Black History celebrations spotlight new S.F. Bayview community center
SAN FRANCISCO -- A Black History Month celebration in San Francisco's Bayview/Hunters Point Saturday morning highlighted a very recent struggle for social justice that has left this community with a sparkling new legacy for the future.
The Black History celebration in the Bayview is only four years old but Tacing Parker, with the Bayview/Hunter's Point YMCA, believes the small parade they held Saturday morning will one day rival other major parades in the city.
"There's a lot of opportunity to continue to build this out," she said "I imagine, in years to come, you'll begin to see hundreds of thousands of people at the Black History Month Parade right here in District 10."
The parade wasn't the only new thing here. The Southeast Community Center, completed in October, is becoming a focal point for the entire neighborhood. Its towering design features African American artwork, spaces for community gatherings, a childcare center and several acres of outdoor play space. It also serves as a place for local entrepreneurs like Lazro Ruiz, who can sell his "Trust Black Men and Women" T-shirts to a wider audience.
"It's just drawing people here to the community, understanding we've got a corridor here, we've got strong businesses," he said. "The goal is to bring people over here."
Supervisor Shamann Walton, who represents Bayview/Hunters Point agreed.
"Since it's been open, we've had so many community events, so many celebrations, so many people to come out to utilize this center -- not just in Bayview/Hunters Point but across San Francisco," he said.
But in a way, the new center is an example of Black history in the making. It was created after community members objected to a plan to expand the nearby sewage treatment plant to bring 80 percent of the city's sewage to the Bayview.
Harold Madison was one of a group of activists in the 1980s known as the Big Six, who demanded that the city provide something more for the community than just its waste.
"The city wanted to put a basketball court there and my father and others said, we don't want a basketball court. We need a center for job training, for education, for residents of Bayview/Hunters Point," said Harold's son, Maverick.
Harold died in 1994 but Maverick is proud of his father's work -- not just for getting a community center built but also for busting some commonly held myths at City Hall about the Black community.
"This is part of the disconnect," he said. "There's a whole lot of assumptions and cultural conditioning that all we care about is basketball and sports and not that we care about educating our kids and providing job training that will subsequently elevate our economic status."
Faces of the activists now grace the walls of the new center they fought to create. It's the kind of Black history that Mayor London Breed said often goes unheralded.
"You know what? Their names weren't in the history books," she told the crowd. "You had to hear the stories from the people who understood and saw what they did and how they fought!"
Black History is a history of struggle, often just to be understood -- a struggle that continues to this day.
