Look at people like William Leidesdorff Jr., whose statue is in the Financial District. He’s one of the key architects to decide whether San Francisco was going to be called San Francisco or Yerba Buena. He was a multiracial brother of African descent. And, Pio Pico was Mexican, African American and Spanish. These were some of San Francisco’s architects.

Too many people make a lot of bad decisions choosing to see evil and wrong in things because they don’t know or understand it. Nobody has a monopoly on spirituality. Spirituality is what you do with the totality of your being and treating others with respect. What Dr. King valued was personalism. Personalism means every individual has worth and dignity. Your religion is not to be dumped on someone else.

Welcome to America. We were not invited in. We were systematically kept out. We were not even considered people. We were listed as property: a table, a chair, ‘African American female,’ and ‘African American male.’

“There are as many ideas and identities as there are Black people. We have never been a homogenous group. Black presence is fluid. Acknowledging Black presence is acknowledging Black diversity."

Thea Matthews, Artist, Poet, Activist