Talks: Social Movements / 2015-2017

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Shaping San Francisco hosts Public Talks on a variety of topics on Wednesday nights, about 18 times a year. One recurrent theme has brought together activists and the interested to discuss contemporary and past Social Movements. Here are the Talks we held at the Eric Quezada Center for Culture and Politics from 2015-2017.

December 13, 2017

San Francisco's Freeway Revolt

Today’s San Francisco and our village-like neighborhoods, charming architecture, and quality of life is indebted to the Freeway Revolt that shocked the nation between 1956 and 1965. Most histories have focused on the politicians and city leaders who argued and voted in those years, overlooking the vital role of the emergent middle-class women who spearheaded the Revolt, and kept it going against overwhelming odds. Decades later, a second Freeway Revolt helped reclaim the Embarcadero and Hayes Valley from the blight of freeways, leaving us in the current configuration we have today. With Jason Henderson, Evelyn Rose, Chris Carlsson

Video here

October 18, 2017

50th Anniversary of the Stop the Draft Week Protests

Join the California Historical Society, Shaping San Francisco, and the Oakland Public Library, Main Branch, for a panel discussion that explores the intentions, planning, and outcomes of the historic October 1967 protests against the United States draft and the Vietnam War in general. Hear from organizers, including members of the “Oakland Seven,” who were tried for conspiracy and found not guilty by an Oakland jury, and from historians and others who will share context and stories of that era. With Frank Bardacke, Karen Jo Koonan, and Charles Wollenberg, and Chris Carlsson moderating. Event at the Oakland Public Library Main Branch, 125 14th Street, Oakland, CA 94612

No audio for this event.

Video here

May 31, 2017

Summer of Love or Vietnam Summer?

Music, Art, & Politics of 1967: Was it all peace and love or did the anti-war movement really define the era? A conversational antidote to the narrow interpretation of a memorable summer in the City. With Calvin Welch author, activist, and USF Faculty), original Digger Judy Goldhaft (Planet Drum Foundation), Mat Callahan (The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in SF, 1965-75), and Pam Brennan (Haight Ashbury Flower Power Walking Tours).

Video here

March 22, 2017

We've Done This Before: 1980s Movements

The fight against the Reagan administration’s war build-up, emergency response against Central American wars, birth of the Peace Navy, stopping the USS Missouri, creating sanctuary cities, AIDS and Anti-Nuclear activism. We bring it up to climate justice & no nukes today. With activists and archivists Marcy Darnovsky, Steve Stallone, Lincoln Cushing, and Roberto Lovato.

Video here

October 26, 2016

Death of Money: Diggers 50 Years Later

From free food to free stores, free money, and free communication, the Diggers defined a politics a half century ago that continues to exert a powerful influence on radicals today. Original participants in the Digger movement, Judy Goldhaft, Jane Lapiner, and David Simpson, describe the interventions, confrontations, and celebrations that ushered in the Death of Money, and later the Death of the Hippie. Eric Noble, Digger archivist, will show how archiving itself is a form of making history, and brings history across time while shaping contemporary sensibilities.

October 12, 2016

Compton's Cafeteria 50th Anniversary—The Transformation of Trans Politics and Identity

Felicia Elizondo recounts her experiences in the Tenderloin when trans women erupted on a late August night in 1966 and rebuked police harassment with an epic mini-riot at Compton’s Cafeteria at Turk and Taylor. The audience joins the conversation to help illuminate the long path over the decades to today’s high profile trans activism, still beset by obstacles and conflict within the gay community as well as the larger surrounding culture.

September 14, 2016

Hunter's Point Rebellion, 50 Years Later

The 1966 Hunter’s Point riot has disappeared into the fog of San Francisco’s lost memories. Erupting after police shot a young African-American man running away from a stolen car, it led to martial law and military patrols in both Hunter’s Point and the Fillmore. Join us as we hear from Darrell Rogers who lived through the riot, trace San Francisco’s black community history up to the present, and examine the stark similarities between then and now with Adriana Camarena, active with several coalitions seeking radical reform of local policing practices after multiple police murders in the past few years.

The first 40 minutes of the program consists of video clips, which are mostly embedded on Foundsf.org pages, with one on the San Francisco Bay Area Television archive at San Francisco State University. The links are here in the order they appear (in most cases you'll have to scroll down the page to find the playable videos)

1. "Take This Hammer" (first 8.5 minutes)

2. Darrell Rogers on his experiences with the Congress on Racial Equality fighting widespread segregation in San Francisco 1962-64.

3. "Point of Pride: The People's View of Bayview/Hunter's Point" (minutes 5:32 to 9:06).

4. Thomas Fleming on the rebellion

5. John Ross on blockading the Armory

6. Willie Brown at BV Community Center, and young man interviewed here.

7. "Race Riot of 1966" by Dante Higgins

October 14, 2015

Housing is a Human Right!

Enrique Reynoso of Mexico City’s Organización Popular Francisco Villa de Izquierda Independiente (OPFVII), also known as “los Panchos,” reports how tens of thousands of people occupy land and build thriving, autonomous communities in the heart of one of the world’s grittiest cities. Outside of political parties they promote urban self-government, community safety, and autonomous education, culture, and health. Bárbara Suárez Galeano joins him. Co-presented by The Mexico Solidarity Network

September 23, 2015

Prisoners and Politics: from the San Quentin Six to Pelican Bay

California holds more prisoners than any other state while the U.S. incarcerates far more people than anywhere else on earth. During the 1960s and 1970s a political movement erupted among the imprisoned—Dan Berger’s new book Captive Nation takes us through that political history. We welcome Luis “Bato” Talamantez and David Johnson — both original members of the San Quentin Six, and Caitlin Kelly Henry — a local attorney who coordinates the National Lawyer’s Guild “Support from Outside the Walls” prisoner support series. Co-sponsored by Freedom Archives.

April 29, 2015

Union Demise and New Workers’ Movements

Bureaucratic labor unions, long besieged, seem incapable of defending, let alone advancing, workers’ interests. In Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe, workers are rejecting leaders and forming authentic class-struggle unions rooted in sabotage, direct action, and striking to achieve concrete gains. Manny Ness, editor of New Forms Of Worker Organization, and Steve Early, contributor to Continental Crucible: Big Business, Workers and Unions in the Transformation of North America and author of Save Our Unions, co-hosted by PM Press.

April 1, 2015

Vietnam War, Dissent, and the U.S. Military

A half-century after the Vietnam War officially began, we’ll look back at military mutinies, the rise of the volunteer army in response to the “Vietnam Syndrome,” and situate the Vietnam War in the long history of U.S. military aggression, even pre-dating the founding of the United States. Paul Cox, Deni Leonard, Michael Blecker.

January 14, 2015

Home on the Grange

“Grange Future” celebrates the history and contemporary expression of ‘the grange idea.’ From the 19th century populist movement that backed the early campaign for an “information commons” in the form of Rural Free Mail delivery, to public banking and Farmers co-op banks, this vital movement is re-emerging to confront information and agricultural monopolists of our own era. Severine von Tscharner Fleming leads a panel discussion with the Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle and Matt Senate from the Omni Commons and Sudo Room Hackerspace.